Oral Presentation script: Objects, speculation and the (im)possibility of Realisation

The purpose of uploading the script here is to further explore / link to ideas in future blog posts.

My developing practice is concerned with the positioning of objects and possibilities within a sculptural frame of reference. Currently, I am also interested in the concept of the hybrid form through the combined object and explorations of specific dichotomies. I would like to discuss these idea within the context of four key themes; Speculation, Representation, Objects and Adhocism, and the coexistence of the digital and analogue. To begin, I will discuss: Speculation as a methodology, with reference to curator and writer Carin Kuoni. Speculation as an approach in critical, that design discusses alternative ways of being via designer Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. And lastly, speculations use in art objects that materialises structures of science fiction in reference to curator Lizzie Muller.Then, representation and form from the virtual to the object via my work HydExpRAM (2021) and American Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965).In the third section, I will discuss theorist and landscape architect Charles Jencks’ notion of adhocism, with particular reference to my mid-year installation for now, for later (2021).Lastly, I will explore my most recent studio explorations into the conversations and co-existence between the digital and the analogue.

“Stationed at the edge of itself, or of its present knowledge, the thinking mind launches a suit for understanding into the unknown... The mind reaches out from what is known and actual to something different, possibly desired or something else.” [1] This quote from Eros The bittersweet (1986), written by poet Anne Carson, metaphorically summarises the process of speculation I find myself working with. One where speculation is free of economic understanding, forecasting, predictions and risk association.[2] Instead, this method situates itself at an edge, peering over to explore something not yet evident.[3] In Speculation, now, a wide-range of writers and artists explore how speculation could utilised as a framework for constructive thought and progressive change. In the foreword, curator and critic, Carin Kuoni, notes that speculation as a methodology, or a habit of thought, embraces the unknowable: something that remains obscure and unverifiable. [4] This speculation also highlights a necessity to weigh, hold and connect what is, with what might be, into balance. [5]

This notion of balance between what is and what if is essential to post 1990s speculative design. In Hertzian Tales, designer Anthony Dunne establishes that by going beyond product innovation and marketplace ideologies, speculative design explores the aesthetics of the social, psychological and cultural experiences objects mediated in everyday life. [6] Dunne and his design partner Fiona Raby, further developed this idea in their book Speculative Everything published in 2013. In which, they note that speculative designs create a “space for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being ...act[ing] as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality “ “...challen[ging] narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life.” [7] [8] Designer James Auger similarly comments on the possibilities of speculative design by locating the importance prototypes and fictionality in the move away from traditional design processes to speculate on future products, services, systems and worlds. [9] Dunne and Raby’s proposal titled Designs for an overpopulated planet, no: 1 Foragers, exemplifies how fictional scenarios and prototypes can be adopted to analyse circumstances of today and possibilities of tomorrow. A scenario where, based on contemporary information, futile governments and industry have failed to address food scarcity, causing individuals to create their own solutions. [10] Information from evolutionary processes, animal digestive systems, synthetic microbiomes and alternative farming methods are utilised to speculative how future farming could be. [11] That foraging tools could extend from the corporeal core, making inanimate tools defunct. I am interested how in suggesting possible uses, interactions, and behaviours, Dunne and Raby invite the viewer to imaginatively interpret the origin, context and values behind their prototypes.

Thinking about the relationship between design and art, the closest these entities meet is via their “sub- categories,’ of conceptual art and conceptual design due to their ability to set ideas as precedents.[12] Despite this closeness and speculative design’s borrowing of fictional worlds, scenarios and prefigurative futures from art, Dunne and Raby maintain there is a separation between the two. [13] For me, operating within methodologies of fine art opens the parameters of speculative design to greater extremes, without ties to the everyday. And, therefore introduces a greater scope of possibility and flux.

In her essay Speculative Objects: materialising science fiction, curator Lizzie Muller delineates that speculative objects are philosophical tools, or unreal conduits, that consist of an amalgamation of fact and fiction, instigating substantial reflection and imagining.[14] Speculative objects can then support or activate structures of science fiction. Utilising a fictional lens, science fiction, refreshes humanity’s gaze, encouraging us to explore the impacts of scientific discovery and technological advancements on individuals, societies and the earth. Thinking about science fictions relationship to reality, Donna Haraway notes In her A Cyborg Manifesto (1991), that the cyborg, fictionally maps our social and bodily reality, and acts an imaginative resource. [15] One way the cyborg dissolves this illusionary boundary is through medical regeneration technologies such as IVF, genetic modification and engineering. Which favours a regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of replication. [16] In the collage titled Dream of a common language in the disintegrating circuit, artist Deborah Kelly combines ancient aquatic forms with futuristic female babes. Kelly’s collaged mythological creatures and cyborgs, were presented alongside an audio track which explores emerging reproductive technologies such as ex-uterine gestation. [17] In exploring Haraway’s cyborg regeneration and impact of genetic modification, biomimicry, and reproductive technologies, Kelly’s speculative objects directs the audience to different iterations of womb- less reproduction across histories, theories and fiction, emphasising ethical questions and possibilities. Asking the viewer to question the so called divide between science fiction and fact.

My approach has also shifted from utilising moving image and the spectacle of a digital space to explore the object as form, or conduit, of an idea. In this way, my use of a low-frame rate moving image, more akin to a double take, localises to the object and places the context of the object within the speculative capacity of the viewer.I was interested in facades of accessibility: where modes of communication attempt to delineate and foster understandings of mechanical objects and their processes. How an object and its parts’ image, construction and action in a process are explained via different modes of virtuality. When lacking basic supplementary information or combined with other complex representations, like audio and schematics, their delineation becomes disorientating, making the explanations appear more esoteric than accessible. Although the work on this is at an early stage, it highlights my interest in multiple modes of representation in one installation, and the ability to allude to slippages between understanding and mis- understanding, which creates a space for speculation and possibility. When thinking about the transference of form, American Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) exemplifies how an object can exist across multiple modes of representation: As an object, as an image, and as words. The chair is physically “tangible” as a 3d manufactured form, “virtually” accessible as a written definition and “liminal” as a photographic image. To Kosuth, form across representations is not tied to speculation or believability, as he utilises language “in our understanding of and relationship with real objects”. [18] Instead, Kosuth uses form not as a notion of physicality, rather as a concept to be communicated. Therefore, three dimensionality is only one presentation of form itself. Here, Kosuth questions whether types of representation are important, whether it is possible to articulate their differences, and if there is a representation that is most accurate.[19] [20] What I find most poignant is Kosuth’s problematising of the relationship between representations, the concepts they refer to and meaning. That representations have their own distinct properties, represented, experienced and read in different ways. How this creates artefacts that are equal in value, but not necessarily equal in the information they communicate.

The notion of speculative outcomes transposing virtual representations to physical ones, became a point of contention within my research. Materialising these objects is a concept I find intrinsically problematic, as physicality significantly reduces speculative condition and rather places it in relation to tangible existence. In exposing the object’s capacity to exist and function, the speculative object is then subjected to re- categorisation and becomes an impossible, dysfunctional, realised or anti-aesthetic object. Or, a prop or sculpture. This idea of the speculative and the virtual was addressed by Kuoni, who noted that physical outcomes of the speculative process can be paradoxical,“What emerges from the speculative process is and remains virtual....What emerges [does not] lack reality, but rather it remains in a process of potential realisation. The speculative outcome cannot then be made in the object of the real, but in an image of virtuality, in which any actualisation....corresponds to a virtual multiplicity.” [21] An example of a virtual medium I use in my works is 3D computer modelling to communicate speculative objects constructed from created and existing digital parts. Borrowed from the design, manufacturing and entertainment sector, computer modelling allows an image of a thing to be virtually described. Ensuring its form has no functionality and only an illusion of physicality. In Speculative Everything (2013), Dunne and Raby believe that physical outcomes from models to uncanny functional objects are essential to speculative design’s tension between the here-and-now and yet to exist. [22] Regarding my own project, I prefer the liminality of models or prototypes. In being a non-functional object with reduced materials and details, the model retains the virtuality noted by Kuoni. As seen in Noam Toran, Onkar Kular, and Keith R. Jones’ Koons Balloon Mould, the model balances between not quite idea and not quite object. This quasi status blurs the distinctions between the virtuality of fiction, dreams, imagination and the physicality of the every day. [23] These models then become props or approximations, suggestive in their form or ability to exist, but speculative in their functionality, context and idea. My stance then situates somewhere between Kuoni’s virtuality of speculation and Dunne and Raby’s uncanny functional outcomes.

Avoiding pure physicality, I was interested in how representations could have three-dimensionality through their surface or support. Using perspective drawing and a cuboid, this sketch, explores a greater sense of interactivity and understanding of the (represented) object without the need for its own three-dimensionality. Lithophanes similarly combine attributes of drawing and sculpture. Like ancient relief sculptures, and pictorial representations, the lithophane is dependant on its background to create an illusion of three-dimensional form. [24] Yet, the lithophane contains a level of physicality as it projects from, or cuts into its surface. [25] As shown in these 3D printed lithophane tests, material thickness and lighting position is essential to the perception of the represented image as two or three dimensional. In Adhocism: The case for improvisation (2013), architectural historian and landscape architect Charles Jencks and architect Nathan Silver discuss adhocism within architecture and design. Adhocism can be defined as a “principle of action [that has] speed ... and purpose or utility... it involves using an available system in a new way to solve a problem quickly and efficiently.” [26] In dissecting and recombining parts, adhocism produces everyday improvisations that solve real-world problems and inherently modifies or challenges the underlying system of its origin. In Dining Chair, Silver combines parts from a tractor, wheelchair and bicycle with gas pipes into a wheely- chair for rough brick flooring. Dining chair moves beyond its specific purpose in its referencing to wider meanings and images, as its part are designed by a variety of individuals, for a variety purposes. [27] Counterpointing the idea of the perfect, standardised product sought in mainstream design, branding and large corporations, adhocism avoids the one-ness of globalism and the globcult. [28] In 1972 and 2013, Jencks and Silver hoped adhocism would introduce creative pluralism and consumer democracy, where individuals could create and customise their own hybrids from mass-produced objects and materials. [29] In response to Jencks’ adhocism and with a regard speculation’s virtuality, I began thinking about how everyday, functional objects could be installed alongside speculative ones. Dunne and Raby note the speculative object exits the speculative sphere when it adopts full functionality, and re-enters everyday life as an anti-aesthetic object. [30] Although speculation and fictionality are halted, the object still adheres to other attributes of critical design, such as undermining existing and undesirable ideologies or systems. When creating anti-aesthetic functional objects, the immediacy of bricolage and dissectability as a form of adhocism, feels appropriate, as it mirrors my digital methodology of combined parts for an alternative whole.

In for now, for later, I was interested in how manufactured objects could be used as parts to create ad-hoc medical tools that helped carry out specific tasks and thus facilitated independence. Constructed from an observed need, these objects reject the idea of ‘invention for invention’s sake.Their specificity is not based upon one individual, rather creation aiming to avoid becoming surplus debris. Though these objects referenced the body, their presentation displaced them from a specific user or context and froze their functionality - if only for a while. In the gallery context, these tools became art objects whose specific function was left in ambiguity for the purpose of favouring their overall idea: being self-made tools that addressed gaps traditional tools missed. Here, ambiguity and the non-defined object create a space for object possibility. Following for now, for later, I considered how I could conflate distinctions of time and physicality making them less binary. How the speculative didn’t have to be tied to existence but could be associated with being a non-definitive or non-standardised form. The possibility that existence, form, representation and materiality aren’t permanent, and instead can shift and change - sliding up and down on a scale. Thinking about these spectrums re-raises questions like: How the could digital and analogue could interact, coexist or feed into one another? And, how is this feasible when seeking to retain speculation and possibility? Exploring these questions, I have experimented with 3D scanning via the Qlone app. 3D scanning allows a real-object’s form, colour and texture to be transferred into digital files and models. Therefore, creating virtual and physical counterparts to exist simultaneously. Where the physical object might have to be de- construct and re-utilised, 3D scanning can record and store its form. In their digitisation these objects can be duplicated, proliferated and edited with ease. Where 3D scans transfer real-world objects into to the digital sphere, augmented reality, allows digital content to be added into our environment. The connection of the virtual and real creates interaction and seemingly co-existence with people, other objects and space within physical reality via the mediation of a camera and screen.Therefore creating a hybridised reality. Lastly within this exploration of the digital and analogue, I’ve been experimenting with making an open- source website. Within my research, open-source means making object and blender files of speculative objects publicly accessible. These files are fully editable and can be used in various outcomes such as AR, animations or 3D prints. These files are subject to, and re-distributed at, the discretion of the downloader. In the same way manufactured objects can be dissected into new material in Jencks’ adhocism, the open- source objects becomes material again. Reopening them to speculation and new possibilities of form, materials, existence, intentions and ways of being.

Through discussing the four key themes of Speculation, Representation, Objects and Adhocism, and the Coexistence of the digital and analogue, what becomes clear is my interest in the hybridised form. Both as a construction method and concept. Which results in navigating spectrums, such as digital/analogue, anti- aesthetic/manufactured form, unrealised/ realised and fictional/real. This oscillation is not an act of indecisiveness, but an exploration of pluralism and multiplicity that moves away from dichotomies towards mere distinctions and greater possibilities.

[1] - Anne Carson, Eros the bittersweet, (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998),71 [2] - Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Prem Krishnamurthy and Carin Kuoni, Speculation, Now: essays and artwork, (Duke University Press, 2014), 14-26 [3] - Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Prem Krishnamurthy and Carin Kuoni, Speculation, Now: essays and artwork. (Duke University Press, 2014), 14-26.

[4] -Carin Kuoni, “Preface” in Speculation, Now: essays and artwork, ed.Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao and Prem Krishnamurthy (Duke University Press, 2014), 10-14. [5] - Carin Kuoni, “Preface” in Speculation, Now: essays and artwork, ed.Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao and Prem Krishnamurthy (Duke University Press, 2014), 10-14. [6] - “Overview,” Hertzian tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, MIT Press, accessed September 5th, 2021, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hertzian-tales. [7] - Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming, ( Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013), 2. 8 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming, 34. [9] - James Auger, “Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation,” in Digital Creativity, vol. 24, no.1 (March, 2013): 1. [10] - Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming, 151. [11] - Ibid. [12] - Ibid, 14.

[13] - Ibid, 3.

[14] - Lizzie Muller, “Speculative objects: materialising science fiction,” in Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art, ed. K.Cleland, L. Fisher & R. Harley (Sydney: ISEA International, 2013): 1 [15] - Donna Haraway,”A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (Routledge: 1991), 6-7 [16] - Donna Haraway,”A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (Routledge: 1991), 67 [17] - Ibid, 2. [18] - Jo Kear, “Joseph Kosuth: Clock (One and Five), English/Latin Version (Exhibition Version),” Tate Modern, published July, 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kosuth-clock-one-and-five-english-latin-version-exhibition-version-t07319. [19] - “One and Three Chairs,” Moma Learning, accessed September 5th, 2021, https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/joseph- kosuth-one-and-three-chairs-1965/ [20] - “Art: One and Three Chairs: Joseph Kosuth (American, b. 1945),” Annenberg Learner, accessed September 5th, 2021, https:// www.learner.org/series/art-through-time-a-global-view/writing/one-and-three-chairs/ [21] - Carin Kuoni, “Preface” in Speculation, Now: essays and artwork, ed.Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao and Prem Krishnamurthy (Duke University Press, 2014), 10-14. [22] - Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming, 43-44

[23] - Ibid, 119-120.

[24] - “Relief," in Encyclopedia Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia, October 3, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/art/relief-sculpture. 25 Ibid. [26] - Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation, (The MIT Press, 2013), vii, http://www.jstor.org/stable/ j.ctt5hhcvj. [27] - Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation, 79 [28] - Ibid, viii [29] - Ibid. [30] - Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming, 122

Bibliography Annenberg Learner. “Art: One and Three Chairs: Joseph Kosuth (American, b. 1945).” Accessed September 5th, 2021. https://www.learner.org/series/art-through-time-a-global-view/writing/one-and-three-chairs/ Auger, James. “Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation.” In Digital Creativity, 24 (March, 2013) Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby. Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013. Haraway, Donna. ”A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. Jencks, Charles and Nathan Silver. Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation. The MIT Press, 2013. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhcvj. Kear, Jo. “Joseph Kosuth: Clock (One and Five), English/Latin Version (Exhibition Version).” Tate Modern. Published July, 2015. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kosuth-clock-one-and-five-english-latin-version- exhibition-version-t07319. MIT Press. “Overview.” Hertzian tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design. Accessed September 5th, 2021. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hertzian-tales. Moma Learning. “One and Three Chairs.” Accessed September 5th, 2021. https://www.moma.org/learn/ moma_learning/joseph-kosuth-one-and-three-chairs-1965/ Muller, Lizzie. “Speculative objects: materialising science fiction.” In Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art. edited by K.Cleland, L. Fisher & R. Harley. Sydney: ISEA International, 2013. Rao, Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Carin Kuoni. Speculation, Now: essays and artwork. Duke University Press, 2014. T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Relief.” Encyclopedia Britannica. October 3, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/ art/relief-sculpture.