From Dark Properties:
Claire L. Evans on imagination as a form of computation, and the endless entanglement of our biological reality.
The below interview is part of Ecologies of Entanglement, a collaborative series between Are.na Editorial and Dark Properties.
I first came to know Claire L. Evans through her 2018 book, Broad Band, which tells the untold story of the women who made the internet. It’s a great book (you should read it!), but I have to say, I’m even more excited about her current body of research and writing: A mind-bending, ultra-futuristic conglomeration of topics, from slime mold computers, to evolutionary simulations, to programmable organisms. When taken together, there is a central question that emerges from these far-out areas of inquiry: How does computing shape our lives—and how will it shape our future?
To understand the expansiveness of the above question, it’s important to know that for Claire, “computing” is not something merely done by silica-based computers. On the contrary, the act of computing can be applied to almost anything that is dynamically operating in the world—and, in turn, shaping reality. As Claire writes in GROW Magazine, “The sheer multiplicity of approaches is enough to make you think that computing is not so much an industry as a way of seeing — an interpretation of the world.” With this in mind, we can agree that modern-day laptops and iPhones are perhaps a quite limited manifestation of this idea of a “computer.” So much more is possible, and as a science fiction editor, tech reporter, and writer, Claire is one of the best people I can think of to help us all imagine it.
For this series, Ecologies of Entanglement, we wanted to explore the growing overlap between nature and technology, and to see where we mortal humans fit in. Perhaps we were pulled in this direction because of the way that analyzing this particular overlap starts to unravel many of life’s biggest questions—from consciousness to the nature of reality and what it means to be alive. I’m happy to report that in the below interview, Claire takes us dancing through these cosmic unknowns, all while keeping us grounded in reality and, importantly, excited for a future where computers aren’t just made of rocks, but made of the slimy, oozy stuff of life. I hope you enjoy.
— Willa
P.S. Claire writes a terrific newsletter of her own, called Wild Information. I couldn’t recommend subscribing more highly!
*****
....I’d love to chat about the new body of research you’ve been working on. It seems to commingle this unlikely terrain between consciousness and life, on the one side, and then computation and technology on the other. How do you define this vortex of ideas?
Well, I spent many years as a semi-traditional tech writer. That was interesting and fruitful, but I got to a point where I was just not interested in Silicon Valley anymore. However, I’m still very much a computer person. I’m fascinated by moving symbols around on screens, and how computers order our view of the world.
While writing about technology, I developed an interest in biotechnology, and in biology more generally. Right now there’s this intersection between computing and biology emerging simultaneously across disciplines. There are people creating artificial intelligence from the top-down, using traditional machine-learning methods, but there are also people working towards generating life from code from the bottom-up, using evolutionary methods. There are synthetic biologists programming cells like code, roboticists working with living matter, and researchers drawing inspiration from living systems—swarms of fish, flocks of birds, slime molds, or seedling roots—to imagine new computing architectures. Even traditional biologists are increasingly using terms like “computation” and “information processing” to talk about phenomena they observe in nature....
....MUCH MORE
We too have known the allure of slime molds:
I smell a pronoun fight....
