If you could just briefly describe how Urbanomic started, why you started Collapse? Part of it is personal. I think like any small publishing project, it's a labour of love and it's something that began as a personal thing and just got out of control. But there There were a number of problems that it was designed to address, one of which is just the problem of where philosophy can exist outside the academic environment because of certain constraints of the academic environment, the way in which the discipline of philosophy is conducted and constrained, and just the conviction that philosophy happens everywhere
and not just in philosophy departments. So it's a question of how could you construct some kind of vehicle to make that happen and to conduct experiments, and also to publish work by people who I knew were writing and who couldn't get published in a scholarly journal because their work was very much exploratory, experimental on the margins of different disciplines. Right, so you've described it as an experimental entity rigorously challenging philosophical thought by confronting it with conceptual production from elsewhere. In the introduction to the first issue of Collapse, you said that thought no longer takes place in the head, that we are worked over from inside and out by anonymous materials.
This idea of working with anonymous materials, you've done, you made a video for the Cyclonopedia Symposium, and then you're doing the Speculative Solution CD, and then you've also done things like field trips, and art exhibitions. I mean, all these things have emerged from collapse, probably because the model of collapse has this kind of connectivity. I mean, sometimes, to my surprise, and it's obviously very gratifying that some of these connections I've made have led to other projects and have gone outside collapse. And we've done all kinds of live events and we're now doing commissions.
And obviously we're here in New York working with Miguel at the gallery. So they're all very exciting. I think what it comes down to is a refusal to think philosophy as simply content. That is to say... It doesn't always have to take the form of a book. Right. Yeah, it doesn't have to take the form of a book, but also if it does take the form of a book, then I'm actually interested in what kind of book it is, how it looks, how it feels, how it's distributed, how the aesthetics of it work and where they take it. So I'm interested in the whole thing really and I always have been from the start. And so what Collapse is about is really like a process of making and it's a process of physical making
but it's also a process of bringing these elements and really working them to try and find out how these things can fit together and sometimes it doesn't feel right and in In fact, the volume never comes out until it does feel right and it feels like this thing's gelled and now it becomes a physical entity. And I'm interested in all those processes. And I think often people who are involved in abstract thought feel that they have to dismiss all those other parts of what it means to be a thinker, what it means to write. And I think all those things are interesting as well. And I guess that also connects then to speculative realism and to taking thought outside the brain and the idea that objects themselves have agency.
And certainly, from a personal point of view, if you have a project like this and it takes on a life of its own, that's a really fascinating experience to have, to see something which then goes a bit out of your control and has its own agency in the world and makes things happen that you didn't expect. So it's almost like the process of doing it and publishing and everything that's happened reflects back on the kind of philosophical thought that is inside. Exactly. So someone like Nick Land and Risen, their work was very... was it an important model for how urbanomics should function? Yeah, well, like I say, part of the reason for inventing Collapse, if you like, was that
I was aware of this kind of writing and of certain strains of thought that just weren't being seen because there was nowhere for them to be. And I studied with Nick and he was a very kind of inspirational figure and his work just crossed so many boundaries and had such a kind of invigorating effect for me personally that in a sense everything after that became disappointment. And so I was thinking about how can we find our way back to this model of thought that's really kind of connecting to the outside, that's kind of aggressively trying to make things happen, make things move. And yeah, certainly everything that I'm doing with Urbanomic is driven by that conviction
and if that doesn't happen then Urbanomic doesn't exist. Things like working with Florian Hecker have come about and they just happen through these strange convergences. Florian was a reader of Collapse quite early on and he read this piece in the second volume an interview with Roberto Trotter, a theoretical physicist about dark matter. And Florian was in contact with me and said, I've made this piece called Dark Energy, which he'd composed kind of after reading this interview, in which I went and saw the show in London. And then we began to collaborate more, and then we began to talk about Meosu's work
and his kind of interest when he started reading Art of Finitude and was really struck by this idea of hyper-chaos and it might have some kind of connection with what he was doing. And so we started on this commission, which is just kind of coming to fruition now with the CD release. In a positive sense, you've called a lot of the contributors to Collapse amateurs. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. In the sense that they're driven by the love of what they do. I've always been really against the idea of a kind of cabinet of curiosities model, in which you just have a kind of eclectic mixture of things that don't really connect. Always with Collapse, I've tried to convince myself and therefore to convince the audience that there's something real that holds all these things together.
They make it from all different disciplines and from all different backgrounds and be talking about things in completely different ways, but there's something real that holds them together. Certainly, I'm interested in the way in which artists dramatise concepts in the dramatizing in the Deleuzean sense, and this kind of bringing concepts into an experience in time and space. And I'm interested in how that affects the way we think. You just, describing the photographs of Liz... Deschenes. Yes, you describe her photographs as dramatizing this search for... Yeah, and dramatizing is, as you said, as opposed to illustrating or representing or
simply kind of didactically trying to explain something. Dramatization means that in materializing something, you bring something new to it and you actually change our perception of the philosophical problem or the concept. this kind of sensitivity to the materials you're working with. And texts and materials just like the materials that an artist uses. They have textures and they work together in certain ways and there are certain singular points where they converge and they meet. And the ordering of texts, the way they're presented, everything makes a difference. So there's certainly that openness to the contingent qualities of the materials that
one's working with. The first is a collection of Nick Land's writings. This has been in the pipeline for years. As I said, I worked with Nick back in the 90s, and he's really been a great figure of inspiration for me and for many people I know who now have gone on to work in all sorts of different areas like musicians, filmmakers, artists. I think when Nick was around it was one of the last moments when someone like that could exist within academia and eventually he couldn't exist within academia. You see this in the video. Yeah. So yeah, it's just like collecting all these works that have been published in
various places and conference papers which kind of had got this aura of mystery about them and which had never really been collated and put together before. There is books, Nick's book on Bataille obviously exists, but I think this work is, for me this work is more interesting and more representative of what Nick was doing and you can see his whole kind of intellectual trajectory. And what's interesting about it from the point of view of what we've done in Collapse is the whole kind of speculative realist thing. Certainly for Ray Brassier and for Ian Hamilton Grant and equally for Reza, Nick is just this massive influence and I think when people read it, it kind of fills in some gaps. It really is a kind of source book for a certain
strain of that thinking. But I think Nick's work had that kind of breadth, he had that And also just an interest in inventing new forms of writing, which certainly you get in Reza's work. So for me personally it's really exciting for that book to be out there and to think how are people in the 21st century going to read this? It was so exciting for the people who were involved at the time. It was just like an amazing time. And I don't think it's a nostalgic thing, because I think Nick was addressing these problems of correlation, speculation, before they had names.
And now there's a kind of framework in which these problems have been posed. We can read his work again and really appreciate the power of his thinking. And the other book is Francois Laravel's The Concept of Non-Photography. L'Arouel again is the kind of figure in a sense behind speculative realist thinking, who certainly invented a very challenging new way of thinking, whether you want to call it philosophy or whether you agree with him that it's not philosophy is another matter. But he's certainly invented a new way of thinking about the problems of philosophy, which certainly Ray's work draws on to a certain extent.
The interesting thing about the concept of non-photography is it will be ostensibly received as a book about photography, but in fact, through the course of the book, it's a very short book really, but it manages to cover all of the major concepts of non-philosophy in a way that's perhaps not as dry and difficult to get your head around as some of Larawell's other work. So hopefully it acts as a kind of introduction, but it also has this interesting aspect of discussing a new way of thinking photography. What Larawell is trying to do is precisely not to create a new philosophy of photography, but to allow the photograph to speak itself without being interpreted philosophically.
That's what he's interested in, is what is the mode of seeing that is photography without interpreting it and subjecting it to what he calls philosophical decision. And then there's the second installment in Reza's trilogy. Yeah, there'll be later this year, The Mortiloquist, which promises to be in another amazing, bizarre... see some of the same same characters and it's a it's a in the form of a play right involving philosophers who are sewn into the skins of dead animals and that's all I'm allowed to say at the moment okay maybe the stage production
comes late later really and then the oh that and the next issue of collapses Yeah, it's a title of culinary materialism, yeah. And it's going to be an exploration of cookery in the broadest sense from the chemistry of solar system to the preparation of food and the history of nitrogen. You can expect to... Of course, what we don't want to do is for it to be a kind of food fetishist thing. So yeah, cookery but in a very broad sense. Anything you're reading right now that you're especially excited about?
Obviously you're very busy with... I've been reading La Roelle really and trying to kind of inhabit the space of non-philosophy and to understand it. I'm not sure whether I've been entirely successful, but it'll be interesting to have these discussions this week with Larawell himself here to answer our questions. So that's really what I've been concentrating on. And re-reading Nick's work, which is just a great pleasure because it's just such an energised, exciting stuff to read, so I can just enjoy editing that and reading it over and over again. Great. Okay. Thanks.