The Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne) produces videos, photographs, installations, and published texts. From 1999 to 2003, Archive projects centered on state secrecy and the production of the past. Current works address the use of documents—images, texts, objects, bodies, and physical structures—to project and claim visions of the future. The Archive is a collaboration of Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne. Recent projects have been exhibited in the 2006 California Biennial (Orange County Museum of Art), Gallery Akbank Sanat (Istanbul), Kunstmuseum Goteborg (Sweden), Palazzo de la Papesse, (Siena, Italy), Apex Art (New York), Momenta (New York), the Hayward Gallery’s (London) travelling exhibition program, Whitechapel Gallery (London), the Oberhausen Short Film Festival (Germany), the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among others.

Julia Meltzer believes in the power of art to build and transform communities and has worked to create opportunities for the marriage of art and advocacy for nearly three decades as a filmmaker and the founding director of Clockshop in Los Angeles.

She directed two feature films and multiple short films. Her films about a women’s Qur’an school in Damascus and a mother-daughter who arrive in LA escaping the war in Aleppo, Syria, are quiet feminist stories that upend expectations about who Muslim women are and what they can be.

Her film and video work has been broadcast on POV as part of the 25th anniversary season and as the opening film of the 30th anniversary season. Meltzer is a recipient of multiple grants including the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus, Syria in 2005-6 where she taught independent filmmaking at the University of Damascus. Her current project focuses on documenting and preserving histories of the neighborhoods along the LA river in Northeast LA where she lives with her family.

David Thorne is an Australian humourist, satirist, Internet personality and New York Times best-selling author. His work has been featured on the BBC, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Thorne gained public recognition in late 2008 for an email exchange in which he attempts to pay an overdue bill with a drawing of a seven-legged spider. The exchange spread virally via email and social networking sites, leading to a surge of visitors to his website 27b/6 (27bslash6). 27b/6 features a collection of humorous emails and articles from Thorne's life. These and additional essays appear in Thorne's book, The Internet is a Playground. Published by Penguin Group and released on 28 April 2011, the book debuted at number four on The New York Times Best Seller list.