5 Symposium Speculations on Anonymous Materials - Robin Mackay

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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• 00:00:09

  So our next speaker is Robin McKay. I'll start with the introduction while they set up the computer. Robin's going to show quite some image material, so his talk is going to be a bit longer, like 40 minutes. We'll see. Okay, we'll see. Robin McKay is a philosopher, lecturer, currently at Goldsmiths College in London…

• 00:05:57

  So continuing with the Lewis Carroll theme, it's like something of a kind of philosophers and artists tea party where we have these words on the table and we're not really sure what we're doing with them. And who is it who's going to decide what these words mean? Under what context is this operation happening? And…

• 00:11:12

  Materials are coded structures which are already the product of an immaterial manipulation and production before they even enter the domain of manufacturing. The total abstract combinatorial space of possible energetic quantum configurations is made available like a huge memory to be scanned and selected according…

• 00:16:57

  The body, he says, as a confused speaker, which says soft, warm, blue, heavy. Immaterial science instead grasps these qualities as the effects of relative disparities between memory systems, contractions. And Lyotard refers back to Leibniz and Bergson for this conception. So the human mind, says Lyotard, becomes only…

• 00:21:37

  The new abattoirs and auction market proved instantly obsolete before they were completed. Their conception as a prestigious trophy had ignored the problems of citing a massive centralized facility in an already congested city when decentralization was proving elsewhere more economically and logistically viable. So…

• 00:28:29

  spaces whose perpetual motion formed the background to the festive neo-conservativism denounced by Parisian philosopher Gilles Châtelet who writing in the 90s entertains momentarily a delirious dystopian fantasy automobile Robinsons on wheels inspired by the President's vision of adapting Paris to the car repurpose…

• 00:42:02

  Form an Object which is I guess a kind of pseudo-object oriented or quasi-speculative realist text you find this expressed very clearly, he says our epoch is that of an epidemic of things things possess the structure of a panic this work is born of a feeling that tries to justify all this this excess of things…

• 00:57:06

  demanding that the work does tell us something but we're here on the pretext that it does so I'm kind of calling the bluff and asking the question what are these works telling us about materials and how we what do we understand by when we're saying materials here This was the afternoon session of our symposium which I…