Magnetic Movie

An interesting coming together of art and science. The interview with the artists on the BBC’s Culture Show is also highly recommended: it’s an excellent STS case study in itself. Apparently many scientists took this for a recording of an experiment, as it looks so convincing. Fact or fiction? You decide…

Update: We had to remove the embedded video as some of the browsers couldn’t handle it. You can watch Magnetic Movie here instead.

Graham Harman’s abstract for Deleuze2008

The abstract for Graham Harman’s keynote address at the Deleuze2008 conference at Stavanger:

Graham Harman
‘The Assemblage Theory of Society’

This lecture considers the interesting ‘assemblage theory’ of society found in Manuel DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society (2006), which links up with some of the key issues of classical and present-day metaphysics, not to mention some of the central themes of this conference.

The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts

A very interesting call for papers started making the rounds yesterday on various blogs and mailing lists, emanating from the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy (CPPE) at the University of Leicester. “The State of Things: Towards a Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts” conference is to take place between 29 April and 1 May 2009 at Leicester. It brings together the concerns of modern and classical forms of political economy regarding the nature of the capitalist mode of production with recent object-orientated inquiries into economic ordering that draw on actor-network theory, especially within economic sociology and science and technology studies. The deadline for proposals is 28 November 2008. The full call for papers is reproduced below.

Update [18 July 2008]: A nice PDF flyer is now also available.

Deleuze2008: Call for Papers

The Deleuze2008 Conference in Stavanger, Norway is one of the city’s 2008 European Capital of Culture projects. It will take place on 7 and 8 November 2008 and it will also mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of Gilles Deleuze’s (1968) Difference and Repetition. Keynote speakers are Simon Duffy, Roland Faber, Graham Harman, Christian Kerslake, Daniel W. Smith and James Williams. The deadline for submitting abstracts is 12 September 2008. Further information on the call for papers is available here and on how to register here.