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Touchable Speculation: Crafting Critical Discourse with 3D Printing, Maker Practices, and Hypermapping

loving the alien

"Prayers they hide the saddest view
(Believing the strangest things, loving the alien)
And your prayers they break the sky in two
(Believing the strangest things, loving the alien)"

Though likely not its intended message, David Bowie's "Loving the Alien," especially the chorus (lyrics above), encapsulates how desire for the strange and impossible as a form of world-making is at the heart of the speculative.

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postscript Like Mary Shelley teaches us in Frankenstein, there is both magic and danger in making. We are responsible for the objects we make. It is preferable that they do not come back to haunt us. Many speculative works centralize the potentiality of creating new technologies, and with them, new objects that transform imagined magic into a hard reality, into new worlds, into new ways of living and being.

In a world in which “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,”[1] it seems inevitable that maker culture and 3D printing would fall fully into the capitalist machine. Yet, I want to imagine a multitude of uses and practices of maker culture and 3D printing beyond the dominant narrative. Similarly, I want to imagine the potential of academic knowledge production yielded through diverse publishing formats. This desire for potentiality sits opposite to complete understanding or absolute exploitation. Potential is dead when something is fully known or utilized in solely paradigmatic ways. I want maker practices, 3D printing, and the pursuits of research and knowledge to retain that potentiality, which requires all to be imagined and practiced beyond the static and reliable, and instead as the weird, the speculative, the creative.

Acts of speculative making create momentary glimpses of different, sometimes better, sometimes worse, elsewheres that bring the difference of that place into reality, if only temporarily. These elsewheres enable critical scholarship that explores different logics that may help us to better come to understand our own. And in the end, “It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.”[2]

[1] Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review, no. 21 (2003): 76.
[2] Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 380.