Books published by Open Humanities Press

The collective work that produced this book is based on the claim that today's destructive development model is reaching its ultimate limits, and that its toxicity, which is increasingly massive, manifest and multidimensional (medical, environmental, mental, epistemological, economic - accumulating pockets of insolvency, which become veritable oceans), is generated above all by the fact that the current industrial economy is based in every sector on an obsolete physical model - a mechanism that ignores the constraints of locality in biology and the entropic tendency in reticulated computational information. In these gravely perilous times, we must bifurcate: there is no alternative.

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) asks us to suspend our modern preconceptions and treat epistemic processes as something that happens not just when human thought meets the world, but even when objects meet each other. Such confrontations between object and object produce new, stable, and emer- gent objects that fully deserve to be called real. But does OOO go too far in treating objects as self-enclosed units, without full acceptance of the relational side of their being? Laying new emphasis on the way that objects support each other, Gabriel Yoran introduces his challenging notion of "the interfact."

Deterritorializing the Future places concepts of heritage at the centre of the Anthropocene - not as nostalgic longing for how things were, but to think critically and speculatively about alternative futures.

Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup - including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the conditions of art making and creativity today.The book critically examines artworks that use AI, be it in the form of visual style transfer, algorithmic experiment or critical commentary. It also engages with their predecessors, including robotic art and net art. AI Art includes a project from Zylinska's own art practice titled 'View from the Window', which explores human and nonhuman forms of intelligence, perception and action. The book closes with speculation on future art - and on art's future.

In Ways of Following, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi offers rare, intimate access to artists' studios and exhibitions, where art processes thrive in their material-relational becoming. The book argues for an ethical and affirmative mode of engaging with contemporary art that replaces critical distance with sensuous and transformative proximity. From writing-with to dancing and breathing, from conversations to modelling, Kontturi maps ways of following that make the moving materiality of art intensively felt. Drawing on long-term engagements with selected contemporary artists and their art-in-process, Kontturi expands the concept and practice of collaboration from human interactions to working with, and between, materials. With this shift, Ways of Following radically rethinks such core tenets of art theory as intention, artistic influences and the autonomy of art, bringing new urgency to the work of art and its political capacity to propose new ways of being and thinking.

Executing Practices brings together artists, curators, programmers, theorists and heavy internet browsers, all of whose work makes a critical intervention in the broad concept of execution. It draws attention to their political strategies, asking who and what is involved with those practices, and for whom or what are these practices performed, and how? From the contestable politics of emoji modifier mechanisms and micro-temporalities of computational processes, to genomic exploitation and the curating of digital content, the chapters account for gendered, racialized, spatial, violent, erotic, artistic and other embedded forms of execution. Together they highlight a range of ways in which execution emerges and how it participates within networked forms of liveliness.

In Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene, Barbara Herrnstein Smith addresses a set of contemporary issues involving knowledge and science from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled "relativism." Practicing that relativism, she argues, does not mean refusing judgment or asserting absurdities but being conscious of the existence and significance of contingency, complexity, and multiplicity. Rejecting classic and neorealist views of knowledge and human cognition, Smith describes important alternative accounts in cognitive theory, science studies, and contemporary philosophy of mind. The "relativism" commonly associated with these alternative accounts, she maintains, is a chimera-part straw man, part red herring. Objections to the position so named typically involve crucially improper paraphrase of empirical observations of variability and contingency or dismaying inferences improperly drawn from such observations. In an extended examination of recent writings by Bruno Latour, Smith indicates the increasing centrality of theological investments in his work and both the interest of those writings but also their limits for humanities scholars seeking to appropriate them. Discussing computational methods in literary studies, she describes how the idea of "close reading" has operated historically in the Anglo-American literary academy and how it figures now in the discourses of the digital humanities. Efforts to make the aims and methods of the humanities more scientific, she suggests, typically involve ill-informed or otherwise dubious conceptions of science. What distinguishes the humanities and the natural sciences, she argues, are neither subject areas nor methods as such but fundamental epistemic orientations. Declining calls to reaffirm or rehabilitate philosophical realism in the face of denials of climate change, Smith maintains that the most illuminating perspectives for conceptualization and practice in the Anthropocene are precisely those labeled, but commonly mischaracterized as, "relativist."

Adam Wickberg's Pellucid Paper is an interdisciplinary study of the materiality of Early Modern poetry and its relation to political power, memory and subject constitution. The book explores the broad media history in which some of the most canonical Spanish Golden Age poetry was produced. It departs from the intersection of media theory, historiography and materiality of Early Modern culture in a radical rethinking of the nature of the relationship between the imaginary and the real using the concept of cultural techniques. Working with the operative sequences of the material and the symbolic of epistemological configurations of art, literature and power relations, it demonstrates how media and materiality were a crucial part of both the political and the aesthetic already in Early Modernity. It studies these operations in Early Modern Spain in the reign from Philip II to Philip IV. The development of a paper based bureaucracy as a means of sustaining large-scale power relations bridging distances in space and time forms the locus of the book. Pellucid Paper is informed by German Media theory and specifically the more recent developments of Cultural Techniques, which enables a fresh and imaginative take on Early Modern culture. The book offers a radical account of the dynamic relationship between the death oriented aesthetics of vanitas, techniques and media of storage and a form of mediated presence that permeates the inseparable spheres of the political and the aesthetic.

What might an interactive artwork look like that enabled greater expressive potential for all of the components of the event? How can we radically shift our idea of interactivity towards an ecological conception of the term, emphasising the generation of complex relation over the stability of objects and subjects? Gathering Ecologies explores this ethical and political shift in thinking, examining the creative potential of differential relations through key concepts from the philosophies of A.N. Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon and Michel Serres. Utilising detailed examinations of work by artists such as Lygia Clark, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Nathaniel Stern and Joyce Hinterding, the book discusses the creative potential of movement, perception and sensation, interfacing, sound and generative algorithmic design to tune an event towards the conditions of its own ecological emergence.

Opening a major new front in discussions of the Anthropocene, The Neganthropocene is a collection of recent lectures by the leading French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler. In this volume, Stiegler engages substantially with Alfred North Whitehead, Jacques Derrida, Gilbert Simondon, Peter Sloterdijk, Karl Marx, Benjamin Bratton, and others in his renewed thought of the concepts of entropy and negentropy. Stiegler's life-long encounter with the work of Martin Heidegger reappears here in pursuit of the question not of what is called "thinking" (penser) but, in a twist on old French, of what is called "caring" (panser) as the possibility of a new therapeutic theory and practice capable of responding to the massive psychological, social and ecological toxicity associated with what, for Stiegler, is the disruptive age of the Entropocene.

Through the interpretative lens of today's leading thinkers, The Philosophical Salon illuminates the persistent intellectual queries and the most disquieting concerns of our actuality. Across its three main divisions - Speculations, Reflections, and Interventions - the volume constructs a complex mirror, in which our age might be able to recognize itself with all its imperfections, shadowy spots, even threatening abysses and latent promises. On the cutting edge of philosophy, political and literary theory, and aesthetics, this book courageously tackles a wide array of topics, including climate change, the role of technology, reproductive rights, the problem of refugees, the task of the university, political extremism, embodiment, utopia, food ethics, and sexual identity. It is an enduring record of an ongoing conversation, as well as a building block for any attempt to make sense of our world's multifaceted realities.Contributors: Robert Albritton, Linda Martín Alcoff, Claudia Baracchi, Geoffrey Bennington, Jay M. Bernstein, Costica Bradatan, Jill Casid, David Castillo, Antonio Cerella, Anna Charlton, Claire Colebrook, Sarah Conly, Nikita Dhawan, William Egginton, Roberto Esposito, Mihail Evans, Gary Francione, Luis Garagalza, Michael Gillespie, Michael Hauskeller, Ágnes Heller, Daniel Innerarity, Jacob Kiernan, Julia Kristeva, Daniel Kunitz, Susanna Lindberg, Jeff Love, Michael Marder, Todd May, Michael Meng, John Milbank, Warren Montag, T. M. Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, Kelly Oliver, Adrian Pabst, Martha Patterson, Richard Polt, Gabriel Rockhill, Hasana Sharp, Doris Sommer, Gayatri Spivak, Kara Thompson, Patrícia Vieira, Slavoj ¿i¿ek.