Techniques Journal is sponsored by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University and is pleased to announce the publication of a special issue on Bordering.
In this issue we’re interested in techniques that attend to bordering’s dynamism. We use the gerund form as the title for each issue’s theme because it is known as the “imperfectivizing operator,” which expresses duration. The -ing form carries an inherent temporal valence of simultaneity and ongoingness. The grammatical form of the gerund thus evokes each theme—in this case, bordering—as an event in progress, one that is (durationally) incomplete and therefore attends to its ongoingness. Each of the pieces in this issue refuse to limit their inquiry to entities that exist on either side of a given border (physical, geopolitical, ideological, or imaginary), nor even to hybrid spaces produced by queerings or crossings of borders but are attentive to how they announce the spatiotemporal ongoingness that pervades their very production, contestation, and maintenance.
The intention behind this issue of Techniques Journal was to cast the net wide and envision a broad range of critical and speculative responses to how borders are constructed, maintained, altered, and deconstructed within a broadly experimental arts and humanities frame. From migration and animal studies to design fiction, Gonzo journalism, and online curation—these are just some of the many approaches to “bordering” showcased in this issue and are seen as central to the design of our shared, if unevenly felt, planetary existence. Following the ongoingness of all borders, we could not expect the techniques discussed and performed in this issue—docufiction, curation, nonfiction writing, photography, philosophical abstraction, gardening, sonification, and more—to respect the neat and tidy borders set up between disciplines and fields of research, and they don’t necessarily perform what academe deems “acceptable research.” Instead, this issue is itself an experiment in undermining borders of all kinds, but especially between disciplines, spaces of knowledge production, and between academic and nonacademic publishing.
Contributions from: Jimmy Loizeau, Tony Fry, Margret Grebowicz and Maria Whiteman, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Diseño Detonante, Matylda Krzykowski, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Ploy Yamtree, Michael Hornblow, Nausica Castanas, Mario Orospe, Stephen Loo, Stacey Moran, Adam Nocek.