# PHILOSOPHY /// Cyclonopedia Symposium’s lectures are archived and visible online
Published
“If, in middle-eastern tradition, gods deliberately allow themselves to be killed left and right by enemies, humans, or themselves without any prudence as to their future and eventual extinction, it is because they find more significance and benefit in their own corpes –as a concrete object of communication and tangibility among humans- than in the abstractness of their divinity. At last, as corpes, they can copulate and contaminate.”
Negarestani Reza. CYCLONOPEDIA. Complicity with anonymous materials. Melbourne: Re-Press 2008
The New School’s symposium organized last March 11st around Reza Negarestani’s fictio-philosophical masterpiece Cyclonopedia is now archived and visible online.
To be honest, several of those lectures are very difficult to understand -at least for me- as they involve a vocabulary and a system of thoughts that are specific to what we could call “dark materialism”. However, I decided to incorporate three of them here that are accessible to a broader audience.
The first lecture is given by Eugene Thacker, co-organizer of this symposium with Ed Keller and Nicola Masciandaro. The title of his lecture is “Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans” and focuses on the materialist vision offered by Black Gondolier, a short story written by Fritz Leiber.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/22862986]
The second lecture is by Ed Keller and entitled “. . . Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain . . .” Thanks to several movies including Jim Jarmusch’s Dawn by Law, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine and Frederico Fellini’s 8 1/2, he attempts to approach the notion of absolute otherness within a materialist system.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/23336430]
Eventually, the third lecture here is from Alissa Andrasek who presents the work of Biothing within the scope of Cyclonopedia using the most architectural terminology of the book, hole complex, materialist agents, dusting etc.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/23064835]
It seems important to note here that Parsons will held another very interesting symposium this week entitled Transhumanism meets Design that will see Ed Keller, Francois Roche and Mitchell Joachim among a lot of other people presenting lectures about this topic. This event is organized by Humanity+
Other articles about Cyclonopedia:
– CYCLONOPEDIA. Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani
– Sympathy with the obstacle / Parkour in Gaza
– Exhumation & Architecture in Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani
– Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium I at the New School (NYC)
– Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze and Reza Negarestani on Fractal Ontology