The School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts is pleased to announce the inauguration of its new Center for Discursive Inquiry (CDI) and the launch of the book produced from its Cold War Cold World Research Group: Cold War/Cold World: Knowledge, Representation and the Outside in the Cold War and Contemporary Art, published by Urbanomic Press.
If the term 'Cold World' describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and the technological sublime, in many ways the dread experienced during the Cold War, when clear oppositions were laid out between nation states, is echoed in the hall of mirrors that is contemporary globalization. In this Cold World, whose repercussions in many ways amplify, relay and replay those of the Cold War, our collective consciousness is being overtaken by a flood of difference, uncertainty, and the dread of the incompatibility of an alien yet constructed world. Technological subjectivation, political malaise, cultural dysphoria, and ecological crisis abound against an experiential and experimental horizon that prompts many to pose, and to stage, in myriad forms, a fundamental question: 'What will we make of ourselves?'
Contributors: Éric Alliez, Maurizio Lazzarato, Amanda Beech, Robin Mackay, Christine Wertheim, Brian Evenson, Reza Negarestani, Joshua Johnson, Patricia Reed
There will be a reception following the launch.
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