The Impact of Living Technology on the Future of Humanity

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Dr Rachel Armstrong is a writer, multimedia producer, television presenter, arts collaborator and general medical practitioner specializing in non-Darwinian techniques of evolution and the challenges of the extra-terrestrial environment. She regards the discipline of architecture as holding a unique place in the cultural imagination being simultaneously iconic and personal, and which offers an ideal forum to engage with and reimagine our experience of the world so that we can reinvent our role within it.

She is a Teaching Fellow at the Bartlett and member of Professor Neil Spillers AVATAR Research Group, developing a new architectural methodology called Systems Architecture, which is which is the study of complexity within the discipline of the built environment that enables the convergence of the nano-bio-info-cogno technologies and extends from the macroscale flow of information to the micro scale organization of building materials.

She has worked as a technical tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture with students exploring the connections between biology, medicine and architecture. She was technical advisor to international performance artists such as Orlan and Stelarc on projects that explored the possibilities and implications of extreme anatomical and biotechnical modification and is the author and producer of a large range of multimedia projects and digital medical programmes ranging from printed literature to virtual reality and the Internet.

Her first Science-Fiction novel The Grays Anatomy was published in 2001 by Serpents Tail. She was also an editor of an Art & Design Issue entitled Sci-Fi Aesthetics, released in 1997 by Wiley-Academy, and Space Architecture for Architectural Design in 2001. She has published extensively on post-human evolution and alien phenomena, working at the intersection of art, science and technology.