Books published by Urbanomic Media Ltd

An existential odyssey weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm.The mediascapes of late capitalism reconfigure erotic responses and trigger primal aggression; under constant surveillance, we occupy simulations of ourselves, private estates on a hyperconnected globe; fictions reprogram reality, memories are rewritten by the future...Fleeing the excesses of 1990s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—J.G. Ballard, prophet of the post-postmodern, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality.Plagued by obsessive fears, defeated by the tedium of academia, yet still certain that everything connects to Ballard, his academic thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss. Abandoning literary interpretation and renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has run throughout his entire life, and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism, a new discipline and a new ideal for living. Only the darkest impulses, the most morbid obsessions, and the most apocalyptic paranoia can uncover the technological mutations of inner space.An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm—a world become unmistakably Ballardian.

A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics.Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought.Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal.This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization?In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

How humanity came to contemplate its possible extinction.From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity''s future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, in the twenty-first century, existential risk has become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry. But, as Thomas Moynihan shows in X-Risk, this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history.Tracing this untold story, Moynihan revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery. He shows how, far from being a secular reprise of religious prophecies of apocalypse, existential risk is a thoroughly modern idea, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era. In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, Moynihan reveals how today''s attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.

A disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite.At least for the time being, we humans are still finite and mortal—but death isn''t what it used to be. As the body is technologically extended in space and time, we are split between our finitude and our doubled presence in a limitless web of signs, an “immortal” world of information.After Death offers a penetrating philosophical diagnosis of our contemporary condition, describing not only an anesthesia, but an amnesia in which the compulsions of a hyper-present colonize both past and future, prevailing over any sense of duration, becoming, or appreciation of the “thickness of the real.”Are we living in a kind of counterfeit eternity in which we are effectively already dead? Against the anxiety of the constant present, how can we hope to return to the experience of being in time and facing death?After Death is a disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite.

A riotous new take on a classic fictional dystopia, with an all-you-can-eat quinoa buffet of wrongthink. With 2+2=5, George Orwell''s flawed masterpiece finally receives a much-needed rectification, as Jake Chapman takes us on a bad trip into an atrocious alt-Eurasia--a nightmare utopia of 24/7 self-expression, mandatory wellbeing, yogic breathing, and promiscuous empathy. Yippie wonks in open-toed sandals have ejected the evil capitalist overlords, compassion and charity reign supreme, buckwheat salad and artisan cashew cheese are in plentiful supply, and all strive to live their best life, all the time.Employed by the Ministry to rectify misfortunes issuing from a curious glitch in the system, Winston Smith finds that his creative urges are unexpectedly awoken, and he is driven to express his deepest place, voice, and hurt through the medium of poetry. But what connects Winston''s furtive scribblings in My Big Book of Me to the unpleasantnesses emanating from the deep glitch? Is Julia really the perfect kooky carefree soulmate she seems to be? Can O''Brien be trusted? And when does the new season of Big Brother start?An all-you-can-eat quinoa buffet of wrongthink, Chapman''s twisted vision is a bracing reminder that dystopia is just wishful thinking, and that the worst can always get worster.

A detailed examination of the motivations and precise coordinates of Duchamp's break from painting into the field of the linguistic sign.Matisse and Duchamp seem to incarnate ideal poles of the tension internal to modern art as it plunged into crisis the idea of the image—a polemical operation that opened the way to contemporary art's auto-problematization of experimental constructivism. Where Matisse subverted the aesthetic regime by bringing painting out of itself to invest its environment in a Bergsonian energetics of color, Duchamp cuts it off from the plastic arts through a reversal of Bergson's in-the-making. The readymade captures a literalized signifier of this perspective. Duchamp Looked At is an extraordinarily rich philosophical study that offers a startling new account of the dis/continuity between the problems of contemporary art and the new articulations Duchamp fabricated between image and idea, science and art, painting and language. Alliez and Bonne's meticulous archaeological survey rediscovers the real problems and motivations of "Duchamp-thought” through a close analysis of his entire oeuvre: from the Nudes in which the problem of representing movement is gradually displaced into the realm of the virtual, the image disqualified in favor of the diagram, to the pataphysical sciences of chance and the particular, the readymades, the Large Glass and Étant donnés—and beyond, as the artist carbonizes the gallery with 1200 Sacks of Coal and ties it up with Miles of String, in installations that take Duchamp beyond Duchamp.

An artist examines the plethora of Europe Squares, Europa Places, Places de l''Europe, and Europaplatzes and what they tell us about the ideality of “Europe.”If the built environment is a record of our modes of organization and the compromises we make in order to live together, then what are we to make of the plethora of Europe Squares, Europa Places, Places de l''Europe, and Europaplatzes? Public spaces that connect numerous disparate towns and cities through a “supersite” called Europe, they may appear as avatars of an idea in crisis, as “eurocentric values” and the concept of Europe as a unified political space are attacked and eroded from all sides.Atlas Europe Square documents a body of work by Swiss artist Yves Mettler who, since 2003, has engaged in an ongoing mapping and documentation of these sites, along with a series of projects triangulating between particular squares, interrogating their differing architectural, environmental, and public functions, and what they tell us about the ideality of “Europe” and the (im)possibility of its concrete instantiation.Here this work is extended into reflections on the relationship between art and public space, site-specificity, and the artist''s own implication in the imaginary of Europe as he becomes enmeshed in a network of projects, funds, and public bodies that seek to promote "European culture" through art.Alongside extensive photographic documentation, Atlas Europe Square contains texts by the artist alongside essays by Reza Negarestani, Teresa Pullano, Laurent Thévenot, and Stephen Zepke, discussing Mettler''s work.

A multidisciplinary collection of essays reflecting on Cold War cultural tropes in film, fiction, and contemporary art, and the models of knowledge that they imply.If the term "Cold World” describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and the technological sublime, in many ways the dread experienced during the Cold War, when clear oppositions were laid out between nation states, is echoed in the hall of mirrors of Cold World globalization, where our collective consciousness is overtaken by a flood of difference, uncertainty, and the dread of the incomputability of this alien yet constructed world.But what is the crime scene of the Cold World? How is it to be decrypted? Where are its discontinuities, what is the nature of its violence? This is to say, what is our place in this alien world and how do we even compute the "we” that we describe ourselves to be?Given the existential uncertainty unleashed for those who lived through the Cold War, but whose repercussions are in many ways amplified, relayed, and replayed in a new form for those who must now survive what has been called the "Cold World”—that of technological subjectivation, political malaise, cultural dysphoria, and ecological crisis—this terrain comprises an experiential and experimental horizon that prompts many to pose, and to stage in myriad forms, a fundamental question: "What will we of make of ourselves?”Cold War/Cold World documents a research project in progress that attempts to evaluate and respond to this fundamental shock to the system, examining attempts to render knowable, representable, or figurable the looming threats of both Cold War and Cold World—the common denominator being a distressed attempt to inquire into the dynamics of a real that seems in excess over understanding and the means of politics traditionally conceived; and a concomitant temptation to abandon any intelligent collective engagement in favour of a pragmatics that limits itself to wrestling with local contingencies, or an aesthetics mesmerised by a global sublime.

A panoramic survey of the vast spectrum of modern and contemporary mathematics and the new philosophical possibilities they suggest.A panoramic survey of the vast spectrum of modern and contemporary mathematics and the new philosophical possibilities they suggest, this book gives the inquisitive non-specialist an insight into the conceptual transformations and intellectual orientations of modern and contemporary mathematics.The predominant analytic approach, with its focus on the formal, the elementary and the foundational, has effectively divorced philosophy from the real practice of mathematics and the profound conceptual shifts in the discipline over the last century. The first part discusses the specificity of modern (1830-1950) and contemporary (1950 to the present) mathematics, and reviews the failure of mainstream philosophy of mathematics to address this specificity. Building on the work of the few exceptional thinkers to have engaged with the "real mathematics” of their era (including Lautman, Deleuze, Badiou, de Lorenzo and Châtelet), Zalamea challenges philosophy's self-imposed ignorance of the "making of mathematics.”In the second part, thirteen detailed case studies examine the greatest creators in the field, mapping the central advances accomplished in mathematics over the last half-century, exploring in vivid detail the characteristic creative gestures of modern master Grothendieck and contemporary creators including Lawvere, Shelah, Connes, and Freyd.Drawing on these concrete examples, and oriented by a unique philosophical constellation (Peirce, Lautman, Merleau-Ponty), in the third part Zalamea sets out the program for a sophisticated new epistemology, one that will avail itself of the powerful conceptual instruments forged by the mathematical mind, but which have until now remained largely neglected by philosophers.

A remarkably clear explication of the tenets of Object-Oriented Philosophy and an acute critique of the movement's ramifications for philosophy today.

An examination of the new technological mediations between the human sensorium and the planetary media network and of the aesthetic as an enabler of new modes of knowledge.