SPECULATIVE is a curatorial project by Zach Blas and Christopher O’Leary that includes a group exhibition, performance event, panel discussion, and catalogue presented at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions from June 16 – August 28, 2011. SPECULATIVE focuses on politically and socially engaged modes of art production, with an emphasis on the experimental, subversive, and tactical potentials of media and technology in the 21st century. The artworks address notions of design, science, business, sex, gender, death, politics, environmentalism, globalization, neoliberalism, and the future, ranging from critical software, art-science fusions, social practice, experimental video, wearable architecture, performance, and more.

Coined in 1947 by Robert Heinlein, the term “speculative fiction” has been used to describe literature that focuses not on the way things are, but on how things could be different. Its writers offer audiences the freedom to imagine societies outside a traditional or dominant paradigm, making the work a useful means of examining issues of race, sexual bias, economy, science, biology, and politics by forcing the reader to confront and reconsider his or her own normative cultural assumptions.

Following this tradition, curators Christopher O’Leary and Zach Blas have brought together ten artists who see the unsustainable world we live in poised for radical reconfiguration. Embracing new modes of cultural production, including digital media, performance, and virtual communities, these artists use their imagination politically to challenge dominant paradigms. Speculative can be understood as a new type of activism; working with the impossible as a political framework, locating new sexualities and perversities, and ultimately creating new worlds, peoples, species, and ecologies.

SPECULATIVE features the artwork and writing of Casey Alt, Zach Blas, Scott Bukatman, Jeff Cain, micha cárdenas, Jordan Crandall, Sean Dockray, *particle group*, Rita Raley, Xárene Eskandar, Alexander R. Galloway, Jack Halberstam, Michael Kontopoulos, Pedro Lasch, MAL IDEA, Elle Mehrmand, Christopher O’Leary, Claudia Salamanca, Malcolm Smith, and Pinar Yoldas.