Book Launch Parties for John Russell’s anthology Frozen Tears III

The third volume in the Frozen Tears series presented by John Russell is launching soon, over 900 pages of cutting-edge works by writers and artists including:

Dennis Cooper, Damien Hirst, Stewart Home, Stephen Barber, Paul Buck, Jesse Bransford, Kristen Alvanson, CCRU/Orphan Drift, Reza Negarestani, John Cussans, Patricia McCormack, Enrico David, Andrea Mason, Hillary Raphael, D. Harlan Wilson, Lorenzo De Los Angeles III, Kevin Killian, Cedar Lewisohn, Casey McKinney, Neil Mulholland, Paul Noble, Kenji Siratori, John Espinosa, Jeffrey Vallance and more...

If you happen to be in LONDON, NEW YORK, SAN FRANCISO or DEATH VALLEY(?) don’t miss these book happenings...

LONDON: Thursday May 31st 7-9pm - at Koenig Books, 80 Charing Cross Road – readings/performances by Paul Buck, NO BRA, Stewart Home, Cedar Lewisohn and Andrea Mason.

NEW YORK: 21 June - starting with launch at Dexter Sinister bookshop (38 Ludlow Street) - then moving to the 205 Bar on Lower East Side where Frozen Tears III will be the focus of the first of a series of new monthly events called ‘Vs’ curated by Mark Beasley for Creative Time - http://www.creativetime.org.

SAN FRANCISCO: July (date tba) at SF Camerawork - with readings/performances by Donal Mosher and Kevin Killian.DEATH VALLEY: tba

For more information visit: http://www.frozentears.co.uk/

Immaterial Art and Treasures of Indulgences

SPACE (Juraj Carny, Diana Majdakova and Lydia Pribisova) and Cesare Pietroiusti have created Evolution de l’Art, a gallery for contemporary art which only sells artworks that are immaterial, with no physical residue, and it does not release certificates of authenticity, nor statements or receipts. Evolution de l’Art is representing, on a non-exclusive basis, artists whose artwork is, at least in the case of some specific projects, alien from any physical-material component. There are no other limitations or requisites for represented artists in terms of medium or technique. Purchases can be made at the headquarters of the gallery (Lazaretska 9, Bratislava) or through their website.

The immaterial art I have created to date has included receipts of sorts (dESIRE) and certificates (Dreams) to document the art. So I was interested in the fact that Evolution de l’Art decided not to include a physical ‘item’ associated with the sale of an intangible piece of art. I thought I’d like to create something for the gallery, so I decided to offer my 'Days in Iran for Sale' at $100 per day.
The idea of immaterial art is identical to the medieval history of the Catholic Church and Christian papal theology in regard to indulgences. It was only during this time that Johann Tetzel, the father of intangible art, could embed his outlandish artistic projects with the abstruse foundations of Christian theology and reading of scriptures. Pieces of lands from heaven and post-mortem years of purgatory were sold, documented with the names of buyers and systematically archived. This is this highest state of intangible art – trading and investing in the celestial dominions. Since in Catholic theology the human is a reeking infinity of sins and heaven is a boundless piece of land, the potentiality of artistic creativities of such intangible trades is limitless.
Check the gallery website for more information: Evolution de l’Art

Adding to the Mental Contagion

Mental Contagion is an arts and literature Internet magazine published on a monthly basis fittingly named after Exquisite Corpse— "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau” — a technique developed during the surrealist movement and is based on a parlor game. Seeing only a small segment of what a previous person draws, collaborators add to a composition in progress to create a strange and often ridiculous image. Preceding these visual "mash-ups" or what some have referred to as "intellectual MadLIbs" was a literary technique, prompting each contributor to add a phrase, seeing only a segment of the previous phrase. Surrealist poet and art historian Nicolas Calas said that the completed work revealed the "unconscious reality in the personality of the group." Often, similar themes and images would appear in the completed compositions, and this is what visual artist Max Ernst referred to as a "Mental Contagion.”

For my addition to mix, you can see May’s issue where they have featured my work in the Exhibitionist section
http://www.mentalcontagion.com/index.html

dESIRE #003000

http://www.kristenalvanson.com/new/desire.html

Reza Negarestani Seminars in London

MACHINES ARE DIGGING: ON POROUS EARTH AND EMERGENCE

and

UNDERCOVER SOFTNESS: POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE OF DECAY

for more information check here http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/

KRISTEN ALVANSON WEBSITE ANNOUNCEMENT
www.kristenalvanson.com

The interactions of things, the undulation of entities in the space, the art of stitching events together, or in a word, cosmogenesis of all kinds requires abundant sewing work and notions artistry.

American Artist Kristen Alvanson, who relocated to Iran in 2006, has created a new website Artistry of Notions and Cosmic Drapery highlighting her current projects including Middle Eastern focused Maskh Project, Graveyards and Lumpen Orientalism as well as a section on the artist’s forthcoming book entitled ‘Lessons in Schizophrenia’ and her dESIRE Project.
Maskh Project – the connotation of the word maskh in Farsi is more than metamorphosis; it includes experiencing limits of one’s identity or existence usually with the assistance of new independent vehicles of material and abstract articulation, as in the case of spirit possession. Maskh project is a visual compendium of drawings diagramming Alvanson’s metamorphoses in the Middle East in the form of spells and maps.
Graveyards project as a psycho-geographic exploration of Middle Eastern graveyards, entombments and post-mortem spaces escapes necromanticism or fascination with ruins by illustrating the cognition and encounters with space and time – and consequently the twofold of dwelling and thinking – in the Middle East.
Lumpen Orientalism gathers the fragments of a lost civilization, the decaying parts of a once breathing animal. Named after a term suggested by China Miéville, Lumpen Orientalism is a photo-blog engendering an anomalous fascination with the Middle East in a similar way to the mongrel techniques of Gilles Deleuze, H. P. Lovecraft, Gaëtan Clérambault and William Beckford for tackling this enigmatic monstrosity – the Middle East.
Lessons in Schizophrenia is the artist’s forthcoming book, based on real events which led her to leave the US for the Middle East in a cataclysmic process. It includes an introduction by the Iranian Philosopher Reza Negarestani entitled Epithemic.
The dESIRE Project is an ongoing investigation on desire which includes artistic components; it is an attempt to reach concrete but not necessarily corporeal definitions of desire by tapping into its obscure formations. dESIRE Project is intertwined with the mathematics of natural numbers, countability / uncountability, pimp as a nomadic dissipater, stock market, legal contracts, intangibility and expendability of desires. Alvanson’s dESIRES, both intangible and their photographic representations, are for sale on the Market section of her website.

Visit the website here: www.kristenalvanson.com.

COLLAPSE Volume II

Collapse II will be published at the beginning of March 2007. I have contributed a photo/diagrammatic essay on Middle Eastern graveyards to this issue. Please see Urbanomic's announcement below for more information on the other contributors and on how to order a copy of the journal.

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce that COLLAPSE Volume II will be published at the beginning of March 2007.

The second volume of Collapse resumes the construction of a conceptual space unbounded by any disciplinary constraints, comprising subjects from probability theory to theology, from quantum theory to neuroscience, from astrophysics to necrology, and involving them in unforeseen and productive syntheses.

Collapse Volume II features a selection of speculative essays by some of the foremost young philosophers at work today, together with new work from artists and cinéastes, and searching interviews with leading scientists. Against the tide of institutional balkanisation and specialisation, this volume testifies to a defiant reanimation of the most radical philosophical problematics – the status of the scientific object, metaphysics and its 'end', the prospects for a revival of speculative realism, the possibility of phenomenology, transcendence and the divine, the nature of causation, the necessity of contingency – both through a fresh reappropriation of the philosophical tradition and through an openness to its outside. The breadth of philosophical thought in this volume is matched by the surprising and revealing thematic connections that emerge between the philosophers and scientists who have contributed.

• Ray Brassier (Middlesex University, author of the forthcoming Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction) gives the first full-length exposition and critical examination in English of Quentin Meillassoux's important book Après la Finitude, which mounts a radical critique of post-Kantian philosophy on the basis of its inability to account for the literal meaning of scientific statements concerning 'arche-fossils' existing anterior to the possibility of their phenomenal manifestation.
• Building upon his thesis in Après la Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux (ENS, Paris) proposes a reprisal of Hume's problem of causation from a radical ontological perspective. By affirming the absolute contingency of natural laws, Meillassoux argues for a revival of a realistic metaphysics which he calls ‘speculative materialism’ and brings to light a powerful new ontological concept of time.
• In an extended interview, Roberto Trotta (theoretical cosmologist, Lockyer Research Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society at the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University) describes in detail his work as a scientist engaged in surveying the 'arche-fossil', and discusses the ways in which the cross-disciplinary nature of the search for dark matter – an intense collaborative endeavour involving mathematics, astrophysics, theoretical modelling and statistics – anticipates the problematic status of its objects. The interview reveals how the process of determination of this field of research on the ‘outer edge’ of science, bounded equally by technological, probabilistic and logical constraints, raises questions as to the status of scientific thought and problematises its very conceptual foundations, thus emphasising its continuities with traditionally ‘philosophical’ concerns.
• In 'On Vicarious Causation' Graham Harman (American University in Cairo; author of Tool-Being and Guerilla Metaphysics) puts forward a new realist 'object-oriented' metaphysics which, refusing the primacy of human experience and in defiance of post-Kantian ‘philosophies of access’, seeks to speak for the abyssal depths of 'the objects themselves'.
• In an interview with Paul Churchland (U.Cal, San Diego) the brilliantly iconoclastic philosopher of mind and science reiterates his commitment to eliminative materialism, exploring its broad consequences for science and philosophy, and remarking key research outcomes and philosophical problems which have influenced its development.
• Clémentine Duzer & Laura Gozlan present a series of stills taken from their film Nevertheless Empire, an expressionist science-fiction noir of pestilence, biopolitics and desire.
• Artist Kristen Alvanson's photo/diagrammatic essay on the ontotheology of the Middle-Eastern graveyard examines what differences in burial practices propose as to the philosophical thinking of space and of dwelling and examines the consequences for our image of thought.
• In a continuation of his unrivalled radical questioning of the ultimate bases of the 'clash of civilisations', Reza Negarestani details, through a searching analysis of Islamic and Western theologies, how the absolute exteriority of Allah in Islam results in a particular conception of temporality, different vectors for the propagation of faith, and an immanent apocalypse which cannot be reduced to a chronological moment or a possibility of unification.

Order or subscribe at :http://www.urbanomic.com/order.php

COLLAPSE Volume II
Edited by Robin Mackay
March 2007.
Paperback 115x175mm 330pp
Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.
ISBN 0-9553087-1-2

RAY BRASSIER
The Enigma of Realism
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Potentiality and Virtuality
ROBERTO TROTTA
Dark Matter: Facing the Arche-Fossil (Interview)
GRAHAM HARMAN
On Vicarious Causation
PAUL CHURCHLAND
Demons Get Out! (Interview)
CLÉMENTINE DUZER & LAURA GOZLAN
Nevertheless Empire
REZA NEGARESTANI
Islamic Exotericism: Apocalypse in the Wake of Refractory Impossibility
KRISTEN ALVANSON
Elysian Space in the Middle East

Forthcoming Issues: Concept-Horror; Unknown Deleuze; Geophilosophy.

COLLAPSE is now available in the following fine bookstores: Vrin, Paris; ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) bookshop, London; Tate Modern bookshop, London; QI, Oxford; Blackwell, Oxford; Nikos Books (11th & 6th) and St. Mark's, New York; Floating World Comics, Portland OR; Gleebooks, Sydney, Australia.

yours,

Robin Mackay
(Editor)

http://www.urbanomic.com

The Bastardization of Dream

John Haber interviewed me for his Art Reviews website haberarts.com.

The interview can be found here The Bastardization of Dream.

Lumpen Orientalism

My new blog Lumpen Orientalism is now up.

Frozen Tears III

John Russell has just announced Frozen Tears III will be available in November 2006.

I have a series of drawings which make up a visual narration entitled Maskh (Metamorphosis in Farsi) in the book.

Frozen Tears can be visited at www.frozentears.co.uk

COLLAPSE

COLLAPSE : Journal of Philosophical Research and Development

The first issue of Collapse is out Now including articles from Reza Negarestani and Nick Land. See Urbanomic's notice below or check Urbanomic’s website for more information.

Dear Friends

We are pleased to announce that COLLAPSE VOLUME I has gone to press and will be shipping before the end of this month. You can subscribe or pre-order a copy of Volume I on the Urbanomic website now.




COLLAPSE Volume I
September 2006.
Paperback 115×175mm 288pp.
Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.
ISBN 0-9553087-0-4
Price £5/€8/$10

COLLAPSE is an unprecedented conjuncture of work by leading practitioners in diverse fields. Conceived as a carefully-compiled, compendious miscellany, grimoire or as an instruction manual without referent, as a delirious carnival of sobriety, COLLAPSE operates its war against good sense not through romantic flight but through the formal insanity secreted in the depths of the rational (‘the rational is not reasonable’).

It aims to force unforeseen conjunctions, singular correspondences, and cross-fertilisations; to diagram abstract sensations as yet unnamed.

The journal COLLAPSE exists as the explosive, perhaps fragmentary, product of the passion for thought, unrestrained by any thematic or formal constraint, any justificatory relation to any agency whatsoever.

Contents of volume I:
ALAIN BADIOU
‘Philosophy, Sciences, Mathematics’ (Interview)
GREGORY CHAITIN
‘Epistemology as Information Theory’
REZA NEGARESTANI
‘The Militarization of Peace’
MATTHEW WATKINS
‘Prime Evolution (Interview)’
‘INCOGNITUM’
‘Introduction to ABJAD’
NICK BOSTROM
‘Existential Risk (Interview)
THOMAS DUZER
‘On the Mathematics of Intensity’
KEITH TILFORD
‘Crowds’
NICK LAND
‘Qabbala 101’

Mewsing

I will be using Mewsing to share news regarding art and writing projects or anything of interest. I also plan to highlight mentionable projects and news of friends and colleagues.

Kristenalvanson.com is currently being revised; once it is complete my intention is to continue using Mewsing for news updates.

About

Kristen Alvanson is an artist and writer based in the US. She attended The Cooper Union and holds a degree from Sarah Lawrence College. She has participated in group/solo shows in New York, Tehran, Shiraz, London, Istanbul, Berlin, Singapore, Kessel-Lo, Zürich and Vilnius+++. Her writing and artwork has been published in anthologies and magazines such as Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development, Cabinet, Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary, New Humanist, Frozen Tears III, Specialten, and Transmission Annual+++. And in books such such as WONDERBOOK: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, by Jeff VanderMeer (Abrams Image, October, 2013),The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (Harper Voyager, 2011) and Cyclonopedia, by Reza Negarestani (re:press, 2008).

email: kristenalvanson@gmail.com
website: www.kristenalvanson.com