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Writer and independent researcher Laura Tripaldi shows how politics can play out in the nanoscale dimension, by focusing on the role of colloids in defining what “matter” and “bodies” are. When, in 1856, Michael Faraday experimented on gold colloids and investigated their behaviour, the reality of what was known as “matter” and was usually perceived as a collection of intrinsic properties became much more elusive and complex. Even our entire biological bodies could be understood as remarkably intricate colloidal systems consisting of trillions of tiny biochemical particles dispersed in water. One hundred years after Faraday’s experiments, gold colloids were first used in modern pregnancy tests. This revolutionary invention gave women the possibility to make autonomous choices about their bodies, and serves as an example of how non-human nano-actants participate in our politics and ontologies., https://www.librarystack.org/colloidal-ontologies-the-gendered-body-at-the-interface-of-matter/?ref=unknown

On the nanoscale, materials can appear as vibrant, lively subjects that can even have political implications. Laura Tripaldi, author of Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), is an expert on nanotechnology who worked in industrial research before shifting her focus on philosophical and theoretical fields. She has been exploring our relationship to technology and materials we use everyday, and has proposed a different perspective on non-human and non-living entities, challenging us to consider them as active rather than passive matter., https://www.librarystack.org/scale-matter-as-a-subject/?ref=unknown

Is there a way to understand the materials that surround us not as passive objects, but as other intelligences interacting with our own? In Parallel Minds, expert in materials science and nanotechnology Laura Tripaldi delivers not only detailed insights into the properties and emergent behaviours of matter as revealed by state-of-the-art chemistry, synthetic biology, and nanotech, but also a rich philosophical reflection that crosses the frontier between nature and culture, and where the most cutting-edge scientific syntheses resonate with ancient myth. The result is a technomaterial bestiary full of unexpected encounters with ‘strange minds’—from cobwebs to kevlar and carbon fibre, from centaurs to amoebas to arachnids, from polycephalic slime to resonating plasmons, from viruses to golems. In leading us through this labyrinth of intelligent materials, Tripaldi picks up the thread of new materialisms and—in the historical weave between ‘women’s work’ and the ‘unnatural sciences’—contemporary feminisms. Parallel Minds reveals the intelligence at large throughout the natural and technical environment, in the fabric of our devices and dwellings, in our clothes, and even under our skin. Full of lateral ideas and unexpected images, Tripaldi’s book imbues the study and synthesis of materials with a new urgency. For not only do the materials that surround us participate actively in the construction of the world in which we live, but harnessing their ability to interact intelligently with their environment could be the key to the future of our species., https://www.librarystack.org/parallel-minds-discovering-the-intelligence-of-materials/?ref=unknown

PlaguePod Live: Cope Edition. What’s going on? It’s been over a month in lockdown, the epistemological conundrum of coronavirus has been solved (no one knows anything) and we are bored, deranged, chronically anxious, and have no idea what to talk about. But there is fresh junglism, there is CoronaQuest, and there are guests: Enrico Monacelli and Laura Tripaldi report back from Italy, Shaun Lewin continues the search for rare jaffa cakes and COVID/corvid crossovers, and Edinburgh’s finest Proc Fiskal brings some tunes and lockdown updates from the Heart of Lothian., https://www.librarystack.org/plaguepod-live-day-34/?ref=unknown

Self-assembly + replicating capacity: Laura Tripaldi on how viruses went from representing the technological future of humanity to being the absolute emblem of pandemic extinction., https://www.librarystack.org/fundamental-principles-of-global-ecophagy/?ref=unknown

PlaguePod returns with guests including Shaun Lewin, Laura Tripaldi, and Reza Negarestani to talk speculative virology, herd immunity, food security, and much more, plus a diverse range of grime, jungle, juke, and other bangers, a feature interview with Tony the Greengrocer, and an exclusive unreleased track by Florian Hecker. The most diverse coronacontent out there., https://www.librarystack.org/plaguepod-live-day-5/?ref=unknown

In this live podcast, socially-distanced Urbanomic-adjacent guests from across the planet join us from their respective lockdown cells to share personal and speculative views on the Coronavirus era. With Matt Colquhoun (Xenogothic), Amy Ireland, Nyx Land, Shaun Lewin, Robin Mackay, Mattin, Enrico Monacelli, Thomas Moynihan, Reza Negarestani, Katherine Pickard, Miguel Prado, Laura Tripaldi. CONTENT WARNING: FOUL LANGUAGE, DEGENERATE PHILOSOPHERS, COGNITIVE TURPITUDE, ACCELERATIONISM, https://www.librarystack.org/plaguepod-live-day-1/?ref=unknown