Editorial

Technoecologies is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Institute for Advanced Study at the Technical University Munich within the context of the 2023–25 Anna Boyksen Fellowship of Nathalie Bredella. It features contributions by Hélène Frichot, Florian Hoof, Daniel Cardoso Llach, Diana Martinez, Paolo Patelli, and Daniela Rosner.

Digital technology always oscillates between description and enaction, between the deployment of a script and the underlying conditions it both depends on and determines. In terms of knowledge culture, software embeds ideologies, historical biases, and epistemologies of efficiency or control. Hardware, in turn, carries its own logics, constraints, and affordances, and is shaped by place-based knowledge and embodied expertise. As such, software is not just code, and hardware is not just material object. Together, they are living epistemic materials, shaping how we know, build, and dwell in the world. As agentive materials, they actively shape the landscape and the city.

Technology forms its own ecological system with its own cultures of knowledge that interact, conflict, evolve, and co-exist over time. As Donna Haraway posits, no knowledge exists in isolation; it is produced in particular historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. What is considered “valid” in one system may not hold in another. Hence, she calls for recognizing the diversity, interdependence, and situated nature of how we know the world.1 Technological practices in this light are not neutral: they carry assumptions about what knowledge matters, who holds it, and how it should be used. Technology’s knowledge ecology thus helps determine sets of relations and the locales in which they take place.

Ecology, as inherited from cybernetic discourse, is a rolling out of effects and relations, a denaturalized system of apparatuses, objects, and protocols embedded within related diagrams of power.2 Our cities, regions, and socio-political environments are increasingly being conceived within an ecological framework, shaped not only by new waves of theorists and philosophers, but also by emerging technologies that seek to codify, ontologize, and interconnect various agents in order to monitor and manage ecological integrity. Technology, in this sense, shapes and regulates how practices of making engage with environments, and what counts as knowledge in the act of building and inhabiting.

This is perhaps most clear in the ongoing intensity of AI development and its attendant global data center construction boom, whose climatic and energetic costs reveal the entangled ecological and political nature of computational infrastructure. However, the ecological entanglements of technology are plural and diverse. Traditional techniques of ecological processing can shed light on more equitable and sustainable practices. Digital monitoring systems can also allow for the development of more attuned environmental management practices. And yet the development of technologies that track climate change also change climates. Situating technology within practices of environmental stewardship provides the urgent opportunity to rethink the ecological implications and affordances of technology.