This book focuses on Amanda Beech's Final Machine [2013], a video work in three parts which interrogates the force of images in the context of contingency. Collapsing detective-style prose, laconic or
Perspectives from philosophy, aesthetics, and art on how to envisage the construction site of possible worlds. Given the highly coercive and heavily surveilled dynamics of the present moment, when t
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
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.This series of interventions
An assembly of perspectives on risk, contingency, and chance—at the gaming table, in the markets, and in life.A transdisciplinary survey of practices that produce, analyse, and exploit risk and uncert
On how art can be understood as a space within which the project of reason is pursued.Modern and contemporary art have often defined themselves against the conceptual and linguistic mediations of reason, claiming that their practices offer a different and more direct access to the real or the material. Employing a unique configuration of philosophy, art theory, and a consideration of specific artworks together with analysis of popular culture, current political events, and Hollywood cinema, artist, and theorist Amanda Beech challenges this deep-seated orthodoxy, asking how art can instead be understood as a space within which the project of reason is pursued. Developing out of the idealism of theological-sacral art, sustained in Romanticism and entrenched by poststructural antirealist critiques, the notion that art is opposed to reason defined the political and social hopes of the avant-garde, was manifested in the crisis of a self-conscious conceptualism, and remains implicit in the
