Kelsey Chen

This project theorizes silkpunk as a literary and technology aesthetic that bridges genres of speculative fiction and technical/instructional writing. Silkpunk’s technical imagination proposes a humanist theory of technology with roots in Taoist natural philosophy and logic, in critical response to the genealogy of our dominant technoscience, which cleaved technology from art and the technical from the moral. This project both theorizes and practices a technical humanism, —combining literary analysis, archival research, and experimental making to study silkpunk, which not only imagines but instructs on the principles of engineering and methods of construction fora speculative technoscience.