As we tend to our blogs, we are occupying existing spaces: tumblr, instagram, cargo, etc. as well as forming our own spaces within those spaces. What does it mean to occupy these platforms? How do they define our engagement? How do they limit or promote expression? How are we communicating and defining our practices and identities within these spaces? What can we do to exercise control over our own spaces and imagine alternatives to those spaces?
One of the primary drives for this class, moving forward, will be the development, maintenance, and growth of our blogs as a kind of speculative space. Over the course of the class we will work to define and challenge and question the word “speculative” and the many forms it might take in order to find useful individual definitions for everyone’s practices.
We can think of the speculative space as a meta reflection of your own developing art and design practice as well as a bountiful (and hopefully fun) intellectual framework to generate ideas and work from.
Don’t worry about defining and designing this space before-hand. We will work to find and flesh-out the space over time by making, researching, collecting, and remembering. In fact, we have already started. To use the age old refrain, we will, “trust the process,” but also work to understand and define that process for ourselves.
keywords: speculative, fantasy, world-building
“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” — Frederic Jameson
“I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope… We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. (Pause.) So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” — Ursula K. Le Guin