Future Metaphysics, a new book by Armen Avanessian, is to be launched not in a single event, but in a series of real, speculative and symbolic “book launches”. The book launches are an ongoing site of recursive encounters between Avanessian and Los Angeles artists and institutions.

Future Metaphysics was originally commisioned as a series of experimental texts corresponding to each room of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. A series of events now generate from each of the book’s chapters, and unfold across divergent contexts of academic and cultural institutions. LA artists Scarlett Kim, Eric Fanghanel and Parch Es, respond to Avanessian’s activities in the form of microcultural productions: performative strategies, relational scores and media interventions. The collision and intersection between them launches Future Metaphysics, repeatedly and unrelentingly, in a multiplicity of directions.

The series captures not only the proposals of the book but the dynamics of the writing process and institutional logics at play. Avanessian and artists contaminate and alienate each other, abolishing the distinction between theory and practice, and rewriting the terms of the “book launch”. A web of connections extend outward from the book like tendrils of slime that assemble and disassemble contingently: from Germany to the US, from Thomas Mann House to Los Angeles universities, from major institutions to grassroots interventions, and from academic environment to art installation.

This fluid ecology is a continuation of a collaborative practice that blurs philosophy and performance, as seen in the quasi-weekly residency Armen Avanessian & Enemies at the Volksbühne in Berlin, and Perhaps It Is High Time for a Xeno-Architecture to Match, at Brussel’s Kaaitheater, where Avanessian previously worked with Los Angeles artists.

Exhibition becomes book becomes event becomes experience, as Future Metaphysics is embodied in this network of literal and figurative launches.

If you would like to host the site of a microcultural production, email the team at futuremetaphysics@gmail.com.