CCRU - Lecture 2

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.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). 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.

• 00:00:00

  Okay, so the key overarching concept that cohered the CCRU's kind of diverse and peculiar output is what they called, and we sort of touched on briefly last week, hyperstition. Fictions that make themselves real is the traditional definition of it. So, what I wanted to do today, at least in the first half, is show…

• 00:14:21

  So if the CCRU are interested in hypostition, it's precisely because they seek to produce the fiction that they would like to see become the future reality. So they say, according to the tenets of hypostition, there is no difference in principle between a universe, a religion and a hoax. Because the future…

• 00:30:16

  Oscar grows up to become a brilliant scientist whose research into AI is so ahead of its time that NASA actually fails to understand it, eventually firing and discrediting him. Nonetheless, Oscar continues his research through top-secret military and corporate programs and in 1991 ultimately manages to make AXIS…

• 00:45:36

  So that's the kind of AOE's version of Decadence. In all... Not so much to summon a demon, but rather an angel. Okay, now the CCRU's sub-Decadence marks a perversion of Decadence by pairing numbers which combine to equal the number 9 rather than 10, namely the 9 realms of the numerogram, rather than the AOE's…

• 01:11:12

  Or so as to make them ever more advanced. So computers here are a good historical model for how cities can develop by originally posing the problem of how a small-sized unit can self-improve without getting overheated or congested. In the first quote, the coming computers are closer to miniature cities than…

• 01:26:49

  In the 2016 article that I've uploaded on the box, In the 2016 article that I've uploaded on the box, Neo-Modern Shanghai and the Art of Abstraction, Greenspan and Land note how the Chinese government recently held in 2016 an exhibition of a highly abstract form of calligraphic art that did not actually depict…

• 01:42:47

  For instance, recent World Expos have shown a major concern for environmentalism in the wake of alarming climate change signs. Rather than limiting technological development and industrial activity, however, this environmental theme has incited efforts to create new and sustainable technologies for long-term economic…

• 01:57:31

  It doesn't exclude those things, because they... You know, both... Len and Greenspan were both talking also about, like, the fact that cities require migrants, right? Especially Shanghai. It... Yeah. It needs... It needs... And also, like, the initial opening up of Shanghai to western capital and so on. It... There's…