Speculations (“The future is ______”), Ed. by Triple Canopy, Triple Canopy, 2015.
In the summer of 2013, Triple Canopy invited more than sixty writers, artists, scientists, activists, economists, and technologists to make bets on the future. Triple Canopy asked: Which future do you want to see realized? How precisely can you describe it? What demands might this future make on the present? These speculations were to be optimistic, even if that optimism were skeptical or dark. They were presented as Speculations (“The future is ______”), a fifty-day series of lectures, discussions, and debates at MoMA PS1, Triple Canopy’s contribution to the exhibition “EXPO 1.” In subsequent months, Triple Canopy continued the speculations by way of public conversations about climate change and inequality, geoengineering, and the way in which we conceive of and represent nature.
This book, a lexicon of central terms of Speculations, is meant to convey the relationship between ideation and action, in order to suggest viable approaches not just to interpreting the world but to changing it. Triple Canopy considers economic interventions (“guaranteed basic income”), political abstractions (“reform or revolution,” “prometheanism”), figments of the imagination (“interplanetary colonization”), emerging technologies (“enhancement”), and useful neologisms (“hedge-fund utilitarians”). Each of the more than sixty entries consists of edited excerpts from speculations made by, among others, Fatima Al Qadiri, David Auerbach, Gopal Balakrishnan, Ray Brassier, Holly Jean Buck, Ted Chiang, Jace Clayton, CA Conrad, John Crowley, Samuel Delany, Esther Dyson, Silvia Federici, Rivka Galchen, David Graeber, N. Katherine Hayles, Katie Kitamura, Josh Kline, Benjamin Kunkel, Rachel Kushner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mary Mattingly, Naeem Mohaiemen, Evgeny Morozov, Hương Ngô, Trevor Paglen, Ashwin Parameswaran, Christian Parenti, Laura Poitras, Srikanth Reddy, David Rieff, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Rush, Sukhdev Sandhu, Edward Snowden, Astra Taylor, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Kathi Weeks. The book includes new artwork by José Léon Cerillo, who created the structure that housed Speculations at MoMA PS1.
We know all the ways the world will end. And yet, we continue. Our action in the present implies an optimism about the future, even if that optimism is skeptical, worried, or dark. For Speculations (“The future is ______”), Triple Canopy is inviting writers, artists, scientists, activists, economists, and technologists to bet on futures they want to see realized and to describe them as clearly as possible, while considering what demands these futures make on the present. The speculations will take the form of daily lectures and debates in Villar Rojas’s installation and discussions within the structure created by Cerrillo. Call for Applications
Speculations (“The future is ______”) is a school of sorts, and its success depends on regular attendance by a dedicated student body, who will develop their own speculations about the future over the course of a summer’s worth of discussions. Triple Canopy is looking to enlist a group of fifteen to twenty-five students who can prepare for and attend classes on weekends and Monday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons. You are invited to apply by completing our questionnaire about your speculative future. Applications are due May 5.
About EXPO 1: New York
EXPO 1: New York is a large-scale exploration of ecological challenges in the context of the economic and sociopolitical instability of the early twenty-first century. Acting in the guise of a festival-as-institution, EXPO 1: New York reconsiders the museum from the ground up, presenting a simultaneity of modules, interventions, solo projects, and group exhibitions that encompass all of MoMA PS1 and other locations such as MoMA and Rockaway Beach. EXPO 1: New York is made possible by a partnership with Volkswagen.
Triple Canopy is an online magazine, workspace, and platform for editorial and curatorial activities. Working collaboratively with writers, artists, and researchers, Triple Canopy facilitates projects that engage the Internet’s specific characteristics as a public forum and as a medium, one with its own evolving practices of reading and viewing, economies of attention, and modes of interaction. In doing so, Triple Canopy is charting an expanded field of publication, drawing on the history of print culture while acting as a hub for the exploration of emerging forms and the public spaces constituted around them. Triple Canopy is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization. - Bruce Sterling