A transdisciplinary survey of practices that produce, analyse, and exploit risk and uncertainty, Collapse VIII: Casino Real 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, Collapse VIII 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.

The rise of machine gambling can also be read in an architectural register. Far removed from what was once ‘learnt from Las Vegas’, the occupation of erstwhile retail real-estate by machine gambling establishments has become a familiar feature of our cities. Jaspar Joseph-Lester’s photo-essay focuses on the Wedding district of Berlin, remarkable for its concentration of these small casinos which come in a variety of shapes and sizes and yet have begun to form a recognizable architectural genre, albeit one that is largely functional—even if their facades continue to deploy a jaded vocabulary of Vegas imagery, these sites are as far removed from the palatial excesses of the golden age of the Strip as Schüll’s interviewees are from Dostoyevsky’s gambler. In his examination of the architectural merits of these spaces Joseph-Lester riffs on Ed Ruscha’s deadpan methodical approach (Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965), documenting the situation and formal characteristics of these deracinated spaces for zoned-out gamblers.