The Speculative Life Cluster aims to create a space where individuals working in a range of fields—from molecular biology to large-scale technical, urban, and logistical infrastructures—can share ideas and practices.
Across disciplines, our various groups confront the complexities and challenges of living in a networked planet where the impact of new technologies is sensed and felt, not only locally but globally as well.
BioLab
The BioLab is a hybrid, interdisciplinary research-creation laboratory for the development and facilitation of conceptual and material-based explorations around the changing status of life on the planet. It 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 Fluxmedia Research-Creation Network and the Milieux Institute.
Critical Anthropocene Research Group
Established in 2017 to investigate the emerging and multiple discourses associated with the proposed geological epoch of the Anthropocene, the CARG’s research explores a variety of redefinitions of the Anthropocene, as well as the unacknowledged but persistent presence of ‘the universal human subject’ in scientific and popular articulations. Through its interdisciplinary approach, the CARG is interested in decolonial work in the environmental humanities
Critical Practices in Materials & Materiality
Through research-creation, materiality, and environmental sciences, this Concordia University Research Chair examines the socio-environmental, technological and political issues pertaining to material production. Our work mobilizes new relationships with residual, responsive, bio-inspired, and bio-composite materials to develop aesthetic, critical, and methodological knowledge about material engagement.
Ethnography Lab
Established in 2016 to promote and explore innovative research, the Ethnography Lab gathers ethnographic expertise from across Concordia to foster creative thinking about methodology, enhance the possibility of research collaboration, and act as a resource for researchers in and outside the university who wish to use ethnography to ask questions about the world around them. The aim in the Lab is to offer ways to practice ethnography collaboratively and across disciplines
Financializing Infrastructures
This group explores intersections between the emerging literatures in infrastructure studies and finance and financialization. It looks at how infrastructures and finance intersect in the contemporary period and what kinds of technologies and professional expertise are taken up in transforming things into objects of financial speculation. In other words, it explores what it means for the material substrata of modern life to be increasingly financialized.
Machine Agencies
Machine Agencies is an interdisciplinary group of researchers working with various topics associated with Artificial Intelligence and related technologies. The group investigates what kinds of cultural resources are mobilized to define the activities of AI agents in various contexts (games, domestic spaces). Consequently, it addresses the gap between academia and public discourse; and holds a transformative approach to bridge that gap.
Solar Media Project
The Solar Media Project is a hands-on collaboration between Speculative Life and the Solar Media Collective, a student-led research-creation group that explores the affordances of solar energy for digital communication systems through learning by doing. The work of the Solar Media Project is part of the SMC’s goal of building a solar community with institutions, non-profits, and individuals in Montreal and beyond.
