Edited by Marina Vishmidt

 As a powerful logic of contemporary life, the act of speculation is explored in this anthology through its key instantiations: art and finance. Artistic autonomy often allows the freedom to speculate wildly on material and social possibilities, with the artist as a speculative subject seen as the paragon of creativity; however, once social reality becomes speculative – risky, algorithmic and overhauled by networked markets – what becomes of the distinction between not just art and money, but art and life? Encompassing the artistic, the economic and the philosophical, with excursions into the literary and the scientific, the collected texts in Speculation survey speculative inventiveness from the ground up: speculating with constructs of the family, with technologies, with gender, and with systems of logistics and coordination. 

Artists surveyed include Joāo Enxuto and Erica Love, Melanie Gilligan, Elka Krajewska, Sam Lewitt, Jerzy Ludwiński, Adrian Piper, PiRaMMMida, Cameron Rowland, Andy Warhol

Writers include Lisa Adkins, Ramon Amaro, Jasper Bernes, Bertolt Brecht, Binna Choi, Dougal Dixon, Cédric Durand, G.W.F. Hegel, Stanisław Lem, Sophie Lewis, Peter Osborne, Philippe Pignarre, Carter Ratcliff, Isabelle Stengers, Steven Shaviro, Kerstin Stakemeier, Daniel Spaulding, Can Tue, Mi You

Marina Vishmidt is a writer, editor and a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the Masters in Culture Industry. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money and Contemporary Art (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (2016), and Speculation as a Mode of Production (2018).

Paperback, 240 pages, 210 x 145 mm

ISBN 978-0-85488-299-1

First published 2023

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