Ortus: A Journal of Speculative Analysis

“In the Year of Our Economy-Destroying Pandemic 2020, it can often feel as if time has stopped, or has been twisted into a tight loop through which we repeat the same day over and over. Wake up, eat, scroll, sleep. But time hasn’t stopped. Canada’s last ice sheet collapsed, nation-wide insurrection shocked the American public, the Amazon rainforest threatens to tip over into a savannah state, while millions of people across Asia, Africa and the Middle East live under threat of starvation thanks to swarms of billions of ravenous locusts—all this (and more!) as the temperatures swell and the Earth system continues to destabilise. The future rushes towards us as quickly as ever. We invite you to tell us what that future may look like. Ortus means sunrise, daybreak, birth, spring. Consequently, we thought it appropriate to start the journal with an issue about the future. Of course, there’s never only one. Futures presents a plethora of futures—scarred, twisted, morbid, joyful, melancholy, uncertain, humbling futures.” Ortus: A Journal of Speculative Analysis is an international, open-access multimedia journal, publishing interesting and novel insights in various, open formats once a year. Featuring essays, art, poetry and prose on speculative futures, pessimistic outcomes and otherworldly philosophies, Ortus presents its inaugural issue, Futures, as a condensed, hardcopy edition of the original digital 33-works release made on 1st January 2021. Our contributors include members of the Theorygram community: a loose collective of theory and philosophy-based accounts on Instagram, whose works are now presented in print for the first time and for the rest of the world to see.