Speculative Fictioning Colloquium

Schedule

Intro: 20min
Reading: 25min
Fictioning: ~60min
Talking & Sharing: 10min

Intro

A workshop focused on fictioning through media archeology. Using different material and techniques, we will try to implement elements of the critical fabulation method through making that goes beyond merely writing text. Lead by Victor and Senka.

What is media archeology?

As Wikipedia states:

"Media archaeology or media archeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media through close examination of the past, and especially through critical scrutiny of dominant progressivist narratives of popular commercial media such as film and television. Media archaeologists often evince strong interest in so-called dead media, noting that new media often revive and recirculate material and techniques of communication that had been lost, neglected, or obscured. Some media archaeologists are also concerned with the relationship between media fantasies and technological development, especially the ways in which ideas about imaginary or speculative media affect the media that actually emerge."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_archaeology

References and previous work

• Broadcast of Personal Accounts of Irreplaceable Lace: A 200 year long history of Lost and Found [1]

Interface of the soundboard for the caretakers of week 7

A fictional narrative radio broadcast about archiving as a profession and an attitude, and how materials can preserve and store the past. It was a reflection on how digital archival storage often is not as reliable or stable as we want to think that it is.
The archivist of the past was using the experimental medium of lace, which was more durable but less popular than tape. There was also the presence of a dataclysm, an event which whipped presumably all digital records. So the archivists of the future ended up using pen and paper records as the most reliable ones, and a new "shimmer" technology which stores information on crystals.

Exquisite corpse writing exercise

Reading

Excerpts from Saidiya Hartman's 'Venus in Two Acts' we will read during the session to familiarize ourselves with the method of critical fabulation and the context it was created in.

Fictioning

• Look at the Sumerian archive
• If you want read something about it to familiarize yourself
• Pick a medium from what is available to you: clay, pen, paper... Feel free to pick a different one if you prefer it, anything is encouraged.
• Think about the vastness of life what was not captured in this archive, and try to bring it to the foreground with your fictioning