Publisher's Synopsis
Speculation is a risky endeavour. As a wager on unavailable futures, presents to come or alternative pasts, it refers to a not-knowing from which it takes its point of departure and towards which it is oriented. While economics and futurology seek to face the state of not-knowing with risk-management strategies, it is especially the arts, in their constitutive openness, that call upon spaces of possibility beyond experience and prognostic value. Thus, art signifies an exposure to uncertainty; that which is not (yet) known, but about which it is possible to speculate. As counter-laboratories, the arts are capable of testing plausible and contradictory scenarios, probing heterochronies and imagining other bodies within the realm of fiction. The publication asks what other ways of knowing speculative approaches might uncover in the arts. How does the prospective, virtual or utopian become imaginable? How can categories such as artistic production, aesthetic experience or the value of art be redefined against this background?
