Event overview
The Matter of Contradiction’s series, War against the sun, with David Roberts Art Foundation, Mute magazine, and CCS Goldsmiths. Keynotes: Ray Brassier, Anselm Franke, Reza Negarestani and Robin Mackay.
In 1991 the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines injected sulfate particles into the stratosphere, shading the earth and cooling the air by 0.5°c. It has been suggested that one of the best strategies against global warming would be to mimic the effect of such an eruption. Planes and artillery equipped with particle cannons would send aerosols into the stratosphere to deflect solar rays, thus protecting us from the adverse rise in temperature. Geoengineering and other such acts of solar management constitute a desperate attempt to use technological and scientific advancements for the ongoing exploitation of natural resources by an expanding capitalist economy. Such an operation is an attempt to shield the human from the reality of a radically indifferent world.
If the project of the Enlightenment was to ensure the mastery of man via an emancipation from nature then the capacity to control and exploit natural resources has only led to an amplification of the damaging effects of contingent material forces. The more we attempt to manage and extract energy from the material world, the larger the repercussions in the form of entropic degradation. In its attempt to mitigate the consequences of previous actions, the geo-engineered solar shield indicates a critical phase in the intrinsic feedback effect that has accelerated since the Enlightenment. This war against the sun is a battle of Reason against its own effects.
In the last iteration of our ongoing symposia project, The Matter of Contradiction: Ungrounding the Object, held in Limousin in September 2012, we argued that art has been historically positioned as a similar shield against the trauma of scientific reason and a radically decentred human. Placed as the dialectical other of reason, art thus became a space for reflexivity where the inherent limitations of human knowledge had to be revealed and experienced as such.
If, in the history of thought, there have been a series of traumatic scientific revolutions as indexed by Copernicus and Darwin, then art has been responsible, in part, for the registering but subsequent rehabilitation of this trauma through its positing of the human as central and dominant in the relation between the artwork and the viewer. It is our aim with this event, The Matter of Contradiction: War against the sun, to think through art’s immunological status, and to reformulate its relation to the project of reason.
This renewed engagement in the project of reason would be neither an arrogant claiming of the rights to plunder material resources in the name of a subject-centred logic, nor a reactionary call for a reversal to authenticity, but an absolute conception of the real within which anthropic concern is radically de-centred and subsequently reoriented. While previous conceptions of rationality were formulated in opposition to aesthetics, politics or ethics, the present situation demands an epistemologically flattened mode of reasoning where art’s problematic relation to the real has to be rethought.
The Matter of Contradiction is a series of seminars initiated by Sam Basu, Fabien Giraud, Ida Soulard and Tom Trevatt. This third event, The Matter of Contradiction: War against the sun, is organised in collaboration with Inigo Wilkins.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Mar 2013 |
6:00pm - 9:00pm Conference at David Roberts, all welcome, exact time tbc, check with organizer. |
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| 2 Mar 2013 |
9:00am - 6:00pm Conference at David Roberts, all welcome, exact time tbc, check with organizer. |
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| 3 Mar 2013 |
9:00am - 6:00pm Sunday workshop at Mute magazine office at Limehouse Town Hall. Limited places, please email organizer. Followed by after party. |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
