Clouds/Layers/Dimensions

"The book Clouds / Layers / Dimensions explores conceptions of space in contemporary philosophy, media studies and art theory. It stems from the need to clarify how we conceive of space in the 21st century. The selected texts ask questions about how abstract our thinking is and to what extent this abstraction renders space real; what types of spaces exist and how they can be created; how much this creation of space is influenced by globalisation, the advent of the internet and the ecological crisis; how to think about the planet and what the genealogy of this thinking is in contemporary philosophy and art. The book contains texts by Palo Fabuš, Lukáš Likavčan, Jozef Mrva and Veronika Sellner. In his text ‘Topological Materialism and Topological Imagination’, Jozef Mrva Jr. seeks a way to connect topology and new materialist philosophy, and traces the echoes of topological thinking in contemporary philosophy. He defines the concept of topological imagination, which functions as a creative and analytical strategy, applies it to selected examples, and examines their connections with geopolitics and capitalism. In the chapter Earth Without Us, Lukáš Likavčan develops several loosely related themes revolving around a central problem - the need for planetary thinking, a new geopolitics that will overcome the current neoliberal Atlantic order and move towards saving the planet. In his essay ‘When Space Is What I Know About It: The Topological Convergence of Lived Experience and the Digital Environment’, Palo Fabuš adopts a topological-epistemological stance when discussing the web, which unfolds between the object, applied theories and the cognitive-technological extensions of new media. He addresses the issue of shifting attention and argues that the subject is topological in itself, and that the world has likewise become topological as we have interwoven it with information and technology. In her text ‘Temporal Complexity and Art: Post-Contemporary Art as a Response to Insufficiency’, Veronika Sellnerová traces the development of thinking about time and space in the field of art theory under the umbrella of speculative philosophies. Against the backdrop of an analysis of the concept of temporal complexity by Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik, she examines Malik’s efforts to define and transcend ‘contemporary art’ in the direction of ‘post-contemporary’ art.”