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.

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Synthetic Listening (with Florian Hecker)

2021

Topics:
algorithm artificial intelligence convolution feature extraction Florian Hecker music scattering transform Sound

Text for the third volume (bilingual En/Fr) of Spectres (Shelter Press), on algorithms as ‘ghosts in the machine’ in FAVN and Inspection.

Our two collaborative electroacoustic pieces, FAVN (2016) and Inspection (Maida Vale Project) / Inspection II (2016/2018), draw upon current research in machine listening and Music Information Retrieval (MIR), where the ‘ghosts in the machine’ are unsupervised convolutional operators designed to extract auditory features from signal.

Experimental deployment of these virtual listening agents has only just begun, and these pieces initiate a general research programme which, rather than short-circuiting our encounter with Artificial intelligence (AI)-like technologies by placing them in traditional compositional or performer roles, seeks instead to open a dialogue with these spectral operators, moving between analysis and synthesis, between discriminative and generative models, in order to render audible their intelligence signature, the signal trace of their nonhuman brain-ear…