Dedicated to Louise Michel & her Cosmographic Comparator
I had learned to dream in stone and steel" Louise Michel, 1895 (Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia it Deserves)
We dedicate these prototypes of Tarot cards performing various present circuits, materials and technologies to Louise Michel, a 19th century anarchist and member of the Paris commune, who was also one of the first speculative designers and futurists. She imagined and through her alter-egos, Marie Violette Tranchot and Octave Obdurant, described prototypes, which combine creative ways of thinking about the past and future with political activism. Her “Cosmographic Comparator” together with the “speculative crown” and the “utopian umbrella” are tools, which help us understand how to integrate the possible with the actual, science and poetry, which both change our ways of experiencing and envisioning the world. These magical tools have many properties similar to what researchers nowadays describe as scenario methods and future techniques with one important difference. The anarchist scientist and geeky heroine of Michel’s novel, Marie Violette, uses them to start revolutions around the world or how she describes this with a feminist metaphor - “snipping the umbilical of the globe”. The sociopolitical astrolabe (Conducteur à Comparaisons Cosmographiques) is a utopian calculator, a machine for future scenarios, which contaminates our future with history, but also traces in the history hopes for the future, because “history without utopia is dead in spirit and fact, but that the future cannot live on dreams alone; that any science worthy of the name has no other purpose than the visionary improvement of life on earth.” We hope that also our cards can serve as such machine for future making creatively connecting our past with the future, science and technology with poetic imagery, recollection and anticipation, “the unveiling of heaven while in hell. The dream inseparable from the suffering which gave it life”. We also want to wonder with Marie Viollete about the “ burlesques of abundance or simplicity” in history and the “hidden variables… the law connecting real conditions and the wild scenarios to which they gave birth.”