How can we envision future life-forms? With the help of an overhead projector and paper cutouts we enter the anthropocenic version of Plato’s cave.

The Speculakon, as a device with which to speculate, came out of the word “speculative” that had been given to us. The idea of using shadows to create a being or world—or, in other words, to speculate—draws on the “specular” in “speculative.” Specular reflection is the mirror-like reflection of light (or of other kinds of wave) from a surface, in which light from a single incoming direction (a ray) is reflected into a single outgoing or ingoing direction.