Speculative Illustration: From Thinking with Images to Speculative Visuality

Abstract

This is preprint version of the article published in Journal of Illustration. The article aims to address the challenge that the current wide-ranging and multifaceted planetary crisis poses to representation and to ways of thinking about it. It focuses on examining the role of illustration and images in selected recent theoretical works, especially in the ones concerned with the relationship between humans and the environment. What is surveyed is the terrain of selected theoretical texts associated with New Materialisms and Speculative Realism (including Object-Oriented Ontology), as both orientations, respectively, argue for a recognition of a vibrant sense-making agency of matter and for thinking that does away with privileging specifically human ways of interacting with reality. More importantly, these discourses often rely on visual arts and artistic projects or interventions as important means to make their point and to illustrate the ‘non-representable’.