Book Friendzy in Conversation with Robin Mackay of Urbanomic Collapse

Provenance

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.

Listen

Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:05

  If you could just kind of briefly describe how Urbanomic started, why you started Collapse? Part of it's 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 were a number of problems that it was kind…

• 00:01:58

  and art exhibitions. Yeah, I mean all these things have emerged from Collapse probably because the model of Collapse has this kind of connectivity and 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…

• 00:03:31

  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…

• 00:05:36

  And yeah certainly everything that I'm doing with urbanomics is driven by that conviction and you know if that doesn't happen then urbanomics doesn't exist. So the things like working with Florian Hecker have come about and they're kind of just happened through these strange convergences. I mean Florian was a reader…

• 00:07:15

  They make them 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. Yeah certainly I'm interested in the way in which artists dramatise concepts and dramatising in the Deleuzian sense and this…

• 00:08:54

  Well yeah the first is a collection of Nick Land's writings. This has been in the pipeline for years and as I said I worked with Nick back in the 90s and he has really been a great kind of 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…

• 00:11:26

  And the other book is Francois Laruelle's The Concept of Non-Photography and Laruelle 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…

• 00:14:27

  Obviously you're very busy with I've been reading reading Larawell really and trying to trying to kind of inhabit this 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 and with Larawell himself here…