🥼🧪Martyn Dade-Robertson is an architect specializing in design computation and synthetic biology, and Professor of Emerging Technologies at Northumbria University.

🏠Martyn is the co-founder of the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE), a pioneering research centre exploring how living systems and biotechnologies can transform the way we design, construct, and inhabit buildings.

🐛🧫This is the first episode of a series on Biodesign. Biodesign is an innovative, interdisciplinary field where practitioners utilise living biological organisms (like fungi, bacteria, or algae) and processes to create new materials, products, and systems, shifting design from a resource-extractive model to a regenerative one 🪸.

🧬 Here, Martyn & Maxim discuss how synthetic biology in architecture could revolutionise the construction industry, from self-healing concrete and buildings with their own microbiomes, to the possibility of growing furniture or even entire building structures. 🍄‍🟫🌱

While the conversation dives into some technical ideas, it remains accessible to anyone curious about the future of our habitats, and the role biotechnologies could play in it.

Martyn’s book Living Construction: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429431807/living-construction-martyn-dade-robertson

Hashtags: #Biotechnology #Biodesign #SyntheticBiology #LivingArchitecutre #Biofutures #HBBE #NewCastleUniversity #Solarpunk #EngineeredLivingMaterials #Sustainability #SustainableArchitecture #Biology #BioArchitecture #Innovation #Biomaterials

(00:00:19) Martyn's personal journey to Living Construction

(00:02:44) How did you decide to grow stuff instead of build it?

(00:07:45) Is there any interest from the industry in the materials you're trying to synthsie?

(00:12:04) What is biodesign, bio architecture, living architecture?

(00:17:03) How is your approach percieved by collegues from the achitectural side?

(00:26:16) What is an agential material?

(00:29:40) Living materials education

(00:30:21) Teaching Complexity

(00:33:22) Thinking Soils and other projects

(00:37:15) Are these bacterias GMO: ethics, public acceptance, safety ?

(00:39:05) Can we plant a seed and have a building like in sci fi?

(00:43:13) New projects using plants as growing materials

(00:48:10) Bacterial cellulose

(00:51:38) How people will feel inside living buildings?

(00:57:02) The regulations & expectations regarding living material use in construction

Mattie Colquhoun (pronounced kuh-hoon), known online as Xenogothic, is a writer and photographer from Hull, UK.

They are best known for continuing the intellectual and cultural legacy of the late Mark Fisher, one of the most influential contemporary cultural theorists and political philosophers, and Mattie’s former teacher at Goldsmiths London in 2017.

Since Fisher’s passing, Mattie has edited his Post-Capitalist Desire lectures, contributed to various translation projects, and written numerous contextual and introductory essays on his work.

Native to the blogosphere, Mattie has since published several books. Their latest, Narcissus in Bloom (2023), offers an alternative reading of the selfie, in which they argue that what’s often dismissed as narcissism is, in fact, a symptom of deeper political discontent and a yearning for (self-)transformation.

With Mattie, we dive into Fisher’s vision, particularly his seminal book Capitalist Realism, where he diagnosed the exhaustion and imaginative limits of late stage capitalism, and Acid Communism, his unfinished project that sought to imagine how collective joy, desire, and alternative ways of being might form the basis of a new political horizon.

[00:00:58] Pseudonysms and Subversive Aesthetics

[00:07:16] Step 1 - Diagnose the System (Capitalist Realism)

[00:08:18] The Unimaginativeness in Culture & Politics

[00:10:53] "Capitalist Realism" Memetic Engine

[00:11:35] Change Starts with Critique

[00:14:05] Communism as Umbrella Term for all Alternatives

[00:15:47] Generational takes on Signification of Communism

[00:18:41] Post-Soviet Affects Regarding the Term "Communism"

[00:19:52] What Alternatives in Acid Communicsm ?

[00:21:52] Hauntology

[00:30:37] Accelerationism & enshittification

[00:33:31] Different takes on accelerationism

[00:42:02] Importance of political anomalies

[00:50:16]  Visibilise or Dissolve One's Identity?

[00:53:07] Surveillance Impact on the Self

[01:01:05] Queerness is More than Sex and Gender

[01:01:40] (De)Territorializing the Family

[01:08:58] Lesbian Utopian Commune

[01:10:39] Global Crises as Portals To Other Ways of Living

[01:13:35] Alternatives Are Available to All to Learn From

Rachel Rose O’Leary is a revolutionary programmer, poet, and co-founder of DarkFi, a decentralized anonymous infrastructure for building sovereign digital communities. She is one of the leading voices behind the Lunarpunk movement 🌚: a darker, more militant sister of Solarpunk that defends the right to resist, hide, and build worlds away from the surveillance gaze. 🔮

Originally trained as a conceptual artist, Rachel left the art world to explore the political potential of software. Her path took her from early Bitcoin spaces, inspired by the writings of the Cypherpunks and Abdullah Öcalan in Rojava, to developing privacy tools for organizing in the shadows of the surveillance state. 🐦‍⬛✨⛓️

With Rachel, we discussed the failures of mainstream crypto 🪙, her subversive Irish heritage 🍀and why privacy is not a luxury but a condition for democracy 🔐

We hope you enjoy this unexpected synthesis of revolutionary strategy, symbolism and technical insight. 🧝🏻‍♀️

Let there be dark.

Instagram - solarpunk.manifesto / Music - @simocellmusic / Editing - Xenia Kuznetsova / Visuals - @louise_mscr @tengtenho_ @via_minhu / Studio - Edouard Picard from @lpiparis

(00:00:25) Personal journey from art to Lunarpunk

(00:06:48) Possibitily to criticize art is the result of postmodernism?

(00:07:58) Can you describe your initial attraction to the crypto movement and what aspects eventually led to your disillusionment?

(00:14:47) Institutional Bitcoin or free (Cyberpunk) Bitcoin? (Blockchain for banks)

(00:19:52) Why did you decide to shift from the personal liberty towards the collective liberty?

(00:25:59) Why the concept of privacy is essential for a democratic society?

(00:28:56) How does normalization of transparency and surveillance come to life?

(00:38:46) What should happen for people to feel the urge to privacy?

(00:41:27) Core Concepts of Lunarpunk and DarkFi

(00:41:59) What's the dark forest?

(01:03:26) Is DarkFi a prefigurative project?

(01:09:30) Can meaningful societal change be achieved through decentralised methods?

(01:16:51) What groups of people would be able to benefit from Decentralised Technologies?

(01:22:26) Are governance tokens similar to Direct democracy?

(01:34:50) How decentralized technologies can influence on social or economic inequalities?

(01:44:17) How we can do that not only extremist groups would benefit from decentralized technologies?

(01:49:25) What gives you hope for the future?

PS: this session was recorded in April 2024.