Soft Futures is a newsletter devoted to the future of technology as we do not know it.
Our vision of technology is slowly changing. Robots are abandoning their anthropomorphic shells, increasingly resembling invertebrates and plants. Living cells and artificial materials are forming new fertile symbioses between technology and nature. Even our computers are abandoning the rigidity of silicon to embrace the plasticity of biological matter.
These and other emerging technologies are based on a radically new vision of matter: no longer a passive and inert substrate of human projects, but an active, dynamic, and unpredictable participant in its own transformation. How are these technologies transforming our relationship with matter and our visions of the future? What scientific and cultural questions do they invite us to address?
Through encounters with emerging technologies, the lively philosophical debates surrounding them, and emerging design/art practices, Soft Futures explores how the vitality of matter keeps defying our expectations.
Who writes Soft Futures?
My name is Laura Tripaldi. I’m a writer, an interdisciplinary researcher, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for AI & Culture of NYU Shanghai. I hold a PhD in Materials Science and Nanotechnology.
My research primarily focuses on the agency of matter in emerging technologies, intersecting philosophy, science, and design theory. From computation to robotics and beyond, I consider how material substrates can be more than passive instruments of human control. Soft Futures publicly documents this ongoing research project.
I also study the techno-cultural histories of materiality, with a specific interest in the tradition of Western alchemy. I am intrigued by what ancient cosmologies can teach us about our understanding of matter in contemporary technologies.
I wrote Parallel Minds. Discovering the Intelligence of Materials. Find me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
For inquiries, collaborations, events, and one-on-one consultancy sessions, please email me at info@lauratripaldi.net.
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