Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab
In the framework of the exhibition ‘Reflecting
Oil. Petroculture in Transformation’ and in collaboration with Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures
Framed
as a revisitation of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re.press, 2008), a book in which the logic of petroleum
extraction serves as a theoretical and fictional device to connect the socio-political dynamics of the Middle East, the War
on Terror, Capitalism, and modern and archaic myths of creation, this presentation focuses on a different angle concerning
the cryptic tales of petromodernity or modernity at large.
Petroleum or Napht
(from the Avestan word naftah, meaning a blackened moisture that suddenly conflagrates) will be introduced within the tradition
of alchemical works (L'Œuvre au noir, Marguerite Yourcenar), their influence on painting practices, and the early psychoanalytic
tradition as advanced by the likes of Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank. The origin of the (petro-)modern subject of planet Earth
will be traced back to deep origins, where the nested concatenations of cosmological traumas shape the figure of the contemporary
human.
Reza Negarestani is a philosopher and writer. He has lectured and taught at numerous international universities
and institutes. He is the author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re.press, 2008) and Intelligence and
Spirit (2018, Sequence Press/Urbanomic/MIT) among others. Negarestani is currently directing the Critical Philosophy programme
at the New Centre for Research and Practice. Negarestani's current project focuses on the intersections between philosophy,
theoretical computer science and research on the future of humanity and subjectivity.
