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CYBERNETIC CULTURE RESEARCH UNIT // DECIMAL LABYRINTH // 10 ZONES 5 SYZYGIES 45 DEMONS // CCRU DOES NOT, HAS NOT, AND WILL NEVER EXIST
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The Critic

Atlas1 min read

Timeline

The Atlas

The history of the CCRU is the history of a delay. It wrote its work in the nineties, almost unnoticed, and was read only twenty years later, when the world had caught up with what it anticipated.

  1. 1995

    Why 1995 was possible

    Warwick in the mid-nineties was one of the few places where theory took the machine seriously, the Virtual Futures conferences drew a public that thought cybernetics, rave and philosophy together. Add a philosophy department that tolerated the strange, and two forces that needed each other, Plant's departure into new ground and Land's intensity. 1992 Land's Bataille book, 1994 Meltdown, 1995 the founding.

  2. 1996 to 1997

    The short bloom, 1996 to 1997

    A fever of reading groups and performances, a seminar on Afro-futures out of which Eshun's Sonic Fiction grew. Here arose the collective, anonymous voice, the name CCRU, which erases the single author. In 1997 Abstract Culture began, and in the same year Plant left.

  3. 1997

    The fork

    Plant's departure is the most important turning point, more important than any date. When she left, the group lost its affirmative counterweight, and Land drove it into the antihuman and the occult. From here the two lines run apart that the Atlas finds again everywhere.

  4. 1998 to 2000

    The retreat into the occult, 1998 to 2000

    Toward the Numogram, the qabbala, Lovecraft. 1998 Barker Speaks, 1999 Digital Hyperstition, Reynolds writes the first report. Around 2000 the university closes the unit, the CCRU moves to Leamington Spa.

  5. 2001 to 2003

    Dissolution and silence, 2001 to 2003

    The active phase ends, the work is nearly forgotten and lives on only at ccru.net. That silence was no end, it was an incubation.

  6. 2011

    Why the work worked only after 2011

    The financial crisis of 2008 made vivid what Fisher called capitalist realism. 2009 his book, 2011 Fanged Noumena, the internet found the archive again, 2013 the manifesto, 2015 the collected Writings. The group was read in the decade whose conditions it had anticipated. The delay is the point.

  7. 2017

    Diffusion and loss

    In 2017 Fisher took his own life after a long illness. Since then the cosmos scatters into its fields and works on differently in each.

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