In the Confined Space of Identity

After all, identity is the last remaining resource when there is a dearth of tools to imagine a different future, when we close our eyes to the possibilities of alteration.– Francesco Remotti, L’ossessione identitaria (translation by the author) From academic papers to claims in the form of TikTok or Instagram carousels, the leitmotif of the most […]

The Antirenaissance – Magic of the Elements

Art does not feel like abstracting from nature, but, at the same time, it is not content to record it. It engages in a contest, with matter, but remains, perhaps as never before, on its own plane. This way of doing things was recognised in the most elegant way by Tolomei, in the letter we […]

The Antirenaissance – Magic of the Elements

Translation and editing by Matthew Didemus and Filippo Scafi The respect and devotion, we may well say, for the “concept” of water is also manifested in the design of the vessels that are to contain it; especially if they are intended for ceremonial functions, such as political banquets, etc. They also insist, on the presumption […]

The Antirenaissance – Magic of the Elements

Translation and editing by Matthew Didemus and Filippo Scafi “I am convinced that Battisti’s notion of the real is what finally binds together much of this otherwise eclectic book. He uses the word in reference to the city of wood behind the classicizing stone facades, the breaches in decorum that distinguish the nonheroic sculpture of […]

The Antirenaissance

translation and editing by Filippo Scafi and Matthew Didemus Chaosmotics presents the first English translation of excerpts from 1962 L’antirinascimento by Eugenio Battisti, a deep and multifarious study on the value of Renaissance in order to shed light on the relation between folkloristic belief and the development of humanistic rationalism. That is: a problem of […]

Forms of Degradation and the Grotesque Body

Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis never developed further than the stage of manuscript. Part of a project with the Center of Afro-American Studies, for the Institute of Black World, Black Metamorphosis amounts to a long and multifaceted discussion and collection of references for what would become in the 80s Wynter’s “theory of the Human”. BM’s is […]

The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology – Part 2

Here for Part 1Original in The Art of Anthropology, A. Gell, E. Hirsch ed., Routledge, London, 1999 Alfred Gell (1945-1997) was a peculiar thinker, one who contributed toward the development of the recursive, or ontological, turn in anthropology. Gell’s anthropology of art refuses from the outset to be an aesthetic theory, while attempting rather to […]

The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology – Part 1

Here for Part 2Original in The Art of Anthropology, A. Gell, E. Hirsch ed., Routledge, London, 1999 Alfred Gell (1945-1997) was a peculiar thinker, one who contributed toward the development of the recursive, or ontological, turn in anthropology. Gell’s anthropology of art refuses from the outset to be an aesthetic theory, while attempting rather to […]

Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia

Original: Roger Caillois, «Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire », Minotaure, no. 7, 1935 Roger Caillois is a peculiar figure of the 20th century intellectual scene. Surpassed in fame by his friend and colleague Georges Bataille, with whom he founded the Collège de sociologie in Paris in 1937 and with whom he shared the experience of Acèphale, […]

Essay on Exoticism

Excerpt from V. Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: an Aesthetics of Diversity, tr. eng. Y. R. Schlick, Duke University Press, 2002 [original copyright held by éditions Fata Morgana, whom we thank for their kind permission: V. Segalen, Essai sur l’exotisme: Une esthétique du divers, 1978] It was in the span of his short life, at the […]

Three Colours, or: “What Will Happen?”

The story goes like this. There is a great artist, the greatest, perhaps, of all times. He is mysterious and enigmatic; he never made his word public, no one ever had access to his thoughts. It is painful to me to tell the tale, painful to keep it silent too, says Aeschylus’ Prometheus; as the years pass by, Zima – […]

Viroid Life

Excerpt from the article “Viroid Life. On machines, technics, and evoIution”, in Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, K. Ansell-Pearson, Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 145-150 Philosophies of Difference, particularly through the efforts of Deleuze and Guattari, have offered new perspectives in respect to the question of technology, freeing it from the biol...

The Killing of a Sacred Whale

An encounter takes place off the northern coast of Europe. It has as its subject the Grindadráp, the ancient and sacred Fær Øer Islands’ whaling, and it tells of the tension between modernity and tradition, between myth and efficiency, progress and identity. Chaosmotics continues to expand its analysis on mythopoiesis through this excerpt by Nicklas […]

One of these Sounds is Not like the Others, One of these Sounds doesn’t Belong

Every time I get the inspirationTo go change things aroundNo one wants to help me look for places Where new things might be found.– The Beach Boys There is a latent struggle that runs through much of Mark Fisher’s writing, and which finds its ultimate formulation in the introduction to the unfinished Acid Communism. Namely, the […]

Machine Decision Is Not Final – III.

“Spanning borders between different worlds, histories, futures, and foundational models, Machine Decision is Not Final is not only a timely reappraisal of the stakes of AI development, but a tool for constructing more global imaginaries for the future of AI.” This Fall, Urbanomic will release Machine Decision is Not Final, an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collection […]

Variations

Machine Decision Is Not Final – II.

Variations

Machine Decision Is Not Final – I.

Myth and Mass Media

Media Studies is a relatively young discipline. But its youth is a disruptive, feverish, tentacular one. There would have been no Media Studies without Marshall McLuhan, and, perhaps, no McLuhan without the outburst of the electronic era, and of mass media. The incalculable influence of mass media on society made necessary to pose certain questions, […]

Digital Patchwork, Shattered Narratives

«The chances are that you are reading these words on a mobile device. There is a good chance that you are spending a lot of time on that device every day. If that is the case, you are not alone» . When I first read the incipit to Digital Tarkovsky, it was 2018. The rudimentary […]

The Impersonal Within Us

Bogna Konior highlights the ways in which the human conceives of the inhuman; she writes about AI, the links between mysticism and the Internet, non-philosophy, animism, her own history, the future. We asked questions about technology; we were made to glimpse a broader - and, at the same time, more intimate - horizon.

Remembering the Future: on Ruins, Memory, and Rituals

This article is a transcript of the presentation for the November 11, 2022 exhibition, Tecnomemories: fossils of the present, held in Milan at Frigoriferi Milanesi and organized by Chaosmotics and the Uno+Uno+Uno association.

Technomemories. Fossils of the present

The second event curated by Chaosmotics, in dialogue between art, technology and philosophy.

Technomemories

FernGully: 30 Years of Ecological Perspectives

First Chaosmotics curated event, thanks to the support of ACRA NGO and the Soka Gakkai Institute, themed on ecology and imagination.

Ferngully

Remarks for a Metaphysics of Passages – Part III

Evil, the tendency to hold forms in their disintegration as if they were not always fragmented, is indispensable to the awareness that each passage is one. Evil is not horror in itself; it is horror for eternity.

Remarks for a Metaphysics of Passages – Part II

The totality of the past – of the images of the past – is the jewel brought as a dowry to a redeemed humanity. "There is a secret understanding between past generations and ours" – secret to everyone, even to the poles of that very understanding

Contributes

Remarks for a Metaphysics of Passages – Part I

Where theories fail, where cyborgs, brains in tanks, Avatars and Terminators dance without a stage, the real is articulated in the passage. And each passage is a practical dimension, it is the where and the when in which one cannot but proceed, or disintegrate.

Contributes

TECHNOMORPHOSES

Interview by Filippo Scafi, Tommaso Garavaglia, Stefano Moioli In Kafka’s Metamorphosis there is no radical metamorphosis, but the installation of human consciousness in the body of an insect. In this way, Germán Sierra highlights the inability of contemporary thought to think adequately about change – an inability which, in the face of the mass and […]

Beyond the End of the Night

Responding to Jean Monnet as follows: Europe will make itself in crises, and it will be the sum of the lessons learned on the path it has taken towards its own realisation.

Contributes

all that you ever hated all that you ever loved was here

Even if there is an order in the cosmos, it does not include the human being.

Radical Exoticism – Part III

Along the irreversible path of universal progress, nothing "wild" is dead, everything rises or will rise again with vehemence and virulence, "right in the heart of our ultra-sophisticated and ultra-vulnerable systems, disarming them" without gasping.

Radical Exoticism – Part II

Once the Earth has been circumscribed as a sphere, as a finite space, through the omnipotence of the media, all that remains is the fatality of circular tourism that is exhausted in the absorption of all differences

Radical Exoticism – Part I

If economy is libidinal, and libido is essentialy economical, can we think of a space in which appears a rational comunality?

Rekindle Pathways

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The Hyperobject that therefore We are in (II)

The irremediable ontological caesura that materializes between the thing and the way it appears to other things makes all relations move on one, the same, side of the crack, leaving the outside lying on the opposite one.

Contributes

Towards a Post-Work Society

The politics of time offers a response to the crisis of work, inviting us to talk about the conditions for freedom and the kind of society we want to live in.

The Hyperobject that therefore We are in (I)

Attraction and repulsion coexist, on the one hand as terror for the unknown, on the other as a desire to unveil: a (ir)reality that emerges intermittently, at the interstices of the real, pushing us to question it.

Contributes

Exiting the Vampire Castle

We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other.

Ecology as Eco-logic

Ecology encapsulates a myriad of speeches, often tangent to each other but not directly related, frantically revolving around the nebulous core that is its principle, the question: how do we think ecology?

Contributes

Markets, Politics and the Political

Can economics be trusted in taking care of the most pressing questions of today in a neutral and unideological way?

Positive Thinking

The myth of positive thinking is one of the most peculiar figures of contemporaneity. What are the effects of this existential posture? What is its utility? And what are its causes?

Desire, Thought

Introduction to the "On Desire" Variation. It begins with the question about the ancient, obscure interlacement between desire and thought. But - why desiring?

Contributes

What Is Chaosmotics?

The Manifesto represents the set of our guidelines, the paths we will take and the places we come from.

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