Speculative Frictions
A Wilderness of Elsewheres
2009 audio score by Mike Maurillo, 2 channel video, 10:26 loop, edition of 5 Available
0(rphan)d(rift>) cyberpositive
1995 book 5 1/8" x 7 7/8" Available
Talisman 1
2019 charred wood, crystals and cristalina 11" x 17" x 10" Available
A Bright Stage 16
2018 pigment on linen 348" x 48" Available
A Bright Stage 8
2018 pigment and UV inkjet print on silk on linen 204" x 60" Available
Echolocation
2016 nazar glass amulet, silk, and torches dimensions variable Available
Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit
2016 hand sewn cotton 31 1/2" x 40" Available
Tactical Snakes Cart
2017 white oak, ceramic, steel, urethane, and rubber tubing 46" x 28" x 18" Available
67p
2019 Voxeljet 3D print, steel, and plastic 24" x 18" x 16" Available
Digital Knot
2018 digital print, edition of 3 30" x 40" Available
Game of Skill
2018 cast gallium 10" x 12" x 12" Available
Core Memory (8 bytes)
2016 tumbled magnetite stones, copper, adhesive, plastic, and metal alloys 12" x 12" x 1" Available
Meander Vessel with Description of a Key for a Future Lock
2019 ceramic with self-organizing meander glaze and hologram 15" x 10 " x 7" Sold
Spare Evidence #1
2019 ink and graphite on paper 33 1/8" x 23 1/4" Available
Statement
"Speculative Frictions" makes what poet Joan Retallack refers to as a "poethical wager" on the "Experimental Feminine" or open-ended research into the unintelligible as opposed to the hypothesis-driven scientific method (masculine) research that stakes out its end position (the hypothesis to be supported—or not—by empirical data) before it begins. Scientists, that is, “strategically ask only answerable questions.” The experimental feminine is, by contrast, “all that is not business as usual and vice versa.” This wager is guided by what Retallack calls a feminine dyslogic, what we will call rather an extra-logic or “the need to operate outside official logics—[which] is essential because official logics exist to erase any need to operate outside official logics, i.e., the feminine.” This erasure is not unrelated to the structural oppression of Federico Campagna’s Technic, and to it can be opposed, as he writes, forms of what he calls Magic.
Against both the brutalities of the current economic/political landscape and against the easy capitulations of accelerationist theoretical positions, can we speculate freely that many worlds are possible? Can we prototype aspects of futures in manners micro and macro, sci-fi and organic, practical and im-? And of course, what does it mean to ask questions such as these in this venue?
The speculations of these artists include tools, propositions, juxtapositions, situations, writing (and writing as in coding) worlds, or wrighting in a way that leverages spaces to be found in the cracks in the continually reforming edifice of patriarchal capitalism. Their work is grounded in various forms and methods of research, from experiential, material, and lab-based to historical to lateral or serendipitous Google searches and YouTube tutorials. This is a DIY, punk, pragmatism that says yes, we take what we will from existing ways and means (to include deprecated), but also perhaps our way is as good as any.
We are learning all the time.