A volume on artificial intelligence, which attempts to disassemble and reformulate what one might understand as AI by taking apart both notions of ‘artificiality’ and ‘intelligence’ and seeing what new meaning they produce when recombined. We summon the trickster of the natural order, chimera, both a mythical creature and a genetic phenomenon. Drawing upon chimerism allows us to broaden ‘artificial intelligence’ into ‘synthetic cognition’⁠—an approach that highlights the duality of ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’, amplifies non-human methods of cognition and anticipates modes of symbiosis. With this aim, the editors, Ilan Manouach and Anna Engelhardt, assembled an inventory in which one can find contributions ...

Egress is the first book to consider the legacy and work of the writer, cultural critic and cult academic Mark Fisher. Narrated in orbit of his death as experienced by a community of friends and students in 2017, it analyses Fisher’s philosophical trajectory, from his days as a PhD student at the University of Warwick to the development of his unfinished book on Acid Communism. Taking the word “egress” as its starting point — a word used by Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie to describe an escape from present circumstances as experiences by the characters in countless examples ...

PlaguePod returns to take a look at Crack-Ups and Lockdowns, with readings of real-life and fictional breaking points, and chat about weird COVID times with Matt Colquhoun aka Xenogothic. We have Mark Fell joining us to chat from deepest Rotherham with some extremely tidy tracks, and welcome Agnès Gayraud as our guide on a journey into ‘impossible’ French pop.

To celebrate a year of lockdown lunacy, in this special anniversary show we invite survivors from the very first PlaguePod to come back and tell us what their COVID highlights have been. DJK Huysmans is in the house to provide Hariboid sounds. Plus snack testing, Chaney’s Czech-in, and the Inexplicable Scots from Beyond.

In this live podcast, socially-distanced Urbanomic-adjacent guests from across the planet join us from their respective lockdown cells to share personal and speculative views on the Coronavirus era. With Matt Colquhoun (Xenogothic), Amy Ireland, Nyx Land, Shaun Lewin, Robin Mackay, Mattin, Enrico Monacelli, Thomas Moynihan, Reza Negarestani, Katherine Pickard, Miguel Prado, Laura Tripaldi. CONTENT WARNING: FOUL LANGUAGE, DEGENERATE PHILOSOPHERS, COGNITIVE TURPITUDE, ACCELERATIONISM

For this PlaguePod, we’re joined by guests including Simon Sellars, author of Applied Ballardianism, DJ producer and UIQ label boss Lee Gamble, and author and blogger Matt Colquhoun (Xenogothic) to talk about the psychological effects of the Coronavirus crisis and the ever more alarming prescience of Ballard’s tales of isolation and quarantine, social breakdown, inner space, and the psychologically debilitating yet possibly liberating liberating effects of living through catastrophe. With soothing ASMR readings from Sellars, Ballard, and others, crisis music, listener phone-ins, a reading from Reza Negarestani’s Mortiloquist, and an exclusive artificially-worldized recording of the 2009 Urbanomic gig by Russell ...

Edited and with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun, this collection of lecture notes and transcriptions reveals acclaimed writer and blogger Mark Fisher in his element — the classroom — outlining a project that Fisher’s death left so bittersweetly unfinished. Beginning with that most fundamental of questions — “Do we really want what we say we want?” — Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line ...