An assembly of perspectives on risk, contingency, and chance--at the gaming table, in the markets, and in life.

A transdisciplinary survey of practices that produce, analyse, and exploit risk and uncertainty, the eighth volume of Collapse uncovers the conceptual underpinnings of methods designed to extract value from contingency--at the gaming table, in the markets, and in life. The indictment of "casino capitalism" and the centrality of risk to contemporary society are traced back to a ubiquitous image of thought that originated in games of chance, but which is no longer adequate to address a world whose realities are now shaped by risk models and trading in speculative futures.

To challenge the "casino" model, this volume brings together philosophers who extend the thinking of contingency beyond statistical modelling, professional traders and gamblers whose lifelong experience has shaped their understanding of chance, researchers analysing the perception and treatment of risk and uncertainty in diverse arenas including derivatives trading, quantum physics, insurance, sonic experimentation, literature, futurology, mathematics, and machine gambling, and artists whose work addresses both the desire to confront chance and the need to tame it by bringing it to order.

Robin Mackay is a philosopher, Director of the UK arts organization Urbanomic, and Associate Researcher at Goldsmiths University of London.

Jean-Luc Moulène, a self-declared technicien libertaire, studied Aesthetics and Sciences of Art at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he currently lives and works. He participated in the Taipei Biennial, the Sharjah Biennial, the First International Biennial of the Image, the Venice Biennial, the Sao Paulo Biennial, and Documenta X. Among the institutions that have dedicated solo exhibitions to his work are the Secession, Centre Pompidou, Villa Medici, Rome, Kunstverein Hannover, Dia: Beacon, Carré d'art-Musée d'art contemporain, Nîmes, Culturgest, Lisbon, Musée du Louvre, Paris, and Centre d'Art Contemporain de Genève.

Amanda Beech is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles.

Jean Cavaillès (1903-1944) was a French logician and philosopher who taught in Paris and Strasbourg. He was imprisoned as a member of the French Resistance and was executed by the Gestapo on February 17, 1944.

Sam Lewitt is an artist who lives and works in New York City. He completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2005 after receiving his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2004. Lewitt is a 2018 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award recipient, as well as the Spring 2018 Cornell University Teiger Mentor in Fine Art. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Mumok, Vienna, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Suhail Malik is Codirector of the MFA Fine Art program at Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies.

Quentin Meillassoux teaches philosophy at Université de Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), and is author of After Finitude.

Fernando Zalamea is Professor of Mathematics at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.