Speculation Under Lab Conditions
A workshop in the Sense and Speculation series August 28-29, 2024 Utrecht University ArtLab
What is a laboratory? What was a lab 100 years ago? 2500? What is a lab today, in the era of computational tools? What else can a lab become?
Our workshop set out to explore both labs and imagination itself. To do so, we designed experiments that combined speculative fiction writing and hands-on sensory making. Labs and speculative fiction—an umbrella term that includes science fiction, fantasy, weird fiction, slipstream, magical realism, fabulism, and more—pair curiously well together. Labs not only produce discoveries that inspire speculative worldbuilding, they are themselves already steeped in speculation. The scientific imagination guides research questions, methods, and analysis. And more than that, labs exist as spaces set apart, carefully controlled to bridge the real and the not-quite-real.
We gathered a small group of folks from different disciplines and practices, including art history, ceramics, earth science, fiction writing, game studies, multimedia art, music, and poetry. Drawing on sustainability as a loose guiding frame to inform our prompts for writing and making, we asked:
How are the possibilities we can imagine shaped by material, embodied practice?
How can we redream the laboratory as a space to write speculative fiction?
How do sense and speculation intertwine under lab conditions?
The beginning
We began the morning of day one by getting to know one another. Working from carefully designed prompts, we undertook individual and collaborative exercises to heighten our awareness of the materiality of text and the many possibilities of experimenting in a lab. Together, we recentered our approaches to writing and making away from the precious or the polished and instead toward hands-on play.
prompt
Surface hidden possibilities in a physical text through redaction.
With a paintbrush, or...
...white-out.
Paragraphs? Or geological layers?
prompt
Describe a lab in the future/another world that no one you know would recognize as a lab…
At noon every day the tide washes in. Pools and cisterns fill with water, the devices in them come floating to the top where they bob around emitting friendly little bleeps… Happy to see each other again after the low tide hours of separation, the lab workers shift around the pools… Tenderly they inspect the equipment with their suckered arms, tasting the water…
Laura op de Beke
(prompt)
…then, use the tools and apparatuses available in the ArtLab to “destroy” or “alter” this new material text…
A collaboration under the fume hood: while one participant makes soot to write with, another infuses their text with the scent of smoke.
An instrument to strum.
(prompt)
…Examine the different creations. What stories and events, worlds and lives, can we redream in/around/from these creative remnants?
How does hands-on sensory experience affect how we imagine?
In the afternoon of day one, we experimented with imagining other possibilities in conjunction with various types of sensory input. What does experiencing stickiness—through scent, color, temperature, viscosity, texture, and more—contribute to imagining stories of stickiness? How does hands-on sensory making impact mind-on word making?
prompt
Increasingly, people’s voices are becoming stuck together. Explore how a community adapts.
...For voices to stick together you need a tether, you can’t stick to someone you’re pulling away from. Even purposefully trying to talk in a stuck manner will not work for those pulling… At first it was embarrassing to have your dirty laundry aired like that. Now it’s become a feature to boast about. It’s a status symbol… It’s far more embarrassing to unstick than to have never been stuck at all.
Clara Mikellides De Chiaro
prompt
Create an ink that is good for “writing sticky.”
write me in stained honey
Aimee Ogden
Sticky substances fall to form droplets on the page.
prompt
Pain and joy are now measured with regard to stickiness. Write.
Honey: A warm, fleeting happiness, like being in good company.
Cement: Mental pain, hopelessness, you are stuck.
Gum on the bottom of your shoe: An incapacitating pain, a broken bone, an intense migraine.
Sugar residue: A pleasant memory, easily reactivated.
Collagen glue: A feeling of accomplishment.
Partially removed sticker: Heartbreak, betrayal.
Cleanly removed sticker: You are high on XTC or something similar.
Jan van Daal
prompt
Make glue out of dairy milk…
Crumbling the curds.
(prompt)
…then, everyone should hold some of the glue in their right hands. Shake hands with the rest of the group to congratulate each other on the success of your glue-making.
How does embodied experience affect how we imagine?
On day two, we combined structured prompts with a collaboratively built prompt deck to explore intersections of space, body, and speculation. Labs and writing both entail expectations for embodied experience, with habitual practices of positioning and moving the body. What might challenging these expectations enable us to imagine? What kinds of imagining do—or don’t—standard lab practices support? How does an immediate physical experience impact the substance of a story? The flow of writing?
prompt
Occupy the space in an unexpected way.
Such as hiding under a lab coat…
...or a lab bench.
Have you ever written a story beneath a fume hood?
A custom prompt deck, created the day before.
A pull from the prompt deck.
prompt
Choose one of the ten bodily instructions below to follow.
- Sit on the meditation cushion in the lotus position (Note: only one cushion is available).
- Wear laboratory gloves.
- Sprawl on the picnic blanket.
- Stand contrapposto.
- Keep one eye closed.
- Walk in place.
- Pose like Rodin’s The Thinker.
- Hide from everyone else.
- Write from the bottom of the page, moving upwards; or, if on a laptop, turn your device upside-down.
- Haunt the lab.
Laughing, we gather again to share.
Beginning the next beginning
To close the workshop, we invited participants to join us in expanding the practice by designing exercises themselves.
Write, on cotton rag paper, a letter to the rocks that will be present on the earth 1 million years from now. In the fume hood, burn the paper with the writing to an ash. Make an ink from the ash. Using the pigment, write one sentence from the letter on a chosen rock outdoors.
Adriana Knouf
...build a sensory experience with the personal touch of each participant, free from judgment or from aiming at a ‘correct’ outcome. [For example, make] a smell per group, where each participant adds a scent of choice. The groups could then swap each group smell and write a story inspired by it.
Benedetta Pompili
Acknowledgements
With thanks to our participants:
- Marjolijn Bol
- Laura op de Beke
- Jan van Daal
- Esmee Geerken
- Adriana Knouf
- Clara Mikellides De Chiaro
- Aimee Ogden
- Benedetta Pompili
- Henrike Scholten
- Mia You
This workshop was funded by the ERC-project Dynamics of the Durable: A History of Making Things Last in the Visual and Decorative Arts (DURARE), grant no. 852732.
The Sense and Speculation workshop series is a joint collaboration of Amy Johnson and Grace Kim-Butler. To hire us, propose a collaboration, or explore our individual work, find us at: