The European Culture and Technology Lab+ was formally set up in Cluj-Napoca Romania in February 2020 as the first pan European Research Institute within the European University of Technology to focus on questions of technology and society. The ECT Lab+ commenced as a task within the work package on research and quickly became a place and grew where questions about the nature and vision of the new university were discussed. The group began to discuss the nature and role of technology in society and within the overall EUt+ initiative. The fundamental premise of the ECT Lab+ is that we need a wider understanding of technology if we are to confront the challenges of the 21st Century. Technology needs to conceived as a form of Technē, and not simply as a tool or instrument but a way in which humans become human. Techne includes all forms of technics from the technics of the creative arts, artisanal techniques, to contemporary computational planetary techniques. The purpose of the ECT Lab+ is to pose questions about the relation between culture and technology, the emerging environments (or milieu) of technology which are cultural, cosmological, technical, social, economic, and political. The emerging environment could be considered as a study of evolution, history of technical organs, this we can term a general organology. The ECT Lab+ brings together researchers who are interested in the impacts of technology on society, these impacts can be both positive and negative; this we can term a pharmacology. Following on from the recent material turn in philosophy of technology, the ECT Lab+ conceives of technology as part and parcel of the process and practices of becoming human in the world. Hence the title of the ECT Lab+ reflects the positioning of technology within a culture, acknowledging that technology is not built in a vacuum but in and for society. The second aspect of the cultural environment of technology steams from the philosophical positioning of technics, techne and technology within their cultural locality or milieu. The ECT Lab+, therefore, encourages research which recognises the localised and situated knowledge contexts of technological innovation. The ECT Lab+ acts as a metastable structure, which is akin to supersaturation, a crystallising that can occur in relation around certain thematic, for example Technological Foresight and responsibility or epistemology, ethics and artificial intelligence. The ECT Lab+ takes into account the instability of the milieu (locality) and allows for the undecidability or contingency or indeterminacy of the cultural environment of technology or technological tendency. As a research group bringing a transdisciplinary approach, we bring together researchers from the Arts, Humanities, Digital Studies, Social Sciences but also technologists from the natural sciences and engineering to explore fundamental questions about technologies impact the knowledge construction (epistemology), cultural production (aesthetics), moral choices (ethics) and questions related to the fundamental nature of digital objects (ontology). To date we have been very successful in applying for extra-funding, the EthiCo projects is exploring the questions related to Technological Education, Ethics and Ecology, the AesthetiCo project is investigating the role of the Aesthetics in Technological Education and Ecology.
