Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism, No. 3 (2012)

Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that provides a forum for the exploration of speculative realism and post-continental philosophy.

“This is a leviathan whale of an issue [510 pages!] comprising articles (by Benjamin Norris, Beatrice Marovich, Levi Bryant, Daniel Whistler, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Christopher Norris, and Michael Haworth), position papers (by Christian Thorne and Peter Wolfendale), translations (Graham Harman’s “On Vicarious Causation” into German, for example), reviews (of Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects, Graham Harman’s Circus Philosophicus, Christopher Watkin’s Difficult Atheism, Andy Merrifield’s Magical Marxism, and Joseph Nechvatal’s nOise anusmOs installation), and an interview with Stathis Psillos. Those interested in the ongoing struggles to define exactly what Speculative Realism (SR) is, will want to read the translation of Louis Morelle’s comprehensive “Speculative Realism: After Infinitude and Beyond?” also included in this issue.” (publisher)

Editors: Michael Austin, Paul J. Ennis, Fabio Gironi, Thomas Gokey, Robert Jackson
Publisher punctum books, September 2012
Creative Commons license
ISBN 978-0988234017
510 pages

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Joseph Nechvatal: Immersion Into Noise (2011)

The noise factor is the ratio of signal to noise of an input signal to that of the output signal. Noise can block or interfere with the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. But in Information Theory, noise is still considered to be information.

By refining the definition of noise as that which addresses us outside of our preferred comfort zone, Joseph Nechvatal’s Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying the audio understanding of noise to the visual, architectural and cognitive domains. Nechvatal expands and extends our understanding of the function of cultural noise by taking the reader through the immersive and phenomenal aspects of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning with his experience in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux.

Immersion Into Noise is intended as a conceptual handbook useful for the development of a personal-political-visionary art of noise. On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought? That is the question Joseph Nechvatal explores in Immersion Into Noise.

Publisher: Open Humanities Press; in conjunction with the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office, 2011
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
ISBN 9781607852414

interview with the author (Taney Roniger, Anti-Utopias)
review (Yuting Zou, The Brooklyn Rail)

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nØ1se exhibition catalogue (2000)

Catalogue for the multi-site multimedia exhibition in Cambridge and London (January-May 2000), devised by artist, Adam Lowe, and, historian of science, Simon Schaffer, and organised around three key themes in “digitality”:

Universal Language
Pattern Recognition
Data Synæsthetics

nØ1se is not limited to electronic media, but traces the digital imagination from such myths as Noah’s Ark, through the early modern experiments of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and Morse’s Telegraph, up to today’s charge coupled devices (CCDs), robotics and beyond.. It highlights digitality in history, technology, art and science, drawing upon a wide range of objects and images from artists and scientists around the globe — everything from 3000BC artefacts to the latest state-of-the-art pictures of the surface of atoms.

Catalogue contributors: Tabatha Andrews, William Armstrong, Art and Language, Charles Babbage, Stephen Baker, Joe Banks, Richard Barbrook, William Bateson, Evgen Bavcar, Robin Boast, Patrick Blackett, Jerry Brotton, Soraya de Chadarevian, Adrian Cussins, Su Dalgleish, John Dee, Umberto Eco, Richard Feynman, Manuel Franquelo, Peter Galison, Joy Garnett, Merrill Garnett, Joseph Grigely, Roger Guillemin, Sebastian Guillié, Mercurius Van Helmont, Lynn Hershman, Jeff Hughes, Margaret Watts Hughes, Lisa Jardine, Bill Jones, Athanasius Kircher, Bruno Latour, Malcom Longair, Mike Lynch, Paul D Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Iwan Morus, Gracie Ngale Morton, Sven Nebel, Joseph Nechvatal, Ben Neill, Pictic Balls, Roy Porter, Marc Quinn, Jonathan Ree, Michael Rees, Giles Revell, Kathleen Rogers, Romandson, Brian Rotman, Stan Vanderbeek, Tom Van Sant, Ludwig Von Siegen, Julian Simmons, Nicola Schwartz, Lillian Schwartz, Robert Shannon, Bessie Nakamarra Sims, Paddy Japaljarri Sims, Brian Cantwell Smith, Luc Steels, Bruce Sterling, Jozue Tanaka, John Tchalenko, Dave Tovee, John Tresch, Burhan Tufail, John Tresch, Catherine Wagner, Piers Wardle, Peter Weibel, CTR Wilson, John Wilkins, John Woodward, Charles Wynn-Williams.

Edited by Alfred Birnbaum
Conceived of and designed by Adam Lowe
Published by Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge UK, 2000
ISBN: 0907074782, 978-0907074786
118 pages

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Ken Friedman (ed.): The Fluxus Reader (1998)

Fluxus began in the 1950s as a loose, international community of artists, architects, composers and designers. By the 1960s, Fluxus has become a laboratory of ideas and an arena for artistic exprmentation in Europe, Asia and the United States. Described as ‘the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s’, Fluxus challenged conventional thinking on art and culture for over four decades. It had a central role in the birth of such key contemporary art forms as concept art, installation, performance art, intermedia and video. Despite this influence, the scope and scale of this unique phenomenon have made it difficult to explain Fluxus in normative historical and critical terms. The Fluxus Reader offers the first comprehensive overview on this challenging and controversial group. The Fluxus Reader is written by leading scholars and experts from Europe and the United States.

Publisher Academy Editions (division of John Wiley & Sons), Great Britain, 1998
ISBN 0471978582, 9780471978589
309 pages
The version of the text provided for download here contains updates on the original 1998 edition. The copyright owner grants full permission for re-use of this work under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 3.0 Unported licence

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Joseph Nechvatal: Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances. A Study of the Affinity Between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms (1999)

This thesis researches into the ideals behind Virtual Reality technology (and its central property of total-immersion) by looking at VR through the prism of a philosophy of visual art. Its conclusive understanding is achieved through a broad formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness (indicative of an emerging immersive culture) by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy.

Keywords: architecture| Conceptual Art | consciousness | information-technology | myth | sex | space | virtual reality

Written in candidacy for a Ph.D. at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), University of Wales College, Newport, Wales, U. K.

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Later published as a book (2009)

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