Foreign Objekt

Foreign Objekt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVz3YKaoZc4 The panel discussion on David Roden's new book, Snuff Memories (Schism Press: 2021). Panelists: David Roden, Amanda Beech, Martin E. Rosenberg, Romina Wainberg, Corey McCall, and Simon Sellars ... Moderated by: Setareh Taghvaei Organized and Curated by: Sepideh Majidi Video: Dan Hogman & Shaum Mehra In David Roden’s Snuff Memories, an ancient time-war ripples through a demon-haunted cosmos as its characters systematically expunge their humanity. Their ‘posthuman becoming’ pre-empts any possible ethics or sane politics. Instead, desire is weaponized from a bleak, inhuman future. Bodies replicate and unzip across the novella’s pornographic vignettes, remade in erotic rituals of mutation, death, and pain. Snuff Memories explores themes common to the discourses of New Realism, Posthumanism, Accelerationism, and Weird fiction: the cultivation of general intellect, the storming of heaven, our complicity with alien intelligences and uncontrollable technologies, the possibility of an ethics of ‘becoming inhuman’ in a world without transcendental norms.

Sami Khatib: Sensuous Supra-Sensuous: The Aesthetics of Real Abstraction See the rest of the videos, and access the readings, in the link https://www.foreignobjekt.com//sami-khatib-sensuous-supra- / : @samikhtb This is an 1 hour excerpt from Sami's lecture from session-1 of the study group. ... Sensuous Supra-Sensuous: The Aesthetics of Real Abstraction Topics: Real Abstraction Economic and Linguistic Value The Spectral Materiality of Wertgegenständlichkeit Commodity-Language and its Secret Capitalism as Religion Reading/Discussion Focus: Real Abstraction Economic and Linguistic Value The Spectral Materiality of Wertgegenständlichkeit Excerpt: Explaining the peculiarities of the value form, in the original 1867 edition of Das Kapital, vol. I, Marx deploys a compelling image: It is as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits, and all other actual animals, which form when grouped together the various kinds, species, subspecies, families etc. of the animal kingdom, there existed also in addition the animal , the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom. MEGA II .5.1, 37 2 Marx’s project of the critique of political economy could be summed up as the science of this animal and its spectral mode of existence. In societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails (C I, 125) it is as if the abstract dimension of value acquires a life of its own. The dual character of the commodity, pertaining to both use-value and exchange-value, creates a seemingly autonomous sphere of value relations which have cut themselves loose from the sensual world of concrete commodities and the dimension of their use- value. This autonomy, however, is not merely intellectual or ideal as in the sphere of religion where the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own (C I, 165). Rather, it is as if the mode of abstraction, namely value, has a real material existence of its own independent of the human mind. ... read more by going to the link above. #foreignobjekt #Samikhatib #realabstraction #marx #studygroup #philosophy

This is an excerpt from the final session of the study group led by . and on our YouTube channel: https://www.foreignobjekt.com//ray-brassier-posthuman-prag... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNOhbFuw7zZnXZeNJyUemRQ Our apologies for the audio glitches in the one video "Selecting Power: Part 1" This video is a clip from Ray's presentation: Session 2: The Human: From Subversion to Compulsion In the contemporary ‘critical’ humanities, the privileging of the human has become as suspect as every other sort of privilege. Far from being the uncircumventable horizon for emancipatory politics, humanism is denounced as integral to a logic of domination that proceeds from the subjugation of nature to the enslavement of all those deemed less than human. It is easy to retort that this indictment of humanism follows from conflating the restrictive specification of the human (as white, male, heterosexual, European etc.) with its generic de specification the human as what Alain Badiou calls ‘the voided animal’, an exception that includes the unspecified part of everything: neither white nor black, neither male nor female, neither heterosexual nor homosexual, etc. But the suggestion that universalization proceeds not by generalizing specific predicates but by subtracting them tends to fall on deaf ears in a theoretical context where the Nietzschean equation of universalization with domination continues to hold sway. Once the inference from exception to exclusion is made, an all-inclusive post-humanism supplants exclusionary humanism as the politically ‘progressive’ optic consonant with the liberal ideal of inclusiveness that has become the humanities’ critical lodestone. This ideal stipulates a formal equivalence of human and non-human that is the ontological ratification of capitalism’s personification of things and reification of people....Read more in bio. Organized by: @sepideh_majiidi #RayBrassier #Foreignobjekt #Human #Philosophy

Bochra Taboubi @The Art of Bochra Taboubi Identifying Drive System--Video and Text by Bochra Taboubi https://www.foreignobjekt.com//identifying-drive-system-by Dilating Nature expresses a form of subjective and jubilant modification, each appearing insane to the other. The creation of possible worlds goes beyond description--it delves into an archeology of common imagination. The strange and foreign forms disturb not in their degrees of contrasts, but rather in their famili...arity. The spectators facing new forms tends to recognize only friendly, intimate, known forms. Their identification drives emanate from the discomfort of these morbidities. They try to make analogies to the usual forms to get out of this elusive situation. Or, perhaps, this is due to spontaneous and archaic identifications. Where do these shapes come from? How are they formed? How do these invisible worlds manage to bring a new semiotic language? The shape of a foreign object is indescribable, it disturbs. This strange presence poses a problem, like a flaw in reality which by definition escapes the imaginary, the fictional. The disturbing form appears as a bug, and this dysfunction hits perception first and interpretation later. Everything that is questionable escapes reality and comes back to it. This sublimation leaves for the world of ideas, seeking origin and identity of this disparate body. The resulting hiatus reaches a dimension that escapes measurement...like a dream in which one finds oneself in the middle...right in the middle the morbid form is both a fossil and a meteorite; a time window. With a system of elimination, the observer tries to understand: if this body is not from this world, it surely comes from somewhere. In the space-time scale he tries to locate it. But it seems at the same time so close and so far away. The observer doesn't know whether he needs a microscope or a telescope. The scale becomes derisory and gives up its reliability. #identifyingdrivesystem #BochraTaboubi #foreignobjekt

/ , https://www.foreignobjekt.com//eunsol-lee-kimberly-lee-con... Kimberly Lee @kimberlyleee_ is the name of a bodiless character brought to life through 3D rendering. Using the character Kimberly Lee, Lee Eun-sol visualizes the idea of the existence of contemporary objects. It is essential to Kimberly's existence that her creator continues to create new landscapes and spaces to ensure Kimberly’s sustainability. Popcorn Prophet_trailer_001 (2020~) is a project series that explores and simulates Kimberly Lee as a member of Decentraland, with its virtual economy and real estate market based on cryptocurrencies and recorded on blockchains. Decentraland (DCL) is a distributed virtual world running on a blockchain using the Etherum ERC-721 token. Land in Decentraland is not owned by the central authority. Theoretically, the owner of the land compartment is in charge and anyone can build whatever they want on the virtual land. Their vision is to allow Decentraland to evolve into the same form as "The Oasis" as in the movie Ready Player One. Decentralization is their main distinction, but the imagined result of this real estate business is the current appearance of Million Dollar Homepage. Can virtual reality avatars--who act as billboards on decentralized lands like billboards that cut and sell pixels on Web pages--be seen as our ideal future? With these questions, Kimberly aims to collaborate with Youtuber Ryu.Free. Ryu.Free is a developer and YouTuber who conducts lectures on blockchain, and has a plan to run a game business by purchasing land in Decentraland for the purpose of profit. Since Kimberly doesn't own land, she works as a part-time worker in Ryu.Free’s business, creating his virtual workplace and helping in the creation of games. So the destination (dot) is, to be precise, settled in the cycle of generating revenue there. ... more on foreignobjekt.com/blog-foreign-objekt #Foreignobjekt #EunsolLee #KimberlyLee #Decentraland #blockchain #virtualworld #simulation #VR #ART #Media #Digital #Popcorn_Prophet_trailer_001

This is the link to all four videos of Study Group_3 with Ray Brassier

This is an introduction to Ray Brassier’s upcoming presentation of his unpublished paper The Human, which will be happening this coming Saturday, December 12, at 10am Pacific Time, for Foreign Objekt’s Study Group. A link to the text is here: https://drive.google.com//1-UREzp0ZKtC0SO28ZE_tesSHJ/view... Also, this is a link to the Facebook event, which includes the zoom link to the meeting, as well as links to the additional readings: https://fb.me/e/jgG6F1eLp The event is free and everyone is welcome to join and participate in the discussion with Ray Brassier