Agenda

25 May 2026 16:00

JOINT SEMINAR ECLT-NICHE | Material Agency in Technological Intelligence

Aula B Ca' Bottacin Venice

Material Agency in Technological Intelligence: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective 

25 May 2026, 4 PM CEST

Ca' Bottacin, Aula B
Calle Crosera, Dorsoduro 3911, Venice 

Laura Tripaldi
NYU Shanghai

Introduction
Prof Francesco Gonella

Abstract:
This seminar examines the growing relevance of material agency for understanding technological intelligence. Across new materialist philosophy, biotechnology, soft robotics, biological computing, and materials science, matter is increasingly understood not as a passive substrate but as an active participant in the production of form, function, and intelligence. This shift challenges older hylomorphic and substrate-neutral paradigms of technology, in which material substrates merely serve as supports for externally imposed designs. Focusing on case studies such as xenobots, wetware computing, intelligent soft matter, and AI-driven material discovery, this seminar discusses how our paradigms of technological intelligence are undergoing a profound epistemic transition. These emerging technologies operate through the specific affordances of their material substrates: their plasticity, responsiveness, self-organisation, and ability to process information in embodied ways. These developments suggest a new technological landscape in which agency is distributed across human and nonhuman actors, and in which matter itself increasingly participates in technical functions. Material agency, I suggest, provides a useful cross-disciplinary framework for interpreting this shift and for rethinking AI as a materially entangled, ecological, and substrate-specific process.

Organizers:
Francesca Tarocco
NICHE Director

Achille Giacometti
ECLT Director

Language

The event will be held in English

Organized by

NICHE, ECLT, DSAAM, Erasmus+

Downloads

Poster 564 KB

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