We invite you to experiment with your life. Submissions for experiments are now open.
Experiment Magazine is committed to promoting and documenting experiments by people on their own lives.
We take inspiration from the self-experimentalists of the past:
Jonas Salk, who injected himself and his family with his experimental polio vaccine to prove its safety
Paul Preciado, who applied pharmaceutical testosterone to his body to document the political and psychological effects of hormonal transformation
John Scott Haldane, who inhaled toxic gases and entered decompression chambers to study the mechanics of human respiration
Neil Ansell, who lived in total isolation in the wilderness to observe the sensory and mental shifts of extreme solitude
Genesis P-Orridge, who underwent numerous surgeries to physically resemble their partner as part of a "pandrogeny" experiment to merge two identities
Barry Marshall, who drank a petri dish of H. pylori bacteria to prove that they, and not stress, caused stomach ulcers
ORLAN, who used a series of plastic surgeries as performance art to transform her face into a hybrid of classical female figures
Timothy Leary, who ingested massive quantities of LSD and psilocybin to map the dimensions of the psychedelic experience
Michel Siffre, who lived in a lightless cave for months without a clock to discover the natural human circadian rhythm
Josiah Zayner, who injected himself with CRISPR gene-editing technology to advocate for the democratization of genetic engineering
and many more.
Importing a morning ritual from a self-help YouTube video into your early morning is an experiment, but we’re interested in other kinds of experiments: gender experimentalists, communalist movements, experiments in loneliness, in discipline, in indiscipline, in collective construction and destruction, in unconventional sleeping, in disindividuating listening and sensing habits, with the way you walk, the way you and everyone around you talks (start referring to yourself and your friends as a collective entity), start tracking everything you do, or let a computer do it, or disagree with everyone around you, or go somewhere where you speak not a word of the language, stop taking those drugs and start taking others, link yourself up to an inhuman system you’ve made out of what was closest and furthest away, take hashish with Walter Benjamin, poke around your nerves with Henry Head, experience your relation to the infinite with René Daumal, doubt everything with Charles Sander Peirce, strain to take fishing seriously as a hobby, develop a gnostic practice, a mania for taxonomy, bugchase, experiment with near-death experiences, throw away your TV, adopt a new morality, LARP as someone else, break all your hammers, advocate for your enemies, plot against the state, subsist on dandelion soup, found a new discipline, attempt to make yourself faultlessly rational, find god, fail with Allen Neuringer, take up science as a habit.
Anything that breaks with the mere habit of circulating like a shark your own neuroses, anything that can’t be justified yet, anything that takes the substance of life to be a little more playful than it seemed a moment ago. Serious work.
Of course, don’t do anything without discussing it with us. Safety first and all.