Speculative Solidarities
Interventions and Activations across Bennington's campus and beyond in collaboration with Autonomous Mechanics Studio + Lab. Facilitated by 2022–24 Public Action Fellow, artist-researcher Elæ Moss.
Welcome to the evergreen virtual home for Speculative Solidarities at Bennington College! Autonomous Mechanics offerings within the Speculative Solidarities network of tools and infrastructures are built to adapt to and with communities long after they're introduced by a Field Agent or founder Elæ Moss, which means this landing page will take you to a range of physical and/or virtual tools and materials, whether in currently operational or archival form. During the 2022-2024 Terms, these projects and programs are ACTIVELY in operation and physically installed across campus and in local / regional sites.
Through AUTONOMOUS MECHANICS, their research-driven design STUDIO + LAB, Moss and Lab Field Agents offer public, open source projects and programs which investigate potential forms of systemic innovation across space, place, body, structure, and biome. When introduced, these projects are responsive to the immediate capacities and needs of each site, and scale iteratively in collaboration with human and more-than-human populations and the sites they occupy.
As part of their Public Action Fellow term at Bennington, Elæ Moss has seeded three of their ongoing Speculative Solidarities projects on the campus and in the local community—facilitating peer learning amongst students, staff, faculty, and local stakeholders, in the service of leaving in place a custom set of tools and infrastructures through which these collective practices can organically thrive and continue to evolve.
Learn more about these projects, associated programs and coursework, open tools for community use, ways to get involved and/or use these systems below!
YEAR ONE | SEED LAB
A YEAR ONE | SEED LAB activation is currently sited in CAPA, installed for the duration of the Spring 2023 semester and through the 23-24 Academic year. The LAB is available for DIY community use and activation as well as supporting Speculative Solidarities projects, programs, publications, and research.
ARCHIVE + ACCESS
For its Crossett Library intervention, ARCHIVE + ACCESS | PUBLICATION as PUBLIC ACTION becomes a durational installation offering both autonomous engagement and facilitated programs. Public workshops, reading rooms, and other events activate the space, offering hands-on training in collective documentation and archive building.
SITES + SOUNDS
Also part of the ARCHIVE + ACCESS set of public activations, SITES + SOUNDS invites members of the Bennington and surrounding community to take part in a local iteration of this ongoing geolocated collective audio mapping project—rethinking (and rewriting) the ways we experience place and its stories.