Visual Arts and Research

Anna Longo obtained her PhD in Aesthetics Philosophy at University Paris 1. She is a member of the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris). She has taught at the University Panthéon-Sorbonne and CalArts (Los Angeles) and is an instructor at the New Centre for Research & Practice. Her research crosses several fields such as metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. She has been the author and editor of several books such as Le paradoxe de la finitude (2019); La genèse du transcendantal (2017); Breaking the Spell: Speculative Realism under Discussion (2015); Time without Becoming (2014), and Divenire della conoscenza: estetica e contingenza del reale (2013).  

Reza Negarestani is a philosopher and writer. Since the early 2000s, he has contributed extensively to journals and anthologies and lectured at numerous international universities and institutes including MIT, HKW, Duke university, The New School, CUNY and École Normale Supérieure. Negarestani’s writings have been translated into more than thirteen languages. His latest philosophical work, Intelligence and Spirit (MIT press / Urbanomic, 2018), is an inquiry into the meaning of intelligence at the intersection of the future of humanity, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, theory of computation, and the philosophy of German Idealism. Negarestani’s most recent project focuses on worldmaking and the question of what it means to inhabit a world as what Wittgenstein would have called a lifeform.

Klaus Speidel is an academic philosopher, art critic and curator, who studied philosophy and art history in Munich (LMU) and Paris (École normale supérieure, Paris X Nanterre, Sorbonne). Beyond numerous academic publications on topics related to art, narrative, depiction, style, drawing and digital, Klaus writes on contemporary art and culture for international magazines like Spike, artpress, Art Newspaper, Parnass and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 2006. In 2015, he received the AICA France Prize for Art Criticism. He curated exhibitions in Germany, Austria and France, was a guest on the Arte TV show « Philosophie » and a keynote speaker at different international events. From 2003 to 2006, Klaus was awarded an Sélection internationale scholarship from École normale supérieure and from 2006 to 2010 he held a doctoral grant from École normale supérieure and Sorbonne. In 2013, he completed his doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne with a dissertation on the possibilities and modalities of narration in single pictures. From 2015 to 2018, he headed the Lise-Meitner Postdoc research project “Towards an Experimental Narratology of the Image” at the Lab for Cognitive Research in Art History (CReA) at the University of Vienna.  

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College. His scholarly focus is upon tracking currents of experimental thought between the Middle East and the West, with particular attention to exploring the concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, madness, futurism, disappearance, and apocalyptic aesthetics. He has published several books to date, including—The Chaotic Imagination: New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Inflictions: The Writing of Violence in the Middle East (Continuum, 2012), The Radical Unspoken: Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought (Routledge, 2013); Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism (SUNY, 2015); Elemental Disappearances (co-authored with Dejan Lukic; Punctum Books, 2016); Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-In-Delirium (MIT Press/Urbanomic/Sequence, 2019); and Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark (Zero Books, 2019). He is also the co-editor of the Suspensions book series with Bloomsbury Press, and the co-director of the 5th Disappearance Lab.

Jean-Pierre Caron  is a philosopher and artist based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His doctoral research, developed at both the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, and the University of São Paulo, proposed a critique of the aesthetic philosophy of John Cage in the context of contemporary ontology of art and philosophy of language. He is a lecturer in philosophy at the UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) and he militates in the Circle of Studies of the Idea and Ideology (CSII)- an international political collective dedicated to examining the viability of the "communist hypothesis" today. He's been practicing noise and experimental music for more than 15 years and several of his records have been released, many through his own imprint, Seminal Records. Recently he's been working on the problem of generic organization as it appears in different fields, like art, science, and politics; and its relationship to scale-sensitivity. 

Cécile Malaspina is the author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury, 2018) and principal translator of Gilbert Simondon's On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, with the collaboration of John Rogove (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). She is directeur de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris (Ciph), where she is also a member of the executive board. She is visiting fellow at King's College London, where her program for the Ciph is hosted by the departments of Digital Humanities and the Department of French, in association with the Centre for Art and Philosophy. She obtained her Doctorate in epistemology, philosophy and history of the sciences and technology from Paris 7 Denis Diderot and her Masters in contemporary French philosophy and critical theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) in the UK. Before turning to philosophy she trained as an artist, art historian (Goldsmiths) and curator (RCA). Her main interest lies in the normativity of concepts, especially with regard to the aesthetic and ethical implications of conceptualising contingency and uncertainty.

Mohammad Salemy is an independent Berlin-based artist, critic and curator from Canada. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and an MA in Critical Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. He has shown his works in Ashkal Alwan's Home Works 7 (Beirut, 2015), Witte de With (Rotterdam, 2015) and Robot Love (Eindhoven, 2018). His writings have been published in e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail, Brooklyn Rail, Ocula, Arts of the Working Class and Spike. Salemy's curatorial experiment For Machine Use Only was included in the 11th edition of Gwangju Biennale (2016). Together with Patrick Schabus, he forms the artist collective Alphabet Collection. Salemy is the Organizer at The New Centre for Research & Practice.

Rômulo Moraes is the Academic Coordinator of the New Centre-ESAP partnership. He is a Brazilian writer, sound artist, ethnographer and a PhD candidate in Music from the City University of New York (CUNY GC) with a Fulbright/CAPES scholarship.  He holds a Master's in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is editor of &&& Journal and author of "Cocoons" (Kotter, 2019). He is currently researching phenomenologies of imagination, post-media maximalism, the intertwining of pop and the experimental, and the mining cosmopoetics.