a unique research group

Based out of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University, we place emphasis on fostering science and technology studies, focus on ecology and environment, are interested in scale and networks, and have a commitment to futurity and imagination as being critical to design, art, and scholarship.

This cluster of artists, designers and scholars presents a rare opportunity to develop the systemic study and creation of emerging technologies with a focus on social justice, difference, and imagination. We engage with multiple technical ecologies, from bio-media to urban planning, in order to foster creative ways to think about the future of the planetary scale transformations currently occurring as a result of human action and technical developments.

Research Groups & Collectives

The Speculative Life Cluster is home to diverse and transdisciplinary research groups, such as the Critical Anthropocene, Disrupting Design, Ethnography Lab, Financializing Infrastructures, and Machine Agencies working groups and the Xmodal studio-lab.

Browse our current feature projects or explore our archive of past work from our groups and collectives.

Speculative Life Research Room

The Speculative Life Research Cluster holds spaces that encourage the meeting of the different research groups and foster the development of research within the cluster.

Speculative Life is located within the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University. The cluster has a Research Room located on the tenth floor of the Engineering and Visual Arts building (EV-10.625). This working space hosts different group events, workshops, exhibitions and meetings. The room has recently been reorganized to host student and faculty research-creation projects, temporary installations, and artworks.

Speculative Life BioLab

The BioLab is a hybrid and interdisciplinary research-creation laboratory for the development and facilitation of conceptual and material-based exploration around the Technosphere, and how it impacts the changing status of life on the planet.

The BioLab currently hosts a Biosafety Level 1 certified wet lab for working with living and electronic media, hosting both wet and dry ‘maker’ processes and materials. It is part of the Milieux Commons, supported by the Concordia Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality, Fluxmedia Research-Creation Network and the Milieux Institute at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.