Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

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We say that a C * -algebra A satisfies the similarity property ((SP)) if every bounded homomorphism u : A → B(H), where H is a Hilbert space, is similar to a * -homomorphism. We introduce the following hypothesis (EP). (EP): Every separably acting von Neumann algebra with a cyclic vector is hyperreflexive. We prove that under (EP), all C * -algebras satisfy (SP).

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