future metaphysics
Future Metaphysics, a book by Armen Avanessian, was launched not in a single event, but in a series of real, speculative and symbolic “book launches”. These book launches were an ongoing site of recursive encounters between Avanessian and Los Angeles artists and institutions.
A series of events generate from each of the book’s chapters, and unfold across divergent contexts of academic and cultural institutions. Artists Parch Es, Scarlett Kim, Eric Fanghanel, respond to Avanessian’s activities in the form of microcultural productions: performative strategies, relational scores and media interventions. The collision and intersection between them launches Future Metaphysics, repeatedly and unrelentingly, in a multiplicity of directions.
The series captures not only the proposals of the book but the dynamics of the writing process and institutional logics at play. Avanessian and artists contaminate and alienate each other, abolishing the distinction between theory and practice, and rewriting the terms of the “book launch”. A web of connections extend outward from the book like tendrils of slime that assemble and disassemble contingently: from Germany to the US, from Thomas Mann House to the SpaceX headquarters, from major institutions to grassroots interventions, and from academic environment to art installation.
This fluid ecology is a continuation of a collaborative practice that blurs philosophy and performance, as seen in the quasi-weekly residency Armen Avanessian & Enemies at the Volksbühne in Berlin, and Perhaps It Is High Time for a Xeno-Architecture to Match, at Brussel’s Kaaitheater, where Avanessian previously collaborated with Parch Es.
More information about the project may be found at futuremetaphysics.com/