A Visual Essay based on 10 images produced in response to the specialist course,
accompanied by written critical commentary (1500 words).
This method of collection, collaging and accumulation of images is suggested by the work
of the historian Abi Warburg ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’ who ‘thought this visual, metaphoric
encyclopaedia, with its constellations of symbolic images, would animate the viewer’s
memory, imagination, and understanding of what he called “the afterlife of antiquity.”
In the context of this module, our suggestion here is that you think of Warburg’s prompts
and your visual essay and as a ‘future facing’ form of accumulation that would animate a
possible ‘afterlife’ of a present time that you wish to bring into being –to ‘world’– in your
own work. They might suggest tangible developments but can also be understood as ‘time
capsules’ sent further to an unspecified time/place/situation.
Readings/Sources:
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative
Finance’, (2015)
Alberto Duman, ‘Haunting the Future City’ (2019)
Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, ‘Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a
Financialized World’ (2022)
Pablo Helguera, Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World, 2012
Gesturing Towards Decolonised Futures, (2021)
Mackenzie Wark. ‘Ficting and Facting’ (2020)
SUPERFLUX, “We’re calling time on human exceptionalism” Manifesto, 2021.
http://superflux.in/#
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIj1_MiFjfU
Larissa Sansour, ‘In the Future They Ate From The Finest Porcelain’, 2015.
White Pube, Ideas for A New Art World, Rough Trade Books, 2021
Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value subjectivity in Art
and Capital, Brill, 2018. (Introduction)
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and
Apocalyptic Anthropology, University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Nele Wynants, When Fact Is Fiction: Documentary Art in the Post-Truth Era, Valiz, 2020.
Schavemaker, M. Folkerts, H. Lindner, C. (eds) FACING FORWARD: Art & Theory from a
Future Perspective, Amsterdam University Press, 2015.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs: M Archive: After the End of the World, Duke University Press, 2018.
adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha (eds), Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction
Stories from Social Justice Movements, AK Press, 2015.
Stephanie Polsky, The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanisation, Technology, and the Atlantic
World, Punctum Books, 2022 (Introduction).