The Institute of the Cosmos announces a call for papers for publication in the Cosmic Bulletin: a free, single-issue journal, influenced by the philosophy of Russian cosmism and its historical and contemporary manifestations. The Institute of the Cosmos is a collective research project, developed as an artistic contribution for the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA2), which opens to the public in May of this year. The Cosmic Bulletin is a publishing platform of the institute and will be made available to the public throughout the duration of the exhibition.
The bulletin will address the need for a creative investigation of the materiality of the cosmos and its strange universalism, from the perspectives of philosophy, anthropology, history of science and art. The bulletin intends to interrogate the current understanding of our biological and social conditions, and to map vectors of our future development, inspired by the history of cosmist thinking and the speculative practices that sustain it. The bulletin seeks to unlock the hidden potential of radical imaginaries across multiple fields and histories of knowledge.
We have many urgent questions: How can our understanding of time and space be expanded? How can our life-span be extended? What are the horizons of organic and inorganic life? How to control time? How to understand the unity of all that exists? How does our post-secular society challenge contemporary science, and vice versa? What kind of sociality will a cosmist future bring? How can life on Earth and beyond be elaborated? What could extra-terrestrial art and literature be? Are plants conscious and should we eat them? How to live without killing any form of life? We welcome you to think this through with us.
The Institute of the Cosmos invites scholars, artists, activists and autodidacts in all fields to contribute original studies, critical essays, theory and fiction pieces and other cross-genre forms of experimental writing.
Suggested topics:
– Genderless society and a post-reproductive condition
– Non-colonization of other planets
– Cosmopolitanism and cosmo-politics
– Cosmist aesthetics and evolutionary creativity
– Museum as a laboratory of resurrection
– Art without Death
– Active evolution of species
– Emancipation of inorganic matter
– Geo-engineering and terraforming
– Star anti-wars and total demilitarization
– Conservation of life, preservation and immortality
– Transformation of energy, nutrition techniques and autotrophic ecology
– Cosmic temporality and heuristics of time
– Cosmic subjectivity and cosmist consciousness
– Post-secular religiosity and techniques of re-enchantment
– Interplanetary medium, extra-terrestrial life and space travel
– Radical futurology and scientific fortune-telling
– Spatial communities and the commons in space
– Cosmocene and decentered space
The deadline for submissions is April 14, 2020.
Please email text as Microsoft Word document to cosmism@rigabiennial.com.
The Institute of the Cosmos is a project by Arseny Zhilyaev, Marina Simakova, and Anton Vidokle.
The second edition of Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA2), and suddenly it all blossoms, curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, looks to re-enchantment as a frame for building desirable futures and to reimagine ways of being human and making relationships in contemporary contexts. Against cynicism and political despair, transforming fear into possibility and peril into exuberance, the Biennial seeks alternative actions, thoughts and narratives in the perspective of collective futures.