Speculative Arts, Fiction, and Design

The Speculative Arts, Fiction, and Design WG (SpecArts) 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.

Samuel R. Delany, "The Art of Fiction No. 210" Interview

The Paris Review, Issue 197, Summer 2011

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Designing the Future


CoFUTURES partners with individuals, institutions, and communities to engage in speculative design thinking. We engage in non-disciplinary blue sky thinking with the future together with practitioners from the arts, sciences, and architecture. Both fiction and non-fiction speculations are components of this task set.

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The Future Urban


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 direct interest in real world applications of speculative thinking.

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The Desert Lab


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.

Two recent exhibitions with artistic collaborators have been at Kunstverein Freiburg (2020) and project88 (2019). Contact us to learn for more.