CLOT x Six Minutes Past Nine Present
Plastic Prognosticate

Phase 2:
Call for Essays/Texts

On the Futures We’re Allowed to Imagine - And the Ones We’re Not

The future has never been more crowded with predictions.

Every institution, industry, and cultural apparatus has a narrative ready-made: innovation as inevitability, disruption as progress, crisis as branding opportunity. The result isn’t clarity - it’s suffocation.

Our collective imaginary is shrinking even as this rhetoric expands.

For Plastic Prognosticate, we’re commissioning essays and texts that examine this narrowing of possibility.

Not just in relation to AI, but across the wider landscape of art and speculative aesthetics through technological myth-making, political stagnation, cultural scripting, institutional risk-aversion, ecological dread and the machinery that tells us ‘the future has already been decided - adapt or fall behind’

We want writing that re-opens that space.
Writing that interrogates who gets to author tomorrow, who benefits from its ‘authorised’ shape and size, and what forms of speculation are quietly discouraged, abandoned, or rendered unthinkable.

Your essay does not need to be about AI.

It can be - but only if AI is a symptom, not the centre.
We’re interested in the broader question: What forces shape, and limit, our capacity to imagine otherwise?

What we’re inviting

Texts that explore (but not limited to):

• Foreclosed futures - how cultural, economic, or technological narratives restrict what can be imagined
  
• Counterfutures - speculative or critical frameworks that cut against dominant scripts
  
• The politics of prediction - who forecasts the future, who is silenced by it, and why
  
• Fictional, semi-fictional, or methodological experiments that break from conventional critical writing
  
• Artistic agency in a time when tools, platforms, and markets increasingly script behaviour
  
• Temporal dissonance - the sense of living in a present haunted by futures that are not arriving
  
• Refusal, malfunction, drift - strategies for sidestepping predetermined trajectories
  

You might write from the perspective of a theorist, artist, curator, technologist, ecologist, sociologist, futurist (or anti-futurist), storyteller, or someone who occupies a hybrid position.
Your disciplinary space matters less than your ability to unsettle habit or normative values

What we’re not looking for

• Evangelism for any particular technology
  
• Doom for doom’s sake
  
• Generic “AI thinkpieces”
  
• Essays that mistake cynicism for critique
  
• Predictable rehash of current tech discourse
  

We want specificity, texture, and argument - not attitude.

Why this project?

Because the future is increasingly treated as a fixed asset rather than a contested domain. That shift deserves scrutiny.

Plastic Prognosticate approaches these normative futures as ‘constructed’ forms and invites writers to interrogate their premises and expand what can be thought.

Your work will be published with CLOT Magazine and will build on the conceptual foundations of our Pavilion for The Wrong Biennale 2025, where these texts will sit alongside artistic responses that also challenge dominant future-scripts.

Commission Scope

• Final Text Length: 1,000–2,000 words (approximate)
  
• Fee: Commission paid
  
• Editorial support provided
  
• Publication: International readership via CLOT Magazine and Six Minutes Past Nine
  
• A range of critical, experimental, and speculative forms accepted
  
• Weekly publication begins late January 2026 for 11 weeks

Submission Guidelines

• Deadline for proposals: Tuesday 27th Jan 2026

Please submit:

• an abstract (max 300 words)
  
• a brief bio (max 100 words) and
  
• 1–2 writing samples or links to prior work.
  
• Submit to: editor@sixminutespastnine.com or use our application form here
  
• Early submitted proposals can be accepted before the deadline