Techniques Journal: Animating Worlds

The inaugural issue of Techniques Journal is now available from the Center for Philosophical Technologies. Our article concerning Dark Arts, Grey Areas and Other Contingencies appears alongside the animated discourses of Adam Nocek, Stacey Moran, Thomas LaMarre, Stephen Loo, Gaymon Bennett, Erin Espelie, Tromarama, Cary Wolfe, Deborah Levitt, and Phillip Thurtle.

"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 publishes themed issues that invite guest respondents and the public to join the conversation about the meaning, use, and variety of techniques for cultivating just and ethical worlds."

https://techniquesjournal.com/

"The inaugural issue explores a wide range of techniques for animating worlds today. Drawing on media philosophy, performance and video art, animation, psychoanalysis, ecotheory, anthropology, and more, the pieces experiment with techniques for pluralizing the fissures and interstices in modern fortresses of thought and practice."

https://techniquesjournal.com/issue/animating/

Our contribution to the Animating Worlds issue is the seventh "recasting" of "Dark Arts, Grey Areas and Other Contingencies". Originally conceived as a performance lecture for RADMIN, the text has been taken apart, reassembled and infused with elements from other places and other times. The text for Techniques evolved out of our conversations with Adam Nocek and Stacey Moran (the editors of the journal) on animism, anima and animation in our work and life.

Can we approach contemporary global economics and daily life in ways symbiotic with techniques from premodern (or paramodern) crafts of magic and ritual? Is a rewilding or remaking of techno-materialist methods possible? We may speak of invocation and communing, risk and protection, care and ruin. Dark arts for dark times, capable of transforming “the darkness of the tomb into the darkness of the womb”

Further reading in the online edition of Techniques.

https://techniquesjournal.com/dark-arts-grey-areas-and-other-contingencies/