The Terraforming Faculty 2022

Meet the new lecturers and experts contributing to the final cycle of Strelka’s The Terraforming design research program.

​Learn more about The Terraforming and apply by November 7, 2021.​

Lydia Kallipoliti

Lydia Kallipoliti is an award-winning architect, engineer, scholar, and curator working at the intersection of architecture, technology, and environmental politics. She is looking in particular at closed and self-reliant systems and urban environments. She is an assistant professor at the Cooper Union in New York. In her book The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Kallipoliti investigates what outer space capsules, submarines, and office buildings have in common. From the space program to countercultural architectural groups experimenting with autonomous living, Kallipoliti documents a disciplinary transformation and the rise of a new environmental consciousness.

Watch Lydia’s keynote lecture at The Terraforming 2022 presentation, in which she problematizes the idealization of circular economies and explains how human waste measures us and engulfs us in more ways than we want to observe or acknowledge.

Tobias Rees

Tobias Rees is a philosopher and the founding director of the Berggruen Institute’s Transformations of the Human program. He also serves as Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at the New School for Social Research, and is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His work focuses on the philosophy, poetry, and politics of the contemporary. Rees is the author of dozens of articles and three books: Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (2008), Plastic Reason (2016), and After Ethnos (2018).

Watch Tobias describe the Transformations of the Human project:

Pascal Gagneux

Pascal Gagneux is an evolutionary biologist interested in the evolution of molecular diversity, particularly in the recognition of self and non-self in the context of host pathogen coevolution and mammalian reproduction. He is intrigued by the possibility that many of the unusual traits that characterize humans have been shaped by past pathogen regimes that affected our distant ancestors. Gagneux is a professor of Pathology and Anthropology at UC San Diego and the associate director of the Center of Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA). In that capacity, he also runs the Graduate Specialization in Anthropogeny, a unique transdisciplinary graduate specialization for Ph.D. students from eight UC San Diego graduate programs.

Watch Gagneux discuss genomics, life history, and reproduction during an event that asked: “How are Humans Different from Other Great Apes?”

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga is an associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His professional interests lie in the history, theory, and practice of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the international context, with a focus on Africa.

In his book Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe, Mavhunga gives an account of technology in Africa from an African perspective, examining hunting in Zimbabwe as an example of an innovative mobile workspace.

Mavhunga views technology in Africa not as something that is always brought in from the outside, but something that ordinary people understand, make, and practice through their everyday innovations or creativities—including things that few would even consider technological. Technology does not always originate in the laboratory of a Western-style building; it also originates in the society of the forest, in the crop field, and in other places where knowledge is made and turned into practical outcomes.

In his talk “African Innovation,” Mavhunga elaborates on the question of “What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?”

Christina Agapakis

Christina Agapakis is a synthetic biologist and science writer. She is the creative director of the biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks. In her work, Agapakis seeks out ways to blur the boundaries drawn between nature and technology, and between science and society. She practices a different kind of engineering that better takes into account the human and the cultural. As a scientist, she’s been working on enzymes involved in the production of biofuels, ecological design principles for synthetic biology, and the evolution of microbial communities in the soil. As an artist, she has mapped the microbial diversity of California, isolated halophilic bacteria from the Salton Sea, and made cheese from bacteria living on human skin.

Watch her TED Talk “What Happens When Biology Becomes Technology?”

David Delgado

David Delgado is a Cultural Strategist for JPL Lab Engagement and a Visual Strategist in the JPL Studio. He previously co-led NASA’s Imagine Mars Project, a STEAM-based “boot camp for the imagination” where students worked with NASA scientists and engineers to imagine and design communities on Mars. Outside of JPL, David works as an independent artist. He is currently working with the Museum of the Future in Dubai, as well as developing the Museum of Awe, a series of art/science experiences designed to leave visitors feeling the gift and privilege of being alive.

Website: davidjdelgado.com

Ken Goldberg

Ken Goldberg is an award-winning roboticist, filmmaker, artist, and public speaker on AI and robotics. He is the William S. Floyd Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley, where he trains the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs in his research lab. He is a pioneer in technology and artistic visual expression, bridging the “two cultures” of art and science. Ken is also the founder of the robotics company Ambi, which develops robot grasping systems.

Watch his talk about the new wave in robot grasping.

Fred Scharmen

Fred Scharmen is a designer and researcher focusing on how architects imagine new spaces for speculative future worlds, and who is invited into those worlds. He teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning. He is the co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems, an art and design consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland. His first book Space Settlements from Columbia Books on architecture and the city was published in 2019. His forthcoming book Space Forces will be published by Verso in 2021.

Watch Fred’s talk in which he examines the plans for life in space as serious architectural and spatial proposals.

Venkatesh Rao

Venkatesh Rao is a writer and consultant. He is the author of Tempo (2011), a book on decision-making, and the founder and editor of the influential longform blog Ribbonfarm. He holds a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering (2003) from the University of Michigan. His current research focuses on the changing relationship between time perception and the human condition, with particular focus on the hypothesis that a century-old culture based on universally shared objective clock time is giving way to a condition of multitemporality—a human condition based on a fragmented landscape of subjective time cultures.

Watch his talk on archetypes for the Anthropocene.

Twitter: @vgr

Website: venkateshrao.com​

Valerie Olson

Valerie Olson is an environmental anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her work focuses on contemporary sociocultural processes that remake what count as environments. Valerie’s current projects focus on how social groups use the system concept to perceive, organize, and control spatial relations, particularly on large scales. This focus allows her to follow the ways people relate to sites, things, and processes they do not experience directly and which are categorized as outlying or beyond human. She is the author of Into the Extreme (2018), which reveals how outer space contributes the scope and scale of today’s natural and social environments.

In the following talk Valerie lectures on the extraterrestrial as a space in forward-facing research design, imagination, politics, and ethics.

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