Beyond Speculation: Make the Stories Material

Abstract

This paper explores what comes after speculative narratives, when artistic practices, performances, and installations test out and attempt to enact social and technological methods for sustainable living in the Anthropocene. We heed Haraway's call for new stories and wonder what it takes to transform these stories from the speculative realm to the material realm. To explore this quandary, we share our research findings on two historical case studies, in which creative practitioners attempt to reify propositions and concepts for utopian and sustainable futures through their work. Our first case study includes the poet and potter Mary Caroline Richards and electronic composer David Tudor, who helped establish the artist led housing cooperative of Gatehill in 1954. This duo implemented ideas of philosopher and esotericist Rudolf Steiner and his Anthroposophy into their everyday lives through practices including communing, educating, gardening and art making. We will discuss the productive and guiding connections of Steiner’s spiritual environmentalism or “eco-alchemy” (McKanan, 2017) with Richards’ praxis. Our second case study explores the work of the slovenian media arts collective Zavod Projekt Atol and its founder Marko Peljhan. Since 1992, the work of Peljhan and Projekt Atol has strived to materialize the utopian visions of Russian Futurist poet, Velemir Khlebnikov, via an interpretation of the avant-garde methodology of faktura. This led to their most notable project, Makrolab, a mobile and energy autonomous laboratory for artistic, scientific and tactical media research that also supported individuals’ quests to develop new environmentally and culturally sustainable methods for living and working on a changing planet. Together, these examples reveal some of the approaches that creative practitioners might use to address climate change and environmental crisis in their own practices. We discuss these histories in order to encourage others to transform the speculative narratives that inspire them into ecologically and socially sustainable realities in the present. Show more