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The Aesthetics of RiskSoCCAS Symposium Vol. III

extrait
John C. Welchman – Introduction (extrait)


This book collects 16 essays and conversations about the nature and consequences of risk in and out of the art world, beginning with the premise that the modern subject is caught up in an ever-expanding network of predictive and proactive stratagems for the management of risk.

We are heirs to radical transformations in the natural and social sciences engendered by the development of quantitative ideas of chance and the rise of probability theory and its promiscuous alliances with law, medicine, political statistics, and polling-and numerous other disciplines; and involuntary parties to the model-based predictive orchestration of the world of events.

For, in addition to being subjects of the spectacle, we are also hyper-actuarialized citizens, under-written, over-ridden, speed-bumped, over-drawn, and not occasionally maxed out by the hydra-headed nooses of fiscalized social control that snatch the administration of risk away from us.


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