001 Intro

While the world still digests the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, there is another fundamental transition in contemporary technological infrastructure being cooked up in the back kitchen.

However, with the skyrocketing computational demands and energy costs of silicon-based computation, researchers are currently looking into alternative materials that could replace the architecture of computers as we know them.

Since the dawn of the computer era, the dominant computational substrate has been semiconductors, which represent logical operations as electronic circuits carved out on tiny silicon desks.

One of the most promising quests for new computational substrates represents the field of biocomputing, which offers an increasingly diverse set of solutions inspired by living matter: DNA data storage, computing by cells and protein structures, or hybrid organic-machinic designs. ^[1]

Biocomputing blurs the boundary between life and non-life, and challenges traditional understanding of computation as an activity invented by humans, and embodied in discreet technical artefacts. Perhaps the historical role of computers as we know them - a.k.a. the good old-fashioned computation - was to offer us new philosophical perspective, one that would eventually enable us to see computational processes in the very foundations of living matter.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from nature” - Karl Schröder

The historical role of the good old-fashioned computation was to offer us new philosophical perspective, one that would eventually enable us to see computational processes in the very foundations of living matter.

002 Synthetic Ambiance

The speculative perspective we aim to offer in our research suggests that computation itself may become an ambient property of environments we are surrounded by - a property yet to be fully mobilized and elaborated on. In other words, the 20th century emergence of the silicon-based computer enables us to comprehend and potentially reconfigure the radical efficiency of computational processes inside biological agents all around us.

These affordances of living matter are to be tapped into contemporary global economy hungry for computational scale. Are you prepared for the future where you can spill your computer on the floor?