International Roaming Biennial of Tehran

I will be participating in the First International Roaming Biennial of Tehran. The exhibition which is themed 'Urban Jealousy' is curated by Amirali Ghasemi and Serhat Koksal. As the title suggests, the exhibition will be roaming with the first stop and official opening in Istanbul at Hafriyat Karakoy:

First International Roaming Biennial of Tehran
Hafriyat Karakoy
Necatibey Cad. No: 79 Karakoy Istanbul, Turkey
30th May - 6th July 2008

For more information check www.biennialtehran.com.

Azad Gallery Release on nonad

Azad Gallery No. 41, Salmas Sq., Golha Sq. Tehran, Iran +98 21 88008676

Kristen Alvanson
nonad
May 23-28, 2008

Two nomadic fabric chadors - blue (2007) and pewter (2008)


Azad Gallery is pleased to present nonad (of nines and nomads), a solo exhibition by the Iran-based American artist Kristen Alvanson, opening Friday, May 23. In Alvanson's first Tehran exhibition, a western artist reanimates her artistic experiments with an entirely new arsenal of conceptual and material resources.

Since leaving New York, Alvanson has explored the threefold of textiles, women, and the Middle East in all its formations, anomalies, enigmas, political speculations, and aesthetic conjectures. Her new work includes nomadic fabric chador (Persian veil) sculptures, abjad-9 drawings, and an animation from her Cosmic Drapery Project.

For the exhibition, Azad Gallery is transformed into a garden of hanging folds. Nine colorful chadors are hung throughout the gallery. As viewers weave through and interact with the installation, they discover implicit sociopolitical structures of these nomadic fabric sculptures as well as their nomadic persuasions in regard to art and creativity. At 350 cm x 190 cm, each chador contains nine panels, six made of different nomadic fabrics. The rest contain black fabric, the same fabric used for traditional back chadors.

On surrounding walls, the Abjad-9 drawings suggest collective shapes vaguely reminiscent of the patterns of traditional Islamic art. Drawn in Persian ink and calligraphic pen, the drawings reveal the affect space between women in veil or chador, and the forces, folds and movements between them. These elaborately nested structures include half-elliptical shapes, the shape of a Persian veil when fully spread out. These shapes represent women in chador as seen from above.

The animation ninefold is a further visualization of these complex, subterranean relationships and spaces. Like the chadors and the Abjad-9 drawings, it is structured by the number 9, standing for the occluded relations between textiles, women, and the Middle East. In the Middle Eastern occult, nine is the number of unceasing collectivity - worlds created through the hidden bonds of spells and collective tides.

Alvanson’s ongoing Cosmic Drapery Project is an exploration of the enigma of the Middle East through its drapery. It is nurtured by the history of textiles in the Middle East. This history includes clashes and secret dialogues between state and nomad art, their folk beliefs, textiles and modes of creativity.

Alvanson's nomadic fabric chadors explore the interactions between black and nomadic fabrics. These include the differences and compatibilities between patterns, textures, and weight; explicit folding lines; and the distribution of sequins. The potentials inherent in each fabric emerge as islands of alliance or as folds of opposition between state and nomadic art in the Middle East.

Kristen Alvanson (born in 1969 in Minneapolis) lives and works in Shiraz, Iran. She attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and holds a degree from Sarah Lawrence College. Alvanson has exhibited in shows in both the United States and the Middle East. She will be participating in the upcoming International Roaming Biennial of Tehran. Her writing and artworks have been published in Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development, New Humanist, Frozen Tears III and will be included in an upcoming issue of Cabinet magazine.

For more information visit Alvanson's website at www.kristenalvanson.com or email Mohsen Nabizadeh of Azad Gallery at azadgallery(at)yahoo(dot)com.

Invitation for 'nonad'

If you happen to be in Tehran on Friday, May 23, please join me for the opening of my exhibition ‘nonad’ from 4-8pm at Azad Gallery.

Azad Gallery
No. 41, Salmas Sq., Golha Sq.
Tehran, Iran
+98 21 88008676

A printable invitation is available here.

I will post more information on the show soon.

Update Collapse Volume IV: 'Concept Horror'

Contributors to this volume include: Kristen Alvanson, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Michel Houellebecq, Oleg Kulik, Thomas Ligotti, Quentin Meillassoux, China Miéville, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Rafani, Steven Shearer, George Sieg, Eugene Thacker, Keith Tilford, Todosch, James Trafford.

Collapse IV, published as a limited edition of 1000 copies, features a series of investigations by philosophers, writers and artists into Concept Horror. Contributors address the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of horror, interrogate its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought, and uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable. This unique volume continues Collapse's pursuit of indisciplinary miscegenation, the wide-ranging contributions interacting to produce common themes and suggestive connections. In the process a rich and compelling case emerges for the intimate bond between horror and philosophical thought.

Collapse Volume IV will be shipping around May 15 and is available for advance purchase online.

Collapse Volume IV: Concept Horror

An update from editor Robin Mackay on Collapse Volume IV...

We are delighted to announce that Collapse Volume IV will be published May 2008 and will soon be available for advance purchase online.

Collapse Volume IV: 'Concept Horror' is an investigation into the philosophical, existential, aesthetic, religious and political dimensions of horror. Its task is not to promote theories of horror, but to uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable.

The volume brings to fruition Collapse's vision of a miscegenated text in which contributions interact and produce a series of interzones or objectively-collaborative spaces. Throughout the volume many different styles of philosophical texts and graphic works intermingle, creating unanticipated connections and adding new dimensions to one another.

George Sieg's Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror demonstrates the simultaneously cognitive, existential and political nature of Horror, through a conceptual investigation of victimhood.

In The Shadow of a Puppet-Dance, James Trafford tracks weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti's anticipation of the radical thesis of neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger's book Being No-One: namely, that 'there has never been such a thing as a self'.

In Thomas Ligotti's own contribution to the volume, he takes up the work of obscure Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe, among others, to take an unflinching journey into the depths of nihilism...

...As a counterpoint to Ligotti's deflation of human hubris, Ukrainian Oleg Kulik, a prominent contemporary artist known for his disturbing investigations into the borders between life and death, human and animal, contributes his photographic series 'Dead Monkeys'.

Eugene Thacker's Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror gives a detailed and penetrating account of the 'teratological noosphere', discussing the ontologies of horror from Aristotle to Lovecraft.

Novelist Michel Houellebecq is well-known for his ability to evoke the horror that dwells within the banalities of contemporary life. His poems, of which a selection are translated into English here for the first time, distil his powerful vision into translucid moments of dread.

Jake Chapman, half of the notorious Brothers Grim of the British artworld, who unveil their infernal new work Fucking Hell in London next month, contributes a set of etchings created exclusively for Collapse in response to the other contributions in the volume.

Quentin Meillassoux's work is familiar to our readers. In the third of a 'trilogy' of essays published in Collapse, Spectral Dilemma, Meillassoux reveals some of the ethical consequences of his deduction of the 'necessity of contingency', through an examination of the problem of 'infinite mourning' for the dead.

Kristen Alvanson's photographs, at once repellent and fascinating, of preserved specimens of deformed and mutated animals and humans, are accompanied by a text which discusses Paré's sixteenth-century treatise which makes of taxonomy itself something monstrous.

German artist Todosch (Thorsten Schlopsnies) meticulous sketches seem to depict varieties of heterogenous slime in the process either of disintegration or coagulation...

...A perfect companion to Iain Hamilton Grant's Being and Slime. This untimely excavation of the naturephilosophische work of Lorenz Oken - according to whom the generation of the universe from a 'primal zero' corresponds to its coagulation from a 'primaeval mucus' - puts an entirely new slant on Badiou's notion of 'founding on the void'.

Benjamin Noys meditates on Lovecraft and the real, revealing that the most abyssal of Horrors is Horror Temporis.

In The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo, Reza Negarestani shows how Aristotle and Plotinus both unlock and dissimulate the ontological mechanism expressed by an unspeakable form of Etruscan torture.

A rising star, Canadian artist Steven Shearer, contributes a new series of his Poems - striking graphical pieces created through a manipulation of the nihilistic and extreme titles and lyrics of death-metal bands.

China Miéville, better known for his bestselling weird fiction novels, writes on M.R.James and the Quantum Vampire, introducing us to a new fearsome creature from his arsenal, the Skulltopus!

Czech art collective Rafani present their cycle Czech Forest, an adaptation of folk-tale imagery which presents a very modern tale of warcrime and revenge from the end of WWII.

Graham Harman returns to Collapse with On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. In a polemical defence of 'weird realism', Harman demonstrates that philosophical thought has more in common with weird and horror fiction than it might like to admit...

...Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo, Keith Tilford's series of images, deftly disintegrated objects with more than a hint of 'pulp', anticipate and shadow Harman's invocation of the weird inner life of objects.

Collapse Volume IV // Ed. R. Mackay // May 2008 // 400pp[TBC] // ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 // £9.99

Order here: http://blog.urbanomic.com/urbanomic/

blocks of pest

The back of a diagram for Lessons in Schizophrenia.

For more information on my forthcoming book check here: http://www.kristenalvanson.com/new/LIS.html

Maskh Project

The Maskh Project has been abstractly created after the forgotten art of Talisman-forging in the Middle East particularly Iran. Middle Eastern talismans are forged in the form of diagrammatic bodies whose true figurative ideas are stripped down to their minimal abstract components – numbers as body parts, letter curvatures as fiendish fauna, geometric elements as skeletal frames and alpha-numeric convolutions or miniature ciphers as elementary particles of the world surrounding the figures. Each talisman or spell-diagram casts a particular spell and by doing so effectuates a metamorphosis or possession. Middle Eastern talismans present the idea of metamorphosis through the realm of in-between, between the figurative and its numero-diagrammatic double.


For more information and new images, please check my website: http://www.kristenalvanson.com/new/maskh.html

dESIRE Update

In line with demand and current inflation, the price of one unit of desires has been increased from $100 to $125 (date of increase - March 2008). There is still time to buy a unit at a low price. Be a participant in the exploration of the economy of intangible art and desire. Buy a unit now and let's see what happens over time.

For more information, please check here: http://www.kristenalvanson.com/new/market.html

RE: FIGURING MEMORY

An essay by A. Gargett on my works created while in New York...


RE: FIGURING MEMORY – THE ART OF KRISTEN ALVANSON
_ A. Gargett

“I look at you and think of the evening I first met you, and you’re not that person anymore. I mean, the elements are the same, but you’re different. Look at me right now.” Christy lifted her long arms right up in the air, still holding the dripping spoon, asking me to take in all of her. “I will never be this person again. When we walkout of here today – when tomorrow morning comes – I will be somebody else, not exactly the same as I am right now. Maybe that’s all dying is.” Ethan Hawke – Ash Wednesday

Quirky, yes. Offbeat, certainly; but more than that, with its mixture of media and its oblique take on the very act of being an artwork, the paintings of Kristen Alvanson imply that their creator’s vision is wrested from the world rather than being at home within it. In an era when so much art strives for the ready-made statement – in reality provoked by the times but seeking nonetheless to be provocative of them – Alvanson’s work remains carefully stated. The working is always shown; an art of passion in which the terror of – and desire for – abandonment, is expressed with consummate cool.

Alvanson’s art is an art of presences and resonances, acts and allusions. Perhaps it is viable to start with memory. With memories that are positioned before our eyes. What here has been remembered? How does the painting work to remember? It is not that these paintings simply turn around the interaction of memory, histories and representation, it is more accurately, that these themes present what comes to be framed within the paintings as their own apposite topos; and within that topos, their presence is intricate and complex. At work within the field of the painting they source the paintings with their work. What this means is that the paintings draw on and develop the resources that inhere in memory, history and representation. The specificity of their work, however, is connected to what occurs when these elements are themselves put to work. In this, their supposed determinations – the already given particularity of memory, history and representation – no longer control, and even though these elements need to be understood as encompassing, and enacting, the material presence of tradition, what is enacted takes the form of an active questioning rather than a painterly or interpretative “fait accompli”. It is that their movement into work is traversed by a questioning of memory, history and representation. This questioning comes to be at work in the frame and thereby forms an integral part of the work’s work. This questioning is no mere idle speculation; it is rather a questioning that, once acknowledged, forms a resolute part of the present.

Read more

dESIRE for Sale

dESIRE #005000

As part of the dESIRE Project I am both capturing and selling my dESIRES. dESIRES are sold in units (1 unit equals 100 consecutive desires). Individual units are recorded in the following way: dESIRE 000001-000100, dESIRE 000101-000200, dESIRE 002201-002300 or dESIRE 005401-005500, for example.

For each unit the purchaser is buying 100 of my intangible dESIRES as well as the 100 color photographic representations of these dESIRES. The photographic representations will be included on one CD-Rom Disk. Each unit is unique and includes original intangible desires and original color photographic representations, therefore, the unit will not be duplicated or sold as copies.
Current Market Value of 1 Unit of dESIRE = USD $100. Order Now because the price of a Unit of dESIRE is about to increase. 

For more information and to order check the desire section of my website: http://www.kristenalvanson.com/new/market.html

updated del.icio.us tags

Adela Jones Alain Badiou Alex Fradkin Anders Weberg anti-copyright Archaeology Architecture Archive Art Artaud Avant-garde Blog CA Carey Young Cinema Curating Decay Deleuze Desire Drapery Dublin Eric Alliez EXHIBITION link.of.thought Fabric Fictional Authors Fractal Ontology France Frozen Tears Gallery Garrett Phelan Gean Moreno Germany Graffiti Graham Harman Gregor Schneider Hyperstition Iain Hamilton Grant Immaterial Independent Installation Jo-Anne Balcaen Joachim Schmid John Russell Journal Juliet Jacobson LA Legal Contract Les LeVeque Machine Magazine Mark Wallinger Mary-Anne Breeze Matthew Buckingham Mehrdad Iravanian mezangelle Michel Serres Minimalism Narration Nathaniel Mellors Network Past Present Future Now Philosophy Photography Poetics Politics Post-continental Projected Personae Pseudonyms Quentin Meillassoux Rachel Rampleman Ray Brassier Reza Negarestani Robin Mackay Romain Meffre Régine Debatty Schizophrenia Sephen Gill Sex Spacepolitics Spain Spielhaus Morrison Sweden TEXTural Theory Thomas Duzer Time Trinie Dalton Turner Prize UK Urbanomic Vermin video installation Weizman Yves Marchand

Garden of Spellbinding Paths

'Unknown Deleuze': COLLAPSE Volume III

'Unknown Deleuze' – COLLAPSE Volume III will be published in mid-October and is now available for advance purchase online at http://www.urbanomic.com/order.php

A note from editor Robin Mackay: Collapse Volume III: 'Unknown Deleuze' contains explorations of the work of Gilles Deleuze by pioneering thinkers in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music and architecture. In addition, we publish in this volume two previously untranslated texts by Deleuze himself, along with a fascinating piece of vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure influences. Finally, as an annex to Collapse Volume II, we also include a full transcription of the conference on 'Speculative Realism' held in London earlier this year.

Whilst books continue to appear at an alarming rate which claim to put Deleuze's thought 'to work' in diverse areas outside of philosophy, we submit, in this volume, that his philosophical thought itself still remains enigmatic, both in its detail and in its major themes. The contributors to this volume aim to clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be 'integrated' – what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts 'signed Deleuze' converge?

The volume includes two newly-translated articles by Gilles Deleuze along with contributions from Arnaud Villani, Thomas Duzer, Quentin Meillassoux, John Sellars, Éric Alliez & Jean-Claude Bonne, Haswell & Hecker, Robin Mackay, Mehrdad Iravanian, J.-H. Rosny the Elder, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier.

COLLAPSE Volume III
October 2007.
Paperback 115x175mm 515pp (TBC)
Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.
ISBN 0-9553087-2-0

THOMAS DUZER
In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995
GILLES DELEUZE
Responses to a Series of Questions
ARNAUD VILLANI
'I Feel I Am A Pure Metaphysician': The Consequences of Deleuze's Remark
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory
HASWELL & HECKER
Blackest Ever Black
GILLES DELEUZE
Mathesis, Science and Philosophy
JOHN SELLARS
The Truth about Chronos and Aîon
ÉRIC ALLIEZ & JOHN-CLAUDE BONNE
Matisse-Thought and the Strict Ordering of Fauvism
MEHRDAD IRAVANIAN
Unknown Deleuze
J.-H. ROSNY THE ELDER
Another World
RAY BRASSIER, IAIN HAMILTON GRANT, GRAHAM HARMAN, QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Speculative Realism

dESIRE #004000

In an effort to continue the exploration of desire (commerce, customer dynamics, propagation of desire), my dESIRES are now available for sale online. For more information about the dESIRE Project check the following: http://www.kristenalvanson.com/new/market.html 

The Art of Nothing: Immateriality and Intangible Art (PDF to read on medieval studies, intangible art and modern law)

Update: Fozen Tears 3 New York City Book Launch

DEXTER SINISTER VS. FROZEN TEARS III

Launch of John Russell's FROZEN TEARS III – THE TRINITY
Thursday, June 21, 2007
A two-part event:
7.30-9pm installation and book launch
at Dexter Sinister
38 Ludlow St. (at Hester St.)

9-11pm performances/readings
organized by Mark Beasley for Creative Time
205 Club
205 Chrystie St. (at Stanton St.)

INCLUDING READINGS/PERFORMANCE BY:
HILLARY RAPHAEL
GENESIS P ORRIDGE
TRINIE DALTON
ILANA HALPERIN
ROXY PAINE
MARK HARRIS

Book published by Article Press; see http://www.frozentears.co.uk
With support from the British Council

More about Dexter Sinister: http://www.dextersinister.org

Vs. is an ongoing monthly series curated by Creative Time at 205 Club.

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