What was I thinking?

I was thinking about speculative work and about the potential for seductive images to be used to progressive ends. But already I see problems and that’s after just one sentence… I was thinking about problems.

It is easier to criticize concrete projects. They have passed through a process of materialization involving compromises and contingencies. It is more exciting and also safer to present speculative intrusions: proposals that are so weird or dangerous or illegal that they could never be constructed or performed. I was thinking about an investigation of illegal architecture, illegal acts, perverse inventions—I hope there is one good word for it in Italian, so far this is hopeless in English—and that this speculative investigation would say something about civil society.

Isn’t there something obnoxious about another object? Just because an advertising company or my stupid designer neighbor puts something in the street, should I? Wait, do I have to—is this a war?

So I was thinking that speculative work could also be a refusal to produce any more garbage, even accidentally. Keep it digital, I thought, and if you can get to even one person maybe that’s enough?

But that was in November 2012. Since then, a Canadian aboriginal chief has been starving herself for over 3 weeks (at the time that I write this) to protest the disrespect of our government. So I have been thinking about risk and loss and pain and politics, and not joyful, absurd, pitiless, reckless speculation… What was I thinking?

Perhaps what is essential is a way of deciding when imagination becomes action?