For Speculative Telegraphics, Stahel’s work will contextualise historic objects that from the La Perouse Museum collection, acquired from Sydney’s original 1882 Telecommunication Cable Station where the Museum is now housed. On one hand, Speculative Telegraphics looks to the future, questioning our technological capacity to communicate with other worlds, distant planets, and their inhabitants. On the other, it looks to the past, systematically dissecting objects of communication that once provided the nation with cutting edge technology to communicate with countries across the ocean – through morse code cabling that ran along the ocean floor. Stahel’s approach to Imaginary Sciences blur the boundaries between scientific and creative practices to provide an alternative way to understand and mediate history.

Stahel’s practice incorporates introspective processes of drawing and collecting within an installation framework, and can be briefly described as both pragmatic and pseudoscientific, foreign yet familiar, and an informative bunch of nonsense. Imaginary Science is his fabricated field of research, and involves various creative examinations of how the human brain thinks about itself.