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contemporary art and ideas
Speculative fiction as activism
By imagining different worlds, artists articulate critiques of the present and strategies for survival.
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[ e-flux ]
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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[ KADIST ]
[ KADIST ]
GUILLOTINÆ Wanna Cry, Act Yellow: Break Room
A speculative, multi-channel montage collapses the hierarchy between political news and pop spectacle, treating all media signals as equivalently authoritative to expose how contemporary publics are formed by algorithmic adjacency, affect, and mass devotion to both celebrities and revolutionary icons. By subverting productivity imperatives amid systemic collapse, the work mobilizes feminist and anti-extractive critique through time-warped fabulation and sonic excess, insisting that “normalcy” and futurity are unstable constructs shaped by power, ecology, and collective complicity.
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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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A First Step Towards a Regional Risk Assessment
Patchy Anthropocene thinking (Tsing) is mobilized against apocalyptic totalization, reframing climate catastrophe as unevenly produced through capitalist “salvage accumulation” while still demanding scalar attention to systemic climate change.
By suturing speculative Stockholm-2040 disaster fiction to Warburg/Benjamin/Sebald/Blanchot’s trauma-memory lineages, the text argues for a resistant pessimism that preserves cultural memory and ethical accountability—“grieving and hoping at the same time”—amid securitized resilience, border regimes, and the normalization of emergency.
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