Graham Harman is a distinguished University Professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism (2013) and Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (2014). He also serves as editor of the Speculative Realism book series at Edinburgh University Press. In 2013, he and his Speculative Realist colleagues were ranked among the 100 most powerful forces in the contemporary art world by ArtReview magazine.
About the upcoming lecture, titled "Weird Formalism":
"The word 'form' has different uses in fields such as philosophy, architecture, and the arts. It is sometimes opposed to matter, sometimes to content, and sometimes to function. Yet in all of these different cases, form is treated as something visible and accessible. In this lecture, I will argue that form is what never becomes directly accessible to the viewer, but only manifests itself as a weirdness incommensurable with any specific visible shape." - Graham Harman