fiction
Collapsed Mythologies – A Geofinancial Atlas
This book explores the mythological slang of finance—from hectocorns to dark pools. Benjaminsen and Casey reveal how these "supernatural" fictions aren't just colorful talk, but forces that violently shape our real-world ecology.
Speculative Utopias / Dystopias (x3) – Visual Communication + Change
Visual Comm. + Change students built websites exploring utopias/dystopias. Narratives critique capitalism's failure, ecological decay (microplastics, melting glaciers), the loss of human senses, and the universal need for legacy / remembrance.
A Non-History of Plants
The book questions human projections and representations of the vegetal world, bringing to light the subjectivity, intelligence, and expressive abilities of plants. Tracing a visual history of plants, linking art, technology, and science, through ...
Conspiratorial Design – Information design for the bigger picture
This book argues that design and conspiracy theories, often seen as opposites, actually mirror each other. They share similar goals and use comparable methods of representation.
The Seventy Degree Route – Mobility, infrastructure, and media in a climate-altered landscape
The Seventy Degree Route follows climatologist Brian Brettschneider’s proposal—a year-long road trip across the U.S., always maintaning a constant 70°F (21°C). The project uses this route to explore how mobility, infrastructure, and media intersec...
Discerning the Silent Presence – Authenticity and Artifice
Carefully staged collision of archaeology, surveillance, and speculative fiction, Discerning the Silent Presence is a hybrid media installation that commandeers LIDAR to question whether objective scans can ever be trusted.
Future-Bored: Why We Need New Future Archetypes, Pt1
NORMALS propose a new framework for making futures more imaginative, immersive, playful, and useful: New Future Archetypes (NFAs) are immersive, authored future worlds designed to help people and orgs think differently about what’s ahead.
The Closed World – Modified telescope to observe a machine-generated cosmos
The Closed World is about truth in an age of machine-generated content. It takes a telescope - an instrument of truth - and intercepts the path of cosmic light with that of a simulated universe.
Marsokhod-0 (Марсоход-0) – Horrors of the unknown
Created by Lars Hurrelbrink at Digital Media Bremen (Fictions Speculations & Imaginaries), Marsokhod-0 (Марсоход-0) is a interactive time-delayed experience that incorporates elements of Lovecraftian horror (wiki) into the scientific background an...
The Great American Pastime – Gen AI sportscasting
Created by Dan Moore, The Great American Pastime combines Generative AI with sports storytelling to broadcast an endless series of fictional baseball games on The Infinite Baseball Radio Network. This project relies on advanced Gen AI for game sim...
The Future Fishing Training Program – N O R M A L S
Created by N O R M A L S, "The Future Fishing Training Program" is a film about a speculative device and a programme designed to allow users and companies to discover glimpses of a desirable future through stories and artefacts.
Dread Bass – AUDINT’s alternate timelines reverberate with fear and death
AUDINT is a European artist collective working across animation, installation, and publishing. Drawing on excerpts from an extended conversation with the group, we unpack their vision of the dystopian future-present and the nether zones that can b...
Solace: How We Made the Interactive Speculative Fiction
Part of a new series of posts inviting artists and curators to share latest projects on CAN, we'd like to introduce you to Evan Boehm, and his latest collaboration with Nexus Studios. Solace is an interactive animated film based on celebrated scie...
Too Much Information – Keiichi Matsuda’s vision for augmented and mixed reality
Riding high on the wave of massive interest in his most recent work “Hyper-Reality,” which depicts a super-mediated Medellín, Colombia of the near future, director/designer Keiichi Matsuda chats with CAN about augmented reality, Silicon Valley, an...
High-Speed Horizons – Counterfactual history of supersonic flight
Created by Tim Clark at the Royal College of Art, Design Interactions, High Speed Horizons is a design-driven, critical exploration into technology, innovation, big thinking, and our constantly changing attitudes towards the three, told through pr...
ERIS—2000: Fictional scientific instrument for complex systems
Created by William Fairbrother, Alberto Ruiz Soler and Oliver Smith, ERIS—2000 is a fictional scientific instrument invented by cybernetician Erica Symms in 1971. The device was used to show and study, through a simplified simulation, the conseque...
Beyond Blood – Emotional attachment and inheritance by algorithm
‘Beyond Blood’ is a project that imagines a legal system where algorithms take over the inheritance process where the deceased has not left a will and the state has to distribute the estates.
Therefore I Am – Fictional instrument to explore prenatal diagnostics
"Therefore I Am" is a project exploring prenatal diagnostics - the measurement of a human before birth and consequences and ethics as scientists encode our DNA further and further.
Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming – Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby
Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas.
Pro-Folio – Online portfolios from fictional artists and designers
Pro-Folio is a portfolio website that can generate up to 690,903,803 trillion portfolios of fictional artists and designers with unique name and work combinations.
Delineating the Future – an interview with N O R M A L S
CAN goes in-depth with the Paris-based 'anticipatory' design studio N O R M A L S to learn about their forthcoming dark, dense, and dizzying graphic novel series. Working process, representational techniques (that bridge illustration and code), an...
Speculative Everything – Anthony Dunne at Resonate 2013 and UmK
Continuing our documentation of Resonate 2013, it's a pleasure to present the talk of Anthony Dunne, professor and head of the Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art in London
