United States
ToftH grounds in the insight that technology enables new realties that we do not (yet) know how to navigate. To us, these new realities are exciting: We consider technology R&D an unusually potent—but largely untapped—experimental site for radically reinventing what it is to live a human life; what we mean when we say nature; what we do when we build things.
Who, at present, attends to these untapped potentials? Who understands technology R&D as an experimental, philosophical practice in which new possibilities of thinking and doing are elaborated? Can we build technology in terms of its philosophical stakes and potentials? Can one build technologies because one wishes to disrupt some of the concepts we live by?
ToftH was launched in late 2018 to address these questions.
Today, our work is composed of three branches.
(1) Research collaborations: We place philosophers and artists in labs and companies, where they identify, together with engineers, the philosophical potential of a product/project.
(2) Our art-as-research program, which engages artists in conversations about how to explore the philosophical ruptures provoked by technology.
(3) ToftH School, an experimental curriculum designed to bring together philosophy, art, and technology in a single practice we call PArT.