I have a new essay in a publication put together by Vít Bohal & Dustin Breitling, two of the wonderful folks behind Diffractions Collective and organisers of the Wyrdpatchworkshop sessions I’ve taken part in over the last two years.
The collection is called Speculative Ecologies: Plotting Through the Mesh and it’s now available to order through Littereria Pragensia, as well as Amazon in the UK and US.
Exploring contemporary strands of philosophical praxis orientated towards mapping and theorizing the notion of ‘environment’ as geological, organic and social construct. Upon this ground, it formulates the concept of ‘speculative ecology’ as a transdisciplinary form of discursive practice embedded within materiality. The acceptance of the existence and the imposing limitations of the material world functions as a point of departure for the contributors to speculate and experimentally navigate the topology of their surroundings in various, multi-tiered modalities. The main focus is placed upon exploring the integral materiality through digital projects and aesthetic production and is best encapsulated by the three overarching concepts which also create the publication’s basic thematic framework – Representations, Systems and Speculations. These three concepts provide the envelope within which a speculative form of ecological thinking might best function. The integral materialism of such a speculative ecology retains complicity with the relation of the ‘world’ and ‘figure’ insofar as it understands the material mandate of nature, and in this way tries to open space for tentative post-human design.
Featuring Louis Armand, BCAAsystem, Vít Bohal, Dustin Breitling, Paul Chaney, Matt Colquhoun, Digital Garden Lab, Jana Gridneva, Newton Harrison, Alžběta Kešnerová, Bogna Konior, Kateřina Kovářová, Tomáš Mládek, Udo Noll, P Hydrogenous, Paulo Tavares, Gry Ulstein.
My essay is called “When Things Take Time” and it is an (implicit) exploration of unconditional accelerationism, taking its lead from Maurice Blanchot’s seemingly paradoxical writings on communism, and with a splash of Virginia Woolf to boot:
As Woolf would write from the depths of her novel’s templexity: “How to describe the world seen without a self? There are no words.” What an opportunity for the ever-present xenopoetics of late capitalism, for there is no time here either and, for capitalism, as for us, time is all there is.