I am delighted to finally share this essay I wrote for @e_flux Architecture! 🌀
This text is about the future of technological materiality, from living robots to neural computational substrates and beyond. It argues that our visions of technology shape and reinforce our understanding of the living, and that this dialogue carries profound implications for how we relate to each other and to the larger world around us. It is my hopeful manifesto for a softer, open-ended, hypernatural future.
This text was kindly commissioned by @territorialagency for a special @e_flux issue in collaboration with the upcoming seventh Lisbon Architecture Triennale. It is also a small preview of a larger research project I’ve been working on for my residency at NYU Shanghai @interactivemediaarts — and that I hope to keep developing, as a book, in the coming months. 🐌
The English edition of Parallel Minds will be out soon.
Thanks @urbanomicdotcom and @effequ_ed for making this happen! If someone had told me two years ago I would have never believed it.
You can pre-order your copy at the link in bio 🕷️🕸️
#Repost @urbanomicdotcom
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Chemist, nanomaterials researcher and philosopher @lauratripaldi ’s absorbing and adventurous exploration of the past and future of materials science and its entwining with human culture.
Pre-orders open now on our website for a limited number of advance copies.
http://ow.ly/GAVs50HW5U1
Dear friends: the time has come to share a project that's been brewing for a while.
Soft Futures is a curated collection of materials and technologies that I'll be sharing with you through a weekly newsletter.
Over the past few months, I realized that I needed a space to experiment with my science writing process in a more personal and informal way. As a collection, Soft Futures will be a place to encounter unpredictable connections between technological and natural bodies, approaching them outside of systematic scientific knowledge.
The focus of the project is the slippery concept of softness, an idea that has been on my mind for years and that I still struggle to define. Through Soft Futures, I hope to explore what it means for a body to be "soft" and how "softness" can be incorporated into our approach to technology.
If that sounds interesting, make sure to subscribe at the link in my bio.
And if you'd like to show your support, I would greatly appreciate it if you could share this post and help spread the word.
See you on Thursday with the first newsletter. Meanwhile, thank you all for your support, as always!
✨⚗️🕸️
Delighted to have @lauratripaldi on the pod, whose work and whose incredibly incredibly important book “Parallel Minds” has been tremendously inspiring to us not only as thinkers but as artists working with soft materials, air, liquid, and alternative arrangements of compute.
How can we rethink material agency in the context of Synthetic Biological Intelligence, where living and artificial substrates are materially integrated within biohybrid computational systems?
Following the figure of the alchemical homunculus, Substrates Unbound traces a genealogy of “substrate agency,” proposing that matter is not a passive support but an active participant in the production of technical functions. The inherited paradigms of “biomimesis” and “technomorphism” impose a hierarchy between technical and natural reality; yet, both fail to account for material agency, framing substrates as either immutable or indifferent. Such hierarchical frameworks are ill-suited to address the substrate-specific properties of SBI and related technologies. Focusing on the interface as a material site of co-construction, Substrates Unbound reframes the relation between organisms and machines through the lens of agential materialism, recognizing substrates as active partners of invention rather than passive supports of universal functions.
Read Substrates Unbound in Antikythera Journal at substrates.antikythera.org or via link in bio.
Author @lauratripaldi
Graphic Design @regretware
Annotations @lukas_likavcan
Parallel Minds came out exactly 5 years ago in its first Italian edition. It still feels unbelievable how much this little monster has uprooted and transmuted my life since then. To celebrate all the continents, languages, and disciplines we’ve crossed (and we’ll keep crossing) together, a new and extended Italian edition of MENTI PARALLELE is now in LIBRERIA thanks to my original publisher @_effequ_ , featuring the blurb by Sadie Plant I will brag about until the end of my days.🕷️(Swipe to see a very excited 27-year-old me holding the book for the first time 🥹❤️🩹)
È uscito Neuroarchitettura (Notzine #6)
𝕃𝕠 𝕤𝕡𝕒𝕫𝕚𝕠 𝕦𝕣𝕓𝕒𝕟𝕠 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕖 𝕖𝕤𝕡𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕫𝕒 𝕡𝕤𝕚𝕔𝕠-𝕒𝕥𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕒. 𝕌𝕟’𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕣𝕠𝕕𝕦𝕫𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕖 𝕒l 𝕤𝕖𝕤𝕥𝕠 𝕟𝕦𝕞𝕖𝕣𝕠 𝕕𝕚 ℕ𝕠𝕥𝕫𝕚𝕟𝕖
"Contagio architettonico" è il nostro editoriale. Si parla di città psichiche, architetti crackomani, edifici teocosmici, urbanità computazionale e deliri cementizi
Leggilo su not.neroeditions.com (+link in bio)
Meet our keynote speakers ✨ who will intervene for the Plenary sessions during the 5th European Culture and Technology Lab+ Annual Conference EpisTeaM. Visit our website if you want to know more about all of the speakers invited and their contributions at the conference.
Day 1: Ianis Dobrev (Co-founder, Chimerical Intelligence Lab) is a cultural theorist and practitioner. He holds degrees from the Art and Design School of Saint-Étienne, France, and from Design Academy Eindhoven, the Netherlands. His research investigates the ramifications of the ecological nature of reality. His visual practice aims to channel objects engineered by specific fields of knowledge into other imaginaries. He designs thinking systems that generate trans-/infra-/inter-disciplinary conversations.
Day 2: Laura Tripaldi is a writer and researcher at the Center for AI & Culture of NYU Shanghai. She holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Nanotechnology and works at the intersection of philosophy, science, and the arts. Her research focuses on materiality within emerging technologies, investigating the agency and intelligence of matter from a multi-disciplinary perspective. She is the author of the book Parallel Minds (Urbanomic, 2022). She also curates the newsletter Soft Futures and the digital cultural magazine Notzine (NERO Editions).
🗓️ NOV 20-21
🕕 9:00 - 18:00
📍 DAY 1: Foundation We Are
📍 DAY 2: Natlab Eindhoven
🎟️ Tickets are available via our website and at the link in bio
The conference is organised and hosted by Baltan Laboratories 🙏
#ECTLab #episteam #baltanlaboratories #eindhoven #conference #panel #discussion #talk #workshop #art #design #technology #science
Proud newsletter writer moment: Soft Futures was featured on the @mitpress reader! Happy to continue spreading my existential and aesthetic appreciation for nonfunctional artifacts and machines that don’t work (but do much more interesting stuff instead).
On the cover, @ting_bojesen ’s lovely robot pet worms at @copenhagen_contemporary 🪱🫀
Are you subscribed to Soft Futures yet? And would you still love me if I were a robot worm? 🥺
