A new way to explore
contemporary art and ideas
Can speculative design help us imagine better futures?
Artists use speculative tools to propose alternative technologies, institutions, and ways of living.
[ e-flux ]
[ e-flux ]
Counterfactuals
Counterfactual thinking is framed as an artistic-theoretical method that, unlike opportunistic “alternative facts,” rigorously reworks causation to unsettle historical inevitability and expose the contingent, mycelial entanglement of human and nonhuman agents.
By linking speculative play to legal and political frameworks (sine qua non reasoning, reparations, restitution), the text argues that imagining parallel pasts functions as “memory work” that contests institutional power, reorients cultural narratives, and expands the horizon of equitable futures.
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[ KADIST ]
[ KADIST ]
One we are not
Archival collecting and anecdotal exactitude operate as generative methods, assembling a cartography of clues in which images and titles form an intertextual network that renders the overlooked textures of everyday life newly legible. Counterfactual “what-if” scenarios and narrative pedagogy function as a conceptual critique of the institutional and social rules that govern how art and culture are produced, perceived, and valued.
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[ KADIST ]
[ KADIST ]
[ KADIST ]
The Lonely Age
Experimental eco-dystopian mythmaking mobilizes the seed as a speculative, possibly sentient object to probe nonlinear temporalities of environmental crisis and the ideological mechanics through which hope, rumor, and skepticism are produced.
By hybridizing propaganda, documentary, and avant-garde cinema, the work critiques capitalist conditioning and colonial/racialized othering while testing whether apocalyptic romance can be ethically repurposed toward cooperative, non-hierarchical survival that acknowledges more-than-human agency.
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Styles and Customs in the 2020s
Speculative vignettes stage the 2020s as an accelerationist collapse of modern distinctions—public/private, art/life, human/tech—where platform capitalism, data extraction, and privatization reorganize subjectivity into quantified affect, curated identity, and engineered desire amid ecological crisis.
Post-ironic lifestyle aesthetics, Afrofuturist and queer biohacker counter-myths, and the end of authorship/appropriation converge into a critique of neoliberal governance and microfascist “props,” imagining culture as distributed operations and curation-as-power while exposing utopian freedom as a managed, content-producing enclosure.
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