Philosophers, theorists, eco-critics, leading scientific experts in climate change, and artists assess the present state of “planetary thought.” 
Is there an enduring bond between philosophical thought and the earth, or is philosophy's task to escape the planetary horizon? And what is the connection between the empirical earth, the contingent material support of human thinking, and the abstract “world” that is the condition for a “whole” of thought? 
Real and imaginary geographies and cartographies have played a dual role in philosophy, serving both as governing metaphor and as ultimate grounding for philosophical thought; but urgent contemporary concerns introduce new problems for geophilosophy: planetary political, technological, military, and financial mutations have scrambled territorial formations, and scientific predictions now present us with the apocalyptic scenario of a planet without human thought. 
The sixth volume of Collapse brings together philosophers, theorists, eco-critics, leading scientific experts in climate change, and artists whose work interrogates the link between philosophical thought, geography and cartography, in order to create a portrait of the present state of “planetary thought.”

Geo/Philosophy (Collapse)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Urbanomic / Sequence Pr

Essay inspired by conversations with the artist Jean-Luc Moulène addressing abstraction as a multifaceted project in the general domain of thought, and as a specific process of artistic experimentation.
The fruit of numerous conversations with the artist Jean-Luc Moulène, Reza Negarestani's essay addresses abstraction as a multi-faceted project in the general domain of thought, and as a specific process of artistic experimentation.
How can abstraction be so apparently ubiquitous in contemporary art, and yet so nebulously defined? “We have all heard of abstraction, but no one has ever seen one….” In Moulène's work, Negarestani discovers a renewal of the constitutive gesture of abstraction, rooted in the dialectic between form (mathematics) and sensible matter (physics). At once sensory, cognitive, and political, the disturbing force of the work compels us to reconnect the parochial art-historical notion of abstraction to a more comprehensive understanding of the term. Perhaps such a “formal cruelty of thought” is capable of “reactivating abstraction as a vector of disjunction and unity of art, philosophy, and science.”
Published by Sequence Press on the occasion of Jean-Luc Moulène's exhibition Torture Concrete, September 7–October 26, 2014, at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

Torture Concrete: Jean-Luc Moulène and the Protocol of Abstraction

Arts & Photography

Negarestani, Reza

History & Criticism

The writings of Straub and Huillet, presented for the first time in a critical, English-language edition, shed light on the filmmaking couple's essential contributions and their unique place in film history.
A text is spoken; it merges the sphere of ideas, from which it comes, with an immediate and sensible sphere of bodies that give life to them, with a nature that sustains these bodies, and that they in turn nourish by naming it. The body, in which language resonates, becomes the body of the text itself and protracts its speaking.
Here trees are trees and become trees. We learn by taking pleasure in the sublime essence of colors (leaf-green, earth-brown, sky-blue, bronzed-skin…), of timbres (voices, birds, steps…), of textures (flesh, fabric, earth…), the irreversibility of gestures.
These shots are rich in their concerted poverty: here's how.
―Anne Benhaïem, from introduction to “Conception of a Film”
Sequence Press is pleased to announce the publication of the writings of the filmmaking couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, presented for the first time in a critical, English-language edition. Two of the most exacting directors of the past fifty years, Straub and Huillet are renowned for their meticulous adaptations of works by giants of Western art and literature: Sophocles, Corneille, Bach, Hölderlin, Cézanne, Brecht, Schoenberg, Kafka, Pavese, et al. The publication coincides with the first complete U.S. retrospective of their films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the concurrent exhibition, Films and Their Sites, at Miguel Abreu Gallery.
Jean-Marie Straub came of age as a slightly younger contemporary of the French New Wave. Like those directors, he began his career writing film criticism. “Writing about films,” Jean-Luc Godard later said, “was already a way of making films.” This volume thus begins with Straub's early film criticism from the 1950s and traces the evolution of over five decades of writing activity, from manifestoes and trenchant declaratory texts, to detailed descriptions of working methods, letters, questionnaires, and select interviews and oral interventions.
Writings opens with an introduction by Sally Shafto that provides an in-depth look at Straub and Huillet's beginnings, within the context of the emergent filmmaking forces of the time. The book highlights their rigorous methodologies as translators of key texts, and the precision work required to adapt those translations for the screen. As Straub himself said, “We are the only European filmmakers, filmmakers of European nations. We make films in Italian as well as in French and in German. Who else can say that?” The book brings us behind the scenes and reveals how their publication practices mirrored those of their film production and distribution, as they often made distinct versions of the same film using alternative takes and different languages.
In addition to the published texts, the book comprises a richly illustrated Atelier section featuring three full length annotated film scripts, along with other pieces of writing, such as letters to their collaborators, shooting diagrams and schedules, lab notes, and press kits, all of which bring the reader into the heart of Huillet and Straub's creative process. The volume closes with a Portfolio of intimate photographs of the filmmakers at work, with onsite observations by their long-time director of photography and collaborator, Renato Berta, and a detailed filmography.
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet resolutely eschewed a Hollywood style of spectacle filmmaking to create some of the most raw and beautiful, as well as innovative and profoundly moving films of our times. Their writings open up a further understanding of their essential contributions, and their unique place in film history.

Writings

Humor & Entertainment

Straub, Jean-Marie

Huillet, Danile

Movies

Traversing philosophy and the human sciences, literature, cinema, and the visual arts, this book maps out a history where all is chaos, maelstrom, and fog.
If perception and language objectivate the world, if imagination structures it, if knowledge orders it, then how can we describe, name, or even apprehend that which comes to pass when language is absent, when perception vacillates, and when knowledge eludes us? How can we say, show, or make known that which undermines and refutes the order of things, the supposedly immutable real, and the administration of the sensible?
This book takes us on a quest that traverses philosophy and the human sciences, but also literature, cinema, and the visual arts. Not content with analysing the ordering power of our representations, in The Infra-World François J. Bonnet also interrogates the works of artists who have experienced and experimented with those moments when they crack open, giving way to anguish and vertigo.
If perception is a sieve, what can be said of that which slips through its net, how does one speak of what escapes? What remains of unqualified perceptions, of vanishing sensations? Where do the indescribable, nocturnal fears hide, the horrors lurking behind closed eyes? What of the world beneath language and objectivated sensation? What of the infra-world?

The Infra-World (Mono)

Bonnet, Franois J.

Inspection II

Hecker, Florian

Computers & Technology

A book developed in conjunction with the eponymous exhibitions consisting of oversized custom flexible heating circuits, used for environmental regulation in the sealed environments.
More Heat Than Light is a book developed in conjunction with the eponymous exhibitions, co-organized for 2015–16 by the Wattis Institute, San Francisco and Kunsthalle Basel. The work, exhibited at both of those institutions as well as an anonymous Airbnb rental apartment in New York, consists of oversized custom flexible heating circuits, used for environmental regulation in the sealed environments of equipment as diverse as medical equipment and food trays, in satellites and chemical vats. The heating circuits in More Heat Than Light are several times their conventional size, scaled-up and designed to draw their power and maximize the energy resources of the electrical circuits allotted for lighting within the sites they are inserted into. Energy allotted for stable artificial light is converted in this work into diffuse uneven warmth. This process is circumscribed with a strict regime of documentation. Each iteration of the exhibition is documented with a live feed from a thermal camera. The book itself, designed in collaboration with Geoff Kaplan, is conceived as a stand-alone object utilizing images taken with the thermal camera as well as research material relating to the work. On one hand, it picks-up the structure of a log of core temperatures of the sort compiled for analysis by the logistics and distribution industry. On the other hand, its format and layout utilize a two-color gradient printing process that interrupts the logical, spatial organization of the gridded screen-shots. This opposition between grid and gradient are staged in the book along a fragmentary work of theoretical fiction by Mark von Schlegell, as well as texts by Anthony Huberman, Elena Filipovic, Melanie Gilligan, and Sam Lewitt, all offering insight into some of the core themes and interpretations of the work.

More Heat Than Light

Lewitt, Sam

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