What needs to change in our understanding of reality for reality to change? The entanglement of cause and effect, affirmation and disavowal, and past and future is the premise of this collection of original essays and artwork on speculation. 

Transdisciplinary by design and concept, Speculation, Now gathers the voices of artists, architects, designers, economists, scientists, and scholars of otherness who reflect on the speculative moment in their fields. Theoretical premises and anecdotal accounts, artistic interventions and ethnographic fieldwork are brought together in a productive blurring of categories and frameworks. Original texts and visual contributions commissioned for the book literally "bend away" from known methodologies, initiating adjustments that are open-ended and, in traditional terms, unverifiable. Therein lies the subversive and critical potential of speculation. 

Loosely modeled on the visual and textual richness of the Vera List Center book Considering Forgiveness, Speculation collects texts around topics such as the imaginary, notions of time and temporality, space and spatiality, and aspects of the economy. Among the contributors are art critic Holland Cotter; anthropologists Arjun Appadurai, Filip De Boeck, Stefania Pandolfo; architects Laura Kurgan and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss; scientist Gary Lincoff; economists Darrick Hamilton and Satya Pemmaraju; philosopher Boris Groys; and artists Hans Haacke, Lize Mogel, Robert Sember, and Walid Raad. The editor of the book is anthropologist Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, with curators Prem Krishnamurthy and Carin Kuoni.