Under en en vecka lång vistelse i Berlin i början av april besökte jag två bokhandlar som man som finländare bara kan drömma om. Pro qm http://www.pro-qm.de/ och Walther König https://www.buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de/koenig2/index.php?check_pass=true . Två bokhandlar till bristningsgränsen fyllda med böcker, bland dem drivor av böcker som tangerar mina intressen för överstora städer, ekonomi, konstens relation till naturvetenskaperna, filosofi, mm, mm. Självklart förköpte jag mig.
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Några av mina byten:
The Internet Does Not Exist , e-flux journal (Sternberg Press 2015)
”The Internet Does Not Exist. Maybe it did exist only a short time ago, but now it only remains as a blur, a cloud, a friend, a deadline, a redirect, or a 404. If it ever existed, we couldn´t see it. Because it has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time. Yet we are still trying to climb onboard, to get inside, to be part of the network, to get in on the language game, to show up on searches, to appear to exist. But we will never get inside something that isn´t there. All this time we´ve been bemoaning the death of any critical outside position, we should have taken a good look at information networks. Just try to get it. You can´t. Networks are all edges, as Bruno Latour points out. We thought there were windows but actually they´re mirrors. And in the meantime we are being faced with more and more – not just information, but the world itself.”
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Henri Lefebvre: The Missing Pieces (Semiotext(e) 2014)
”The Missing Pieces is an incantatory text, a catalog of what has been lost over time and what in some cases never existed. Through a lengthy chain of brief laconic citations, Henri Lefebvre evokes the history of what is no more and what never was: the artworks, films, screenplays, negatives. poems, symphonies, buildings, letters, concepts and lives that cannot be seen, heard, read, inhabited, or known about. ”
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Armen Avanessian, Andreas Töpfer: Speculative Drawing (Sternberg Press 2014)
”Speculative Drawing presents fifteen books – from monographs and translations to collections of essays – that emerged from the research platform Speculative Poetics, conceived by Armen Avanessian in 2011. This book gives a somewhat different introduction to contemporary speculative philosophy, raising questions on how thinking works and how thinking occurs in drawings or illustrations. How does a poetic thinking work that´s not about but with art.”
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Och ett citat ur inledningen till boken: ”This is where poetics has its place: the creation of something that could not even have been imagined before it was produced and was, for that matter, impossible before it was real; the production of a novelty whose gensis cannot be explained via any causality but remains contingent: an artistic act that, ultimately, open up space for truth, always to be revised.”
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In the Holocene, Ed. João Ribas, över 30 författare (MIT List Visual Arts Center 2014)
”In the Holocene proposes art as a speculative science, how artist investigate principles and phenomena more commonly associated with scientific or mathematical thought. Through the speculations and propositions of artists from nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries this volume proposes that art is an investigative and experimental activity, adressing what is explained through traditional scientific means: matter, time, energy, perception, etc. In this sense, both art and science can be seen to share an interest in knowledge and disrutive insights, yet are subject to different logics and conclusions.”
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This Idea Must Die – Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress, Ed. John Brockman (Harper Perennial 2015)
Boken består av en lång rad små uppsatser skrivna av vetenskapsmän och -kvinnor. Här ett urval av idéer och teorier som enligt skribenterna inte förtjänar att fortleva:
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Simplicity
The Universe
IQ
Entropy
String Theory (X2)
Cause and Effect
Race
Essentialism
The Self
Free Will
Common Sense
Things are either True or False
One Genome per Individual
Natural Selection is the Only Engine of Evolution
Universal Grammar
Languages Condition Worldviews
Big Data
Intelligence as a Property
The Continuity of Time
Homo Economicus
Economic Growth (X2)
Sciense is Self-Correcting
Only Scientists Can Do Science
The Scientific Method
Opposites Can´t Both Be Right
Culture
Anthropocentrcity
Geometry
Och förstås: The Illusion of Scientific Progress
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