Parallel Minds

Insights into the intelligence throughout the natural and technical environment, in the fabric of our devices and dwellings, in our clothes, and under our skin.

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 behaviors 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, 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.
 
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.
 "Parallel Minds is a welcome guide to contemporary debates about material intelligence: calm and measured, it is also bold in its ambitions and unafraid to face the challenges posed by an increasingly—and often disconcertingly—smart and lively world in which culture is inseparable from technology."
—Sadie Plant, author of Zeros and Ones

"The most important philosophical surprise of recent years. Radical and erudite, very readable, and revolutionary, Tripaldi’s book is sure to become a great contemporary classic."
—Emmanuele Coccial, author of MetamorphosesLaura Tripaldi is a PhD student in Materials Science and Nanotechnology at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca.
 
Matteo De Giuli is a writer for TV and radio, and Senior Editor of the online journal Il Tascabile. He has collaborated with Rai3, Radio3 Rai, Not, and National Geographic.