Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium

Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium

11 March 2011

The New School, New York, USA | Website

Leper Creativity, The New School

Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, and cinematographers, Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials is a key work in an emerging continental movement in philosophy, “speculative realism.” Cyclonopedia has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking a vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and the art world. Negarestani’s book details a unique philosophy coming from and written on the Middle East. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, it is a middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and corpses of ancient gods.

Leper Creativity: The First International Cyclonopedia Symposium will bring a lively international debate to The New School in a daylong event exploring the inter-relations between Lovecraftian fear/horror/terror, Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad A Thousand Plateaus, and the Mille-feuilles/leafs/lepe(r)s* of contemporary media studies as articulated in Negarestani’s manuscript.

Scheduled speakers include Alisa Andrasek (Biothing; Architectural Association), Juan Azulay (Matter Management; Southern California Institute of Architecture), Zach Blas (Duke),Benjamin Bratton (D:GP; University of California, San Diego), Melanie Doherty (Wesleyan College), Alexander Galloway (New York University), Kate Marshall (Notre Dame University),McKenzie Wark (The New School), Ben Woodard (European Graduate School); and keynote speaker Robin Mackay (Urbanomic).

The symposium is organized by Ed Keller (Parsons The New School for Design), Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College CUNY), and Eugene Thacker (The New School) and is cosponsored by the Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School for General Studies and by The School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design.