Jeremy (Jay) Davison
Uploaded: 05 June 2026
Speculative Futures:
Matching A-Natural themes with A-Natural forms
The conceptual synthesis of A-Natural themes with A-Natural forms invites a radical objective / subjective, aesthetic / material departure from the minimalist sterility often associated with modernism, moving instead toward a topology of connections that mirrors the exuberant complexity of an abundant, lush reality. This vision of abundance is not predicated on the capitalist logic of surplus or excess, but rather on a foundational fullness and plurality that roots our existence in a dense system of relations. In such a framework, productivity is redefined as the life-generating capacity of a multispecies collective, wherein the human subject is intrinsically enmeshed with myriad non-human actors. This sensibility would suggests that our communal potential is not a solo achievement but rather a collaborative becoming—dependent upon the participation of the soil, the atmosphere, and the diverse biological entities that sustain the web of life.
Deconstructing the Modernist Barrier
This aesthetic and material departure requires an essential dismantling of modernism’s defining tool: the barrier. Modernism achieved its signature sterility by using inert glass, steel, and concrete to violently segregate human interiors from the unpredictable exterior world. Such a compartmentalization reflects what Bruno Latour identifies as the “Modern Constitution,” a dualistic framework that strictly separates human culture from the nonhuman world (Latour 1993: 13–15). Conversely, an A-Natural topology replaces these dead boundaries with, for example, semi-permeable, metabolic membranes, wherein walls become active bioreactors that filter air through embedded microalgae and foundations act as synthetic root systems anchoring architectural structures into the local water table. In treating physical forms as porous and responsive, design shifts from creating isolated objects to cultivating continuous, living networks; the resulting spaces are inherently dynamic, weathering, growing, adapting in response to the chemical and biological feedback from their surrounding ecosystems.
Chthulucene Topologies and Sympoiesis
By shifting the focus toward this “living world,” design practice transitions from auto- poiesis (self-creation) to what Donna Haraway terms sympoiesis, or “making-with”— human technology is no longer positioned as an alien intrusion or an external master of the ecosystem, but as a metabolic offshoot of the environment itself (Haraway 2016: 58). This structural shift moves speculative architecture and design objects into what Haraway calls the “Chthlucene”—a thick, ongoing epoch where everything is entangled with everything else, and staying with the trouble of a damaged planet requires collaborative survival (Haraway 2016, 31–33). In this context, form is never static; it is a manifestation of active relations, echoing Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s assertions that freedom and survival are dependent upon the messy, unpredictable collaborations we forge across species boundaries (Tsing 2015, 27–29). The resulting aesthetic is intentionally “lush” and “complex,” resisting the capitalist imperative of clean, scalable optimization in favour of a localized, tangled web of dependencies.
Temporal Mutation and Post-Anthropocentric Materiality
Furthermore, this foundational fullness fundamentally upends the traditional, human-centric timeline of design and development. Modernist design projects are traditionally delivered in a finished, sterile state, engineered to resist time, decay, and non-human colonization for as long as possible. An A-Natural framework, however, treats the completion of physical construction as merely the initiation of an open-ended ecological process. Objects and infrastructures are explicitly designed to be colonized, mutated, and co-authored by nonhuman inhabitants over decades, embodying what Benjamin Bratton characterizes as the deep, machinic, and biological layers of planetary-scale computation and infrastructure (Bratton 2015, 41–44). Success is no longer measured by how pristine an artifact remains, but by its capacity to host biodiversity, facilitate multispecies communication, and enrich the surrounding soil and atmosphere as it degrades. Ultimately, the A-Natural framework replaces the fragile, museum-like veneration of an abstract “nature” with a robust canvas / support for radical, post-anthropocentric imagination (Dunne and Raby 2013, 85–89).
By aligning these themes with forms that reflect such interconnectedness, requires striving to cultivate an ethic of joy that functions as a commitment to the art of living with, within spaces of enchantment, wherein the rigid, linear boundaries of Western thought are dissolved in favour of difference, inventiveness, and unknowing—principles that are accepted not as something to overcome or exceed, but as the primary drivers of living well. Here, abundance acts as a fertile ground for making anew, positioning the artist and the thinker not as masters of a resource, but as participants in a continuous proletariat and generative flux. Such an approach must, imperatively, acknowledge that the new beings and things propelled into the world will be successful only insofar as they nurture the quality of relationships with and within their environments / the living world. Ultimately, matching these a-natural forms with their thematic counterparts allows us to envision a future that celebrates the complexities of existence through a lens of profound, life-affirming reciprocity.
Coleridgean Suspension and the A-Natural Speculative Leap
The design framework of the A-Natural cannot function through purely analytical critique; it fundamentally requires what Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined as the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Coleridge 2014: 208). In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge introduces this concept as a psychological and imaginative bridge that allows an audience to temporarily set aside their strict adherence to realism to engage with the extraordinary (Coleridge 2014: xliii, clxii, 93-fn.350). Crucially, Coleridge’s formulation of this creative leap emerges alongside a rigorous critique of Descartes’s dualism, Spinoza’s refinements, and the mechanistic limitations of materialism (Coleridge 2014, 91–98). Coleridge argues that these rigid, dualistic systems fail to provide an adequate theory of human perception or explain how the mind connects disparate ideas. By applying this historical critique to modern design fiction, the A-Natural form acts as the material vector for this suspension; it prompts the observer to move past the Cartesian segregation of the “artificial” and the “natural,” inviting them instead to actively inhabit an engineered, lush landscape where the boundaries of logic are softened to reveal deeper emotional and ecological realities.
Material Verisimilitude and the Bridge to Reality
Rather than inviting passive escapism, the suspension of disbelief functions as a vital and active link between the audience’s contemporary reality and the speculative realm of the designer. When an audience confronts a world built on sympoietic architecture and generative bio-algorithms, they do not merely observe an impossibility; they dynamically reconcile their real-world understanding with the narrative’s internal rules. For an A-Natural form to successfully catalyze this state, it must possess a high degree of what French film theorist André Bazin, in his essay “Farrebique of de paradox van het realisme” [Farrebique, or the Paradox of Realism] (Bazin, 1947), terms material verisimilitude—what speculative designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby describe as the physical or functional logic that makes an impossible object feel possible, even mundane, yet imaginative, improbable, and provocative (Dunne & Raby 2013: e.g., 94–96, 135, 189). When a synthetic membrane or a living utility grid is designed with precise biological inputs and sensory cues, it ceases to look like a distant sci-fi prop; instead, it leverages the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief, allowing them to travel through a dense system of relations and confront the profound philosophical questions of existence, cohabitation, and survival in what is now commonly termed the Anthropocene—or more accurately the Capitalocene.
From the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene:
The Spatialization of Extraction
By shifting the nomenclature from the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene, the design of A-Natural forms confronts a more precise, systemic culprit: not an undifferentiated humanity, but the historical and ongoing structures of global capitalism. As sociologist Jason W. Moore argues, the Capitalocene reframes the planetary crisis not as a consequence of abstract human nature, but as a system of organizing nature based on the endless accumulation of capital and the exploitation of “Cheap Nature”—labour, food, energy, and raw materials (Moore 2015: 14–17). Modernist architecture and sterile industrial design were the physical expressions of this capitalist logic, built to optimize flow, minimize friction, and hide the ecological devastation required to sustain urban wealth. When speculative design fields replace these sterile surfaces with A-Natural forms—such as living utility grids that pulsate in response to regional water scarcity, or biosemiotic transit corridors constructed from living, engineered substrates that actively exchange biochemical data with the migrating fauna, fungal networks, and weather patterns of the territories they intersect—they expose the invisible metabolic rifts caused by capital. In such cases, the designs cease to be passive containers of commodity and become instead physical critiques, prompting the viewer to trace the material histories, extractions, and labour relations embedded within such infrastructures.
Overcoming Commodity Fetishism through Material Vitality
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In contexts such as these, the suspension of disbelief serves a critical political function: it pierces through what Karl Marx termed commodity fetishism, wherein the mere exchange of objects obscures the social relations between human producers and ecosystems (Marx, 1995/96). In a Capitalocene-driven world, a smartphone or a concrete wall appears autonomous, hiding the toxic mines and displaced communities that birthed them. A-Natural design forms break this illusion by using vivid, biological sensory cues to expose these hidden extractions. A synthetic membrane that visibly bruises, bleeds, or goes dormant when its resource limits are breached rejects the capitalist fantasy of infinite, cost-free abundance. By leveraging Coleridgean poetic faith, the audience does not merely observe a speculative product; they experience the physical object as an active node within a vulnerable, multispecies assemblage (Coleridge, 2014; Bennett 2010: 20–24). The design actively transforms the viewer from a passive consumer into an entangled participant, radically altering their subjective relationship to the material world.
Altmejd’s “Elle”
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David Altmejd’s visceral creative methodology within his exhibition “Elle” (Bradley Ertaskiran, 21 May 2026–04 Jul 2026) provides a compelling case study for how the theoretical framework of the A-Natural transitions from abstract philosophy into tangible, unsettling material form (Altmejd, 2026). When Altmejd speaks of his labour as a submission to an independent, generative entity, declaring that he would “do anything for her,” he embodies the precise post-anthropocentric shift required to move past the sterile, human-centric confines of modernism (@daltmejd, 2026). His creative pursuit is not characterized by the Cartesian mastery of a sovereign artist forcing an inert material to comply with a pre-conceived blueprint; instead, it is an exhausting, yet not exhaustive, ecstatic act of sympoiesis—an open-ended dialogue with matter where the boundaries between the organic and the synthetic, the human creator and the emergent form, dissolve. The resulting sculptures do not function as passive, decorative commodities designed for quiet consumption within a capitalist gallery space. They present themselves as highly relational, mutating bodies that actively demand the viewer suspend their disbelief to meet them on their own mythic and biological terms.
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By examining specific works from the exhibition, such as “L’oracle,” “L’étoile,” and “Autoportrait à la pleine lune,” one observes a radical topology of connections that physically mirrors the exuberant complexity of a lush, hyper-relational reality. Altmejd’s deliberate entanglement of diverse media—weaving crystalline structures, resin, plaster, and hair into complex figurative landscapes—creates semi-permeable membranes where cosmic, somatic, and planetary currents visibly collide. In “Autoportrait à la pleine lune,” the inclusion of lunar motifs and hybrid anatomy forces a confrontation with deep ecological and non-human temporalities, pulling the viewer out of the linear, hyper-optimized timeline of the Capitalocene. The sculptures act as physical bioreactors of meaning, radiating a foundational fullness, an abundance that feels intensely alive precisely because it embraces the monstrous, the unstable, and the transformative. Through this material intensity, Altmejd establishes a profound space of mutual cohabitation, illustrating how the designer or artist, using tactile, non-linguistic matter, can act as a medium, translating the wild energy of evolution and decay into a tangible vocabulary, ultimately providing a physical language for our collaborative becoming within the wider web of life.
Epistemological Shifting:
Tactile Semiotics and Non-Linguistic Materialism
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This focus on the physical medium highlights a crucial pivot within the A-Natural framework: the reliance on tactile, non-linguistic matter to build an epistemological alternative to Cartesian intellectualism. Both modernist abstraction and capitalist commodity production rely heavily on linguistic and numeric codes—such as architectural blueprints, supply chain manifests, patents, and price tags—to enforce order, measure productivity, and sever objects from their biological histories. When an artist or designer deliberately subverts or bastardizes this linguistic dominance, they step away from the role of an authoritarian author and become instead a material medium. Through the manual work of manipulating raw, unpredictable substrates like wet plaster, growing crystals, or organic debris, the creator enters into a direct bodily negotiation with the intrinsic properties of the material. Such processes are not typically about communicating a clean, pre-determined human message, but rather, and particularly in Altmejd’s case, about allowing the chaotic, non-human currents of evolution, metabolic decay, and environmental reaction to articulate themselves directly through the form.
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By allowing these untamed material energies to jointly dictate the final structure, the resulting artifact functions as a live site of tactile semiotics. The physical language generated by the “Elle” forms does not operate through the clear, arbitrary signs of human speech; instead, it communicates through indexical, sensory markers such as structural fractures, chemical discolouration, biological colonization, and textures of rot. These indicators cannot be easily flattened, commodified, or assimilated into a capitalist database. They demand raw, somatic engagement from the human observer, appealing directly to what art historian Steve Baker identifies as a contact zone that acknowledges a profound discontinuity, or “out-of-place-ness,” with anthropocentric modes of being (Baker 2013: 196–97, 211–12). Through this quiet subversion of language, the A-Natural form functions as a literal translation device for the unseen ecological relationships sustaining our world. It offers a tangible vocabulary that helps us navigate, feel, and survive our collaborative becoming within the wider web of life.
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© Jeremy (Jay) Davison, 2026.