Michael Weinstock gave a Keynote Lecture for DigitalFutures WORLD Lecture Series, titles ‘The Ecology of Intelligence in Nature and Civilisation.’
The dynamics and energy transactions of the ‘algorithms of nature’ have informed innovative computational processes of architectural design and materialisation. Current focus is on developing new paradigms for sentient cities in extreme contexts in the regime of rapidly accelerating population growth and declining resources, climatic and ecological change, the accelerating complexity and potential collapse and reorganisation of the global system.
More than100 years ago the Futurists faced impending world-wide catastrophes of pestilence and warfare, great social pressures from large, disenfranchised populations living in crowded and appalling conditions, new and potentially socially explosive technologies, and an implacably unenlightened and repressive orthodoxy. The numbers today are different, but what is similar is the necessity for a generation scale project that starts with dreams and calculations – and the ambition to project them into the future.