They are at work all around us — how did they escape us? While we have extensively studied human-computer interactions and even machine-machine relationships, we have overlooked how machines relate to their environments. This seminar traces and theorizes a family of tools, eco-machines, deliberate constructs oriented toward and embedded within their surroundings. From ancient tools like water screws, wind towers, or ploughs to autonomous earthworking tools, construction robots, or cloud seeders in the service of geoengineering, these tools survey, project, assess, monitor, modify, restore, convert energy and construct their surroundings.

We will trace this evasive family of machines and collectively investigate: What constitutes an eco-machina? In what ways does it exist? How does it affect the landscape and ecologies it operates within? And what can eco-machines teach us about agency and partnerships with natural forces and other species in an age of emerging artificial intelligence?

This seminar is part of a book project by the instructor. Shifting from an anthropocentric view of machines, hand-tool relationships, and a conversation dominated by artificial human intelligence, we turn to examine eco-machina’s operation as a negotiation between machines, matter, and environments. By centering the attention on the way tools meet matter, instead of extensions-of-man, a hitherto conceptually unavailable group of machines emerges. Once unveiled, it changes the way we relate tools and context, machines and landscapes, robotics and ecologies.

Borrowing and expanding scientific terminology, we will classify and examine machines according to the different domains they operate in: in vitro (in labs), in situ (on site), in silico (in simulations), in vivo (in living materials), and more. We will draw on the history and philosophy of technology, ecology, systems thinking, robotics, digital fabrication, landscape and architecture to define eco-machines through the mediums they operate in and the ways they interact with their surroundings. Each weekly session will focus on a specific operation medium or aspect, from context and material-tool encounters through questions of agency, intelligence, and ultimately the ethics we face when robots meet nature.

All students are expected to be fully present, engaged, and to participate in readings and leading of weekly discussions.

The seminar assignments support students with or without a design background: 
Design track: Conceptual designs for a proposed eco-machina for a specific ecological challenge (group projects will be encouraged)
Analysis track: Extended bibliography and a set of analytical diagrams examining an eco-machina aspect, sub-topic, or case study.