Noam Youngrak Son ~ Keywords: design, queer publishing, speculation, attention, facilitation, collective organizing, more-than-human, financialization, extractivism

Noam Youngrak Son is a theorist of material culture, science-fiction writer, and cultural worker based in Brussels. Trained in design, they now develop speculative narratives and theoretical frameworks concerned with technics, ecology, gender, political economy, and the conditions of cultural production. Their work develops across multiple mediations—including essays, speculative fiction, diagrams, lectures, web-based narrative systems, and organizational forms—according to the material conditions of each inquiry. Son critically examines the politics of representation and asks how human and nonhuman bodies, infrastructures, and systems of value are organized through material and representational regimes. For Son, science fiction is a materialist method for approaching the not-yet: forms of life already latent in the present but not yet available to existing regimes of representation. Positioned “in but not of” contemporary cultural institutions, they approach them as sites through which broader social and ecological contradictions become legible. They publish the Archive of Patchy Studies as an experiment in how creative labor—namely artmaking and writing—can sustain its value without institutional mediation. As a cultural worker, they co-organize the Queer Collective Workers’ Union in response to the enclosure of queer commons within and around cultural collectives.

*Learn more about Noam Youngrak Son's 20 minute performance The School of Speculation for Chameleon Orbit ~ DAI's Aeroponic Acts 2024 at Centrale Fies in Italy. 

*Learn more about Noam Youngrak Son's written MA thesis (DAI, 2024): Speculated Everything: Speculative Financialization of Design, Self, and Futures

*During their journey with DAI, Noam made significant contributions to: COOP SUMMIT 2023 ~ NIGHTTIME SCREAMING/DAYTIME WHISPERING ~ A Creational Story in Four Acts as well as COOP SUMMIT 2024 ~ Meta/Mega TRANS - Modes of Narration       

*Noam Youngrak Son was an esteemed 2023-2024 member of the DAI's COUNCIL

*Follow Noam's "Life after DAI" via https://www.d-act.org/ and @noamyoungrakson