Techniques Journal

The Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University is happy to announce the launch of Techniques Journal.

Techniques Journal is a peer-refereed publication that mixes genre, methods, and media to examine techniques for intervening in the many crises our planet faces today. The journal is at once a design experiment, a scholarly publication, and a curatorial platform that aims to trouble extant divisions between academic and nonacademic publishing. Techniques Journal is a space for mixing artistic provocation with careful genealogical analysis; for expanding the audience of critical posthumanism and for broadening the theoretical frame of video and performance art; and it is also a forum for online discussion and debate about techniques for cultivating just and ethical worlds. We believe that to inquire concerning techniques today requires a deft and agile platform for showcasing the full range of disciplinary, technological, institutional, and metaphysical modes of engagement.

To facilitate this, each issue of the journal takes as its point of departure a technique that seems to have wide applicability and that, moreover, appears to intervene in the myriad crises we face in the twenty-first century. But the technique is also chosen with an eye to its being hotly contested and to there being little agreement on its meaning, use, and even relevance as a technique. Each issue is thus framed as an experiment that encourages its contributors to entertain, challenge, or reimagine a concept as a technique and to place it in contexts that showcase its various and complex permutations.

In order to generate new possibilities for imaging and conceptualizing techniques, each issue invites guest respondents. As synthesizers, instigators, and provocateurs, the respondents have an invaluable role to play in the online life of Techniques Journal: not only do they weave together extant lines of inquiry and open up new frames of analysis, but they also transform curated work into material for public engagement. As mediators between the contents of the journal and the public, the respondents make possible a living conversation about what it means to design and use techniques today and in the future. We encourage readers and perusers, theorists and practitioners, as well as pessimists and idealists to weigh in on the content of each issue, engage in productive conversation, and forge new potentials for thought and action.

The first issue of the journal explores techniques for animating worlds. Drawing on media philosophy, performance and video art, speculative philosophy, animation, psychoanalysis, eco-theory, anthropology, and more, the pieces experiment with techniques for pluralizing the fissures and interstices in modern fortresses of thought and practice. The second issue inquires into techniques used for bordering in worlds fraught with asymmetries. The issue brings together video art, ethnography, design fiction, philosophy, border studies, activism, post-development theory, and experimental curation to engage what it means to design techniques on the borders—of institutions, economies, citizenship, the nation state and sovereignty, colonial modernity, and the human and nonhuman. Bordering is due out in December 2021.