Gopal Balakrishnan is a political theorist and author of The Enemy (on Carl Schmitt) and “Speculations on the Stationary State.” David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist whose books include The Democracy Project and Debt. They will discuss prospects for utopia and stagnation, in America and worldwide. 

Triple Canopy is pleased to announce Speculations (“The future is ______”), fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates about the future, as part of EXPO 1: New York at MoMA PS1. Speculations will take place from May 12 to July 28, in a structure created by artist José León Cerrillo and in an installation designed by artist Adrián Villar Rojas. Participants include Marina Abramović, Jacob Appelbaum, David Auerbach, Gopal Balakrishnan, Klaus Biesenbach, Ray Brassier, Ted Chiang, Jace Clayton, Adam Cohen, John Crowley, Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Mary “Missy” Cummings, Ruth DeFries, Samuel Delany, Agnes Denes, Silvia Federici, Peter Frase, Rivka Galchen, Alex Gourevitch, David Graeber, Group Theory, N. Katherine Hayles, Natalie Jeremijenko, Thomas Keenan, Myung Mi Kim, Katie Kitamura, Josh Kline, Benjamin Kunkel, Ajay Kurian, Rachel Kushner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Kelly Link, Marie Lorenz, Niklas Maak, Danny Marcus, Mary Mattingly, Joseph McElroy, Maureen McHugh, Yates McKee, Mileece, John Miller, Naeem Mohaiemen, Evgeny Morozov, Ted Nelson, Trevor Paglen, Ashwin Parameswaran, Otto Piene, Laura Poitras, Fatima Al Qadiri, Srikanth Reddy, David Rieff, Ben Rivers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Carne Ross, Norman Rush, Saskia Sassen, Gavin Schmidt, Taryn Simon, Elizabeth Stark, Astra Taylor, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ellen Ullman, Kathi Weeks, and Ben Wizner. 

We know all the ways the world will end. And yet, we continue. Our action in the present implies an optimism about the future, even if that optimism is skeptical, worried, or dark. For Speculations (“The future is ______”), Triple Canopy is inviting writers, artists, scientists, activists, economists, and technologists to bet on futures they want to see realized and to describe them as clearly as possible, while considering what demands these futures make on the present. The speculations will take the form of daily lectures and debates in Villar Rojas’s installation and discussions within the structure created by Cerrillo, which will also house a library and an offline file-sharing network for collective speculations, designed by artist and programmer Dan Phiffer. 

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