Speculative Arts, Fiction, and Design
The Speculative Arts, Fiction, and Design WG (SpecArt) explores worldbuilding in arts, speculative fiction, and design strategies. Its goal is to encourage new forms of speculative thought via artistic research and production.
Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.
TASK SETS
DESIGNING THE FUTURE
CoFUTURES will partner with individuals, institutions, and communities to engage in speculative design thinking. The goal is to encourage non-disciplinary blue sky thinking with the future together with practitioners from the arts, sciences, and architecture. Both fiction and non-fiction speculations will be components of this task set.
Related: EnvHumInt & VirWor4
THE FUTURE URBAN
RESEARCH GROUP: CoFUTURES and PARTNERS
The Future Urban directs speculative thinking towards conditions in cities of the future, moving from artistic and science fictional imaginaries to speculative models and designs. This task set has a clearer interest in real world applications of speculative thinking.
Related: VirWor2 & VirWor3
SPECULATION: DESERT
RESEARCH GROUP: CoFUTURES and PARTNERS
One of the principal physical sites of CoFUTURES explorations is the desert. We explore the desert imaginary via scientific research, speculative fiction, and artistic practice, from desert architectures to Martian landscape imaginaries to ideas of terraforming.