The Matter of Contradiction Conference Meets ABJECT BLOC 2013

The Matter of Contradiction: War Against the Sun

The Matter of Contradiction is a series of seminars and workshops initiated by Sam Basu, Fabien Giraud, Ida Soulard and Tom Trevatt. This third event, The Matter of Contradiction: War Against the Sun, is organised in collaboration with Inigo Wilkins. It will run Friday 6-9pm and Saturday 9.30am - 6pm, Limehouse Town Hall, 646 Commercial Rd, E14

For full details see: http://lamatiere.tumblr.com

In 1991 the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines injected sulfate particles into the stratosphere, shading the earth and cooling the air by 0.5°c. It has been suggested that one of the best strategies against global warming would be to mimic the effect of such an eruption. Planes and artillery equipped with particle cannons would send aerosols into the stratosphere to deflect solar rays, thus protecting us from the adverse rise in temperature. Geoengineering and other such acts of solar management constitute a desperate attempt to use technological and scientific advancements for the ongoing exploitation of natural resources by an expanding capitalist economy. Such an operation is an attempt to shield the human from the reality of a radically indifferent world.

If the project of the Enlightenment was to ensure the mastery of man via an emancipation from nature then the capacity to control and exploit natural resources has only led to an amplification of the damaging effects of contingent material forces. The more we attempt to manage and extract energy from the material world, the larger the repercussions in the form of entropic degradation. In its attempt to mitigate the consequences of previous actions, the geo-engineered solar shield indicates a critical phase in the intrinsic feedback effect that has accelerated since the Enlightenment. This war against the sun is a battle of Reason against its own effects.

In the last iteration of our ongoing symposia project, The Matter of Contradiction: Ungrounding the Object, held in Limousin in September 2012, we argued that art has been historically positioned as a similar shield against the trauma of scientific reason and a radically decentred human. Placed as the dialectical other of reason, art thus became a space for reflexivity where the inherent limitations of human knowledge had to be revealed and experienced as such.

If, in the history of thought, there have been a series of traumatic scientific revolutions as indexed by Copernicus and Darwin, then art has been responsible, in part, for the registering but subsequent rehabilitation of this trauma through its positing of the human as central and dominant in the relation between the artwork and the viewer. It is our aim with this event, The Matter of Contradiction: War against the sun, to think through art’s immunological status, and to reformulate its relation to the project of reason. This renewed engagement in the project of reason would be neither an arrogant claiming of the rights to plunder material resources in the name of a subject centred logic, nor a reactionary call for a reversal to authenticity, but an absolute conception of the real within which anthropic concern is radically decentred and subsequently reoriented. While previous conceptions of rationality were formulated in opposition to aesthetics, politics or ethics, the present situation demands an epistemologically flattened mode of reasoning where art’s problematic relation to the real has to be rethought.

CONFERENCE

Friday 6-9pm & Saturday 9.30-6pm

Mute magazine office at Limehouse Town Hall

646 Commercial Rd, E14

Free & open to all

Weekend programme:

CONFERENCE

AT LIMEHOUSE TOWN HALL

Friday - 6.00-9.00pm

6.00-6.30 Welcoming & Introduction to The Matter of contradiction/War against the sun

6.30-6.45 Andrew Osborne - Entropy-economy, Biospheric Crisis and Eco-ethical Valuation

6.45-7.00 Inigo Wilkins - Enemy of Music

7.00-7.15 Olivier Surel - Naturalism’s Nihilistic Tendencies and the Politics of Nature

7.15-7.30 Break

7.30-8.45 FOCUS ON Ray Brassier - Nominalism, Naturalism and Materialism

8.45-9.00 Questions & closing remarks

Saturday - 9.15 am - 6.00 pm

9.15 Doors open

9.30- 9.45 Welcoming & Introduction to the day

9.45-10.00 Alex Williams - At the Dawn of the Anthropocene

10.00-10.15 Tom Trevatt - A Universal Address

10.15-10.30 Ida Soulard - Heal the knife that cuts the wound

10.30-10.45 Sam Basu - In the Witches Drowning

10.45 - 11.00 Fabien Giraud - The Suffocation of Birds

11.00-11.15 Break

11.15-12.00 FOCUS ON Anselm Franke

12.00-12.15 Questions

12.15 - 13.45 Lunch

14.00-14.15 Sally O’Reilly - Crude

14.15-15.15 FOCUS ON Robin Mackay - The Barker Topos (A Pitch)

15.15-16.15 FOCUS ON Reza Negarestani - A live answer to Robin Mackay

16.15 - 16.30 Break

16.30-16.45 Josephine Berry Slater - Process Processed

16.45-17.00 Kirsten Cooke & Dale Holmes - A Brief Introduction to Material Conjectures

17.00-17.15 Simon O’Sullivan - On the Production of Subjectivity

17.15-17.30 Benedict Singleton - Maximum Jailbreak

17.30-18.00 Questions & Closing Remarks

Followed by...

A night of performance and noise to launch "               "[sic] TIM GOLDIE / DANIEL BEBAN, 'SLAKES' [Triple compact disc and book] which will close The Matter of Contradiction: War Against the Sun
 

REGISTRATION ESSENTIAL http://abjectbloc2013.eventbrite.co.uk/#

7pm - 11pm SUNDAY MARCH 3rd LIMEHOUSE TOWN HALL, 646 COMMERCIAL ROAD, LONDON E14 7HA

CONTACT: DEFLAG@RISEUP.NET

FREE / DONATION VERY WELCOME AS WE HAVE MAJOR COSTS ON THIS ONE BUT CANNOT CHARGE ENTRANCE FEE DUE TO 'LEGAL ISSUES'

LIVE:

"              "[sic] TIM GOLDIE      http://timgoldie.blogspot.co.uk/

NINA POWER      http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nina-power

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS      http://philipbest.blogspot.co.uk/

BILLY BAO      http://www.mattin.org/recordings/BillyBao.html

MARK AERIAL WALLER      http://www.markaerialwaller.com/

MATTHEW NOEL-TOD      http://mnoeltod.tumblr.com/

JOHN WILD      http://www.rupture.co.uk/

LAUNCH PARTY FOR:

"               "[sic] TIM GOLDIE / DANIEL BEBAN - "SLAKES" 
[Triple compact disc and book]
http://entracte.co.uk/project/goldiebeban-e145/

http://timgoldie.blogspot.co.uk/
 
BILLY BAO - "BUILDINGS FROM BILBAO"[Long player]

http://www.burkaforeverybody.com/releases.htm