Hallucination Archives – Robin Mackay

I’m a philosopher and director of the publisher Urbanomic, which aims to engender interdisciplinary thinking and production.

As well as directing Urbanomic, I have written and spoken on art and philosophy and have also worked with a number of artists developing cross-disciplinary projects. I have also translated innumerable essays and various book-length works of French philosophy, including Alain Badiou’s Number and Numbers, François Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography and Anti-Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, and Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye.

My research interests are wide ranging, but generally emerge from the ‘gap’ between the scientific worldview and humans’ spontaneous experience and self-understanding, exploring the philosophical, aesthetic, and political ramifications of attempts to negotiate this disparity—in particular, new variants of ‘geophilosophy’, which examine the relationship between philosophical thought and the contingent history of the earth, in dialogue with geology, psychoanalysis, myth, and other hybrid modes of knowledge and narrative.

I’m available for editorial, proofreading, copy-editing, and translation (FR>EN) work, and commissions. Or you could just buy me a coffee.

2016

Return of the Faun (Formulations)

On Florian Hecker’s abstract opera FAVN.

Writing

2015

Preface to ‘The Brain-Eye’

An introduction to the methodological and conceptual stakes of Alliez’s studies of modern painting

Writing

2015

Éric Alliez and Jean-Clet Martin, ‘The Brain-Eye: New Histories of Modern Painting’

A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting

Translation

2015

Perspective, Hallucination, Synthesis

Talk given in Porto on the occasion of Florian Hecker’s ‘Formulations’ show.

Writing

2015

The Brain-Ear

Talk on Florian Hecker given at Graz Kunstlerhaus

Writing

2010

These Broken Impressions

Essay on psychoacoustics and hallucination in the work of Florian Hecker

Writing

2004

Squalor, Intoxication, Creation

Theory-fiction exploring the life and work of painter Francis Bacon

Writing