Nathan Brown: The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (2017)

“Poetry, or poiēsis, has long been understood as a practice of making. But how are experiments in the making of poetic forms related to formal making in science and engineering? The Limits of Fabrication takes up this question in the context of recent developments in nanoscale materials science, investigating concepts and ideologies of form at stake in new approaches to material construction. Tracing the direct pertinence of fields crucial to the new materials science (nanotechnology, biotechnology, crystallography, and geodesic design) in the work of Shanxing Wang, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, and Ronald Johnson back to the midcentury development of Charles Olson’s ‘objectist’ poetics, Nathan Brown carves out a tradition of constructivist, nonorganic poetics that has developed in conversation with science and engineering.

While proposing a new approach to the relation of technē (craft, skill) and poiēsis (making, forming), this book also intervenes in philosophical debates concerning the concept of the object, the distinction between organic and inorganic matter, theories of self-organization, and the relation between ‘design’ and ‘nature’. Engaging with Heidegger, Agamben, Whitehead, Stiegler, and Nancy, Brown shows that materials science and materialist poetics offer crucial resources for thinking through the direction of contemporary materialist philosophy.”

Publisher Fordham University Press, New York, 2017
ISBN 9780823272990, 0823272990
xi+296 pages
via Memory of the World

Review: Tom Eyers (boundary2, 2017).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (26 MB)

A Bed, a Chair and a Table: Stories from the Poortgebouw (2017)

“A Bed, a Chair and a Table is a publication about the Poortgebouw, a former squat and vibrant living community located in the South of Rotterdam. In this book, oral histories from inside and outside the Poortgebouw are interlaced with material from various institutional and personal archives. By bringing together these tales of resilience, political struggle, frustration and friendship with historical documents, this book brings forward new perspectives about the Poortgebouw’s unique history and its importance in the contemporary city. The starting point of the book was the Autonomous Archive, a local archiving machine built from parts of different computers by the inhabitants of the Poortgebouw and a group of students from XPUB.

A Bed, a Chair and a Table is the fourth ‘Special Issue’ conceptualised, developed and produced by the students from the Experimental Publishing course (XPUB) of the Piet Zwart Institute Media Design Master. It provides a trigger for the reader to further explore the Poortgebouw’s past and to see this building, meet its community, and discuss a potential future amidst all of its complexities. It is a testament to the archive as not the end, but the beginning of a debate.”

Publisher XPUB, Rotterdam, and Meta/Books, Amsterdam, December 2017
ISBN 9789082118247
Special Issue series, 4
Peer Production License
193 pages

Archive (wiki)
Publisher

PDF, PDF (122 MB)

The Laboratory Planet, 5: Alien Capitalism: Xenopolitics of the Anthropocene (2016) [EN, FR, ES]

“Since World War, the planet is gradually transformed into a scale 1 laboratory. The old model of “world factory” has given way to the model of the “world laboratory”. Objects of this laboratory, can we also be the subjects? Can we reclaim this huge machine that became autonomous and is now developing according to its own dynamic? Can we redirect the fate and direction of this laboratory?”

Texts by Bureau d’études, Keith A. Spencer, Spela Petric, Ewen Chardronnet, Aliens in Green, Donna Haraway, Helen Hester, Émilie Notéris, Konrad Becker, Pablo de Soto, Eugene Thacker, Alejandra Pérez Núñez, Matteo Pasquinelli, Deborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

Edited by Ewen Chardronnet and Bureau d’études
Published on 4 February 2016
24 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (French)
PDF, PDF (English)
PDF, previous issues.