FiveWordsForTheFuture

The Wound of the Possible. Art, Futurity, and Non-Human Agency

A Call for Papers — Noema https://noemalab.eu/memo/calls/the-wound-of-the-possible-art-futurity-and-non-human-agency/ About Noema Noema (from Greek νόημα, “thought”, “concept”, “idea”) is an online magazine (ISSN 2283-3145) exploring the relationships between technology, science, culture, and society. Founded in 2000 — with roots going back…
Interview with Oriana Persico

Oriana Persico is an artist, cyber-ecologist, and director of the research center HER she Loves Data, she explores the relationship between humans, technology, and society by investigating data as cultural phenomena that make us sensitive to complexity and the environment.…
Brain device that reads inner thoughts aloud

From counting the number of people in a room to reading this sentence in your head, we are constantly harnessing our ability for inner speech. But what happens when scientists make that internal monologue external? In a paper published today…
China’s humanoid robot with lifelike expressions

China’s humanoid robotics industry is entering a new phase, not just focused on mobility and industrial automation, but increasingly on something more human – the face. Recent developments in hyperrealistic humanoid robot faces have gone viral online, sparking debate…
Interview with Alessandro Quaranta

Alessandro Quaranta is a videoartist born in Turin in 1975. He currently teaches in the Multimedia Department at the Accademia di Belle Arti Giacomo Carrara of Bergamo (IT). His work has been shown at CAIRN Centre d’art (Digne-les-Bains, FR),…
New Brain Device Is First to Read Out Inner Speech

And on the cutting edge of this field, neuroscientists have more recently developed brain implants that can turn neural signals directly into whole words. These brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) largely require users to physically attempt to speak, however—and that can…
Giacomo Verde non esiste

Italiano [English below] Giacomo Verde (1956-2020) è stato uno dei protagonisti della videoarte, dell’arte digitale e interattiva e del videoteatro in Italia. Nel 2014 Giacomo ha partecipato con una videointervista a fivewordsforthefuture, progetto nato da una serie di…
Noema. Uno sguardo lungo 25 anni / Noema. A look spanning 25 years

Italiano [English below] Marzo 2025: Noema compie 25 anni (2000-2025). Un quarto di secolo è un periodo di tempo importante, così abbiamo pubblicato questo eBook. È in italiano, a breve uscirà anche l’edizione inglese. La pubblicazione traccia la storia…
Australian startup Cortical Labs unveils ‘world’s first’ commercial biological computer

Biological computing startup Cortical Labs has launched CL1, what it is calling the world’s first commercial biological computer. The technology combines “lab-cultivated neurons from human stem cells” with silicon to create what the company says is a “more advanced and…
Interview with Elena Giulia Rossi

Elena Giulia Rossi lives and works in Rome as a researcher, a Professor of Theories of Multimedia Arts, and Editorial Director of the online editorial platform Arshake. Reinventing Technology. After living, studying and working in Chicago for three…
Scientists Make ‘Cyborg Worms’ with a Brain Guided by AI

Scientists have given artificial intelligence a direct line into the nervous systems of millimeter-long worms, letting it guide the creatures to a tasty target—and demonstrating intriguing brain-AI collaboration. They trained the AI with a methodology called deep-reinforcement learning; the same…
Dialogues across the Seas. The Ocean that keeps us apart also joins us. Charting knowledge and practice in the Anthropocene – 2nd edition

Is now out the second English edition of the eBook Dialogues across the Seas. The Ocean that keeps us apart also joins us. Charting knowledge and practice in the Anthropocene. This second edition is updated and is enriched by the…
Interview with Živa Ljubec

Prior to taking up her current post as Innovation Director with a robotics company, Dr. Živa Ljubec was senior lecturer at SIVA – Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts, where she taught cybernetics and other subjects as well as coordinated…
The First AI Cinema Camera

SpecialGuestX, a creative technology agency for the world’s most innovative companies, and 1stAveMachine, a global mixed-media production company, have joined forces to launch CMR-M1 today, the first AI-powered movie camera. The CMR-M1, which stands for Camera Model 1, was inspired…
Cerebras unveils “world’s fastest” AI chip

Cerebras Systems has announced the creation of the world’s “fastest” AI chip. The Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) has been purpose-built to train the largest AI models up to ten-times larger than GPT-4 and Gemini. The chip contains 4 trillion…
Five Words for the Future Workshop

On February 22 and 23 the “Five Words for the Future Workshop” took place in Rome, with Derrick de Kerckhove and Pier Luigi Capucci, curated by Gianna Angelini with the students of AANT – Accademia delle Arti e Nuove…
Interview with Kerstin Borchhardt

Kerstin Borchhardt is an Associate Professor at the Institute of History and Theory of Art at Catholic Private University Linz. She has worked as a postdoc and lecturer at several German Universities and was a cooperating partner at UNAM in…
Titanic robots make farming more sustainable

There’s a lot riding on farmers’ ability to fight weeds, which can strangle crops and destroy yields. To protect crops, farmers have two options: They can spray herbicides that pollute the environment and harm human health, or they can hire…
Using mycelium to create a self-healing wearable leather-like material

A pair of biotechnologists at Newcastle University, working with a colleague from Northumbria University, all in the U.K., have developed a way to use mycelium to create a self-healing wearable material. In their paper published in the journal Advanced Functional…
An Edible Rechargeable Battery

Edible electronics is a growing field that aims to produce digestible devices using only food ingredients and additives, thus addressing many of the shortcomings of ingestible electronic devices. Edible electronic devices will have major implications for gastrointestinal tract monitoring, therapeutics,…
Interview with Claudia Schnugg

Dr. Claudia Schnugg is artscience scholar and curator. She holds a PhD in social and economic sciences with an additional focus on cultural sciences and media arts. Her ongoing practice in the field of art and science is…
HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence

HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence is a digital book of the European Commission on the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and society from different perspectives. The eBook, edited by Freddy Paul Grunert, with Massimo Craglia, Emilia Gómez Gutierrez and Jutta Thielen-del…
A new concept for low-cost batteries

As the world builds out ever larger installations of wind and solar power systems, the need is growing fast for economical, large-scale backup systems to provide power when the sun is down and the air is calm. Today’s lithium-ion batteries…
Dialogues across the seas: the ocean that keeps us apart also joins us. Charting knowledge and practice in the Anthropocene

This publication is about two events on the impact of the climate crisis on the seas and the marine environments. The first one was entitled “From the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Dialogues across the seas”, and took place on…
Interview with Gabriele Romeo

Gabriele Romeo was born in Palermo in 1983. He has a bachelor’s degree in Science and Technology of the arts at the University of Palermo and a graduate degree in History of Art (with a specialization address on…
Tiny electromagnetic robot runs fast and re-forms after being squished

A squishy robot smaller than a postage stamp can run 70 of its body lengths every second – more than three times faster than a cheetah, relative to its body size. “It is really, really fast and, to be honest,…
CPU Made Without Silicon

Known for its core design IP that ends up in everything from IoT to smartphones to servers, Arm is now presenting that it has enabled one of its key microcontrollers in a new form factor: rather than using silicon as…
Brain-computer interface creates text on screen by decoding brain signals associated with handwriting

Scientists with the BrainGate research collaborative have, for the first time, used an implanted sensor to record the brain signals associated with handwriting and used those signals to create text on a computer in real time. In a study published…
Interview with Jeremy Hight

Jeremy Hight is an artist, writer, theorist and sometimes digital curator. He created the field of Locative Narrative in 2002 with the collaborative project 34 North 118 West. His collaborative digital poetics work Carrizo Parkfield Diaries is in the…
“Smart clothes” that can measure your movements

In recent years there have been exciting breakthroughs in wearable technologies, like smartwatches that can monitor your breathing and blood oxygen levels. But what about a wearable that can detect how you move as you do a physical activity or…
New wearable device turns the body into a battery

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a new, low-cost wearable device that transforms the human body into a biological battery. The device, described today in the journal Science Advances, is stretchy enough that you can wear it…
Interview with Jatun Risba

Jatun Risba (‘ki’) is an artist of self, linguist of kinship and joker exploring beyond human paradigms. By approaching Art, Science, Technology in terms of ritual mysticism, ki recovers poetry and magic in contemporary societies. Since 2014 Risba has…
Surgical device inspired by parasitic wasps

A surgical device inspired by parasitic wasps could make it easier and less painful to remove certain tumours and blood clots. Parasitic wasps inject their eggs through a long, thin, tubular organ called an ovipositor into living hosts, such as…
Interview with Giada Totaro

Giada Totaro is a new media artist and innovative didactic expert. Between 2002 and 2015 she graduated in “Theatre Direction” and “Cinema, TV and Multimedia Production” at the University of Roma Tre, the first level master “Digital Environment Design”…
Plug-and-play brain–computer interface

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) offer the potential for people with severe motor disabilities to control external assistive devices with their mind. Current BCI systems are limited, however, by the need for daily recalibration of the decoder that converts neural activity into…
Pavegen

Pavegen is a people powered, kinetic tech floor tile that creates clean electricity and captivates the imagination of anyone that steps on it. WHO WE ARE Let’s create cities that work for citizens, not machines. Technology alone won’t make cities…
Interview with Marta de Menezes

Marta de Menezes is a Portuguese artist (b. Lisbon, 1975) with a degree in Fine Arts by the University in Lisbon, a MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture by the University of Oxford, and a PhD candidate…
A chip made with carbon nanotubes marks a computing milestone

Because carbon nanotubes are almost atomically thin and ferry electricity so well, they make better semiconductors than silicon. In principle, carbon nanotube processors could run three times faster while consuming about one-third of the energy of their silicon predecessors.
Brain-machine interface set to improve life for amputees

A newly designed brain-machine interface dramatically improves performance and reduces mental and physical stress for people with a leg amputated above the knee.
Interview with Dalila Honorato

Dalila Honorato, Ph.D, is a facilitator of safe spaces for hosting the interaction of ideas around liminal issues in the frame of Art&Sci. Her research focus is on embodiment, monstrosity, the uncanny and the acrobatic balance between phobia and paraphilia.…
Iota Biosciences raises $15M to produce in-body sensors smaller than a grain of rice

Fitness trackers and heart-rate monitors are all well and good, but if you want to track activity inside the body, the solutions aren’t nearly as convenient. Iota Biosciences wants to change that with millimeter-wide sensors that can live more or…
Toyota untethers its T-HR3 humanoid robot thanks to 5G

Toyota just brought your dreams of an Avatar-like proxy one step closer to reality. Teaming with NTT Docomo, it remotely controlled its T-HR3 humanoid robot over a 5G network from a distance of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). So far the…
Kia to demonstrate Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving

Kia’s new Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving (READ) technology will be demonstrated at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Co-developed with the Affective Computing Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, the Real-time Emotion Adaptive Driving…
Interview with Adam Zaretsky

Adam Zaretsky is a Wet-Lab Art Practitioner mixing Ecology, Biotechnology, Non-human Relations, Body Performance and Gastronomy. Zaretsky stages lively, hands-on bioart production labs based on topics such as: foreign species invasion (pure/impure), radical food science (edible/inedible), jazz bioinformatics (code/flesh), tissue…