Collapse Volume VIII: Casino Real

Robin Mackay (Ed.)

Published by Urbanomic
December 2014
Paperback 115x175mm, pp. 1013, Limited edition of 1500 numbered copies
ISBN 978-0-9567750-2-3

The wager is situated on the dividing line between pure lived action and autonomous speculation: at once an impetus toward the future, recognition of a radical novelty, risk; and, on the other hand, an attempt at domination through the imposition of order, the establishment of symmetries. Its essence, the unification of these two constitutive themes, is far from being clear.
- Jean Cavaillès, 1939

Collapse VIII examines a pervasive image of thought drawn from games of chance. In order to survey those practices in which intellectual resources are most acutely concentrated on the production and exploitation of risk, and to uncover the conceptual underpinnings of methods developed to extract value from contingency - in the casino, in the markets, in life - the volume brings together contributors who extend the philosophical thinking of contingency beyond the 'casino' model, gamblers whose experience gives them the authority to considerably refine our understanding of what it means to master chance, researchers who analyse the operation and experience of risk in diverse arenas, and artists whose work addresses both the desire to confront chance and the desire to tame it by bringing it to order.

Alea iacta est!

Contents

ROBIN MACKAY - EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
JEAN-LUC MOULÈNE - UNTITLED
AMANDA BEECH - The Church The Bank The Art Gallery
JEAN CAVAILLÈS - From Collective to Wager
STEVE FORTE - The Ultimate Cooler (Interview)
UNKNOWN ARTIST - Angel Deck with Linework
NATASHA DOW SCHÜLL - Engineering Chance
JASPAR JOSEPH-LESTER - A Guide to the Casino Architecture of Wedding
DAVID WALSH - From BlackJack to Monanism (Interview)
ANDERS KRISTIAN MUNK - Dice-Like and Distributed: Time Machines, Space Engines and the Enactment of Risk Markets
NICK LAND - Transcendental Risk
MILAN ĆIRKOVIĆ - The Greatest Gamble in History
JOHN COATES, MARK GURNELL, ZOLTAN SARNYAI - From Molecule to Market
NICK SRNICEK AND ALEX WILLIAMS - On Cunning Automata: Financial Acceleration at the Limits of the Dromological
SAM LEWITT - Notes from New Jersey
ELIE AYACHE - The Writing of the Market (Interview)
JON ROFFE - From a Restricted to a General Pricing Surface
SUHAIL MALIK - The Ontology of Finance: Price, Power, and the Arkhé-Derivative
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX - Mallarmé's Materialist Divinization of the Hypothesis
SEAN ASHTON / NIGEL COOKE - Mr Heggarty Goes Down
GEGENSICHKOLLEKTIV - CAUTION
FERNANDO ZALAMEA - Peirce's Tychism: Absolute Contingency for our Transmodern World
MICHEL BITBOL - Quantum Mechanics as Generalised Theory of Probabilities
ELIE AYACHE - A Formal Deduction of the Market