Speculation

As a powerful logic of contemporary life, the act of speculation is explored in this anthology through its key instantiations: art and finance. Artistic autonomy often allows the freedom to speculate wildly on material and social possibilities, with the artist as a speculative subject seen as the paragon of creativity; however, once social reality becomes speculative - risky, algorithmic and overhauled by networked markets - what becomes of the distinction between not just art and money, but art and life? Encompassing the artistic, the economic and the philosophical, with excursions into the literary and the scientific, the collected texts in Speculation survey speculative inventiveness from the ground up: speculating with constructs of the family, with technologies, with gender, and with systems of logistics and coordination.