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On modes of participation

Describing Technoetic Art's Editorial Organism
Published onJan 19, 2023
On modes of participation
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In July 2020, Roy Ascott invited six scholars with backgrounds in art and design to serve as editors of the journal Technoetic Arts and as members of what he called the Editorial Organism (EO). His aim was to create an adaptive system of collaboration that reflects the journal’s core ideas and employs them to take the journal to the next level.

Since August 2020, we, the members of the EO, have met weekly to plan forthcoming issues and discuss ways to share our visions of Technoetic Arts reflecting Ascott’s concept. Despite the pandemic and our own struggles during the past two years, the EO realigned the journal with its publishing schedule and facilitated the publication of high-quality rigorously peer-reviewed content. The two double issues that preceded this single issue were proceedings issues, collecting outstanding contributions from two conferences. The Special Issue dedicated to the research developed during the fourth conference of Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science (TTT) was edited by Technoetic Arts’s EO member Dalila Honorato (2020). The subsequent ‘Global Conversation’ Special Issue, guest-edited by Christiane M. Herr and Jocelyn Chapman, collected materials from both the 2020 annual meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics and TTT (Herr and Chapman 2021). The issue following this single is again a double Special Issue that is also already in production. Guest edited by Monika Michałowska, ‘Dismantling the Anthropocene: Beyond Binary Categorizations’ presents a collection of articles that approach notions of human superiority and uniqueness critically from a variety of angles and explore their underlying philosophical assumptions (Michalowska forthcoming 2022).

We, the EO, worked closely together and with the guest editors, authors, peer-reviewers and our publisher Intellect to produce the issues, releasing more than 700 pages of excellent and thought-provoking new research. However, it is while editing this first general issue of Technoetic Arts that we learned to fully appreciate Ascott’s vision of an EO in practice as we became entangled in a mesh of re-reflections on our individual and collaborative modes of practice and participation, variations of which we also encountered in the articles of this journal issue.

In nature validation for physiological and emotional bonding becomes a mode for supporting social connectivity. Similarly, in the blockchain ecosystem, cryptographic validation becomes the substrate for all interactions. In the dialogue between human and artificial intelligence (AI) agents, between the real and the virtual, one can distinguish threads of physical or mental entanglements allowing different modes of participation. One could even suggest that in all types of realities there exist frameworks that are to some extent equivalent and act as validation mechanisms for behavioural interweaving.

Relevant to our own experience as an EO, in this issue of Technoetic Arts we explore modes of participation and collaboration through different lenses by including guest-edited sections and stand-alone articles.

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