from leftovers that nature would not claim, spat out as a

bastard child in a damp cave by the River Nidd as the very

moon shunned her.

They said her stench was so rotten that she walked in a

cloud of flies.

They said that she turned water into stone.

They said these things and much more.

And yet they went in droves down to the petrifying well to

see ugly old Mother Shipton.

They came, hoping to influence their fates, since the women

who defied the very laws of nature could also see what the

future had to hold, and so enable them to take corrective

or aversive measures.

Yet the powers of this sorceress were incompletely

revealed, for she was also the guardian of a technology that

could match the potency of nature.

Yet not all of the things that they said about Mother Shipton

were untrue.

Today, her miraculous technology lies unclaimed,

lurking in full view as a tourist attraction.

While the Enlightenment gave us new sets of tools that

replaced our oracles and used the powers of science to

enable different approaches and ways of making

predictions, even these had their limits, being less

reliable as time passed or as events became

increasingly complex.

Indeed, even in our highly technologised area, our

ancient times are stirred when our current tool sets cannot

clearly see the future.

We have recently come to regard these limits as

singularities, where technologically mediated

events introduce time and complexity into our realities

so rapidly that they render our predictive methods

ineffective.

Indeed, it he said that they threaten to rupture the fabric

of human history.

They include a range of anticipated incidents, such as

the AI singularity, where machine intelligence exceeds

that of humans, the trans-human singularity, where

our bodies are no longer naturally made, the virtual

singularity, where we upload our identities, and even the

escape velocity singularity, where human life spans

increase so dramatically, they disrupt our

current notions of humanity.

But although these singularities may seem

diverse, they stem from a particular kind of thinking,

which originates from that Enlightenment worldview.

This is set to hard control the future and involves

accurately forecasting events so that we can better deal

with, design, or prevent them from happening.

Yet the inability to know exactly what happens next does

not imply Faustian bargains to evade grey goose scenarios, as

Bill Joy may claim, but it anticipates a disruption in

our experience of reality.

Through GPS scientific instruments and the data

processing powers of modern computing, a complex model of

the world has emerged and has increased our awareness of

existential risks to our human culture.

They indicate that we face great changes that are posed

by nature herself.

Over the course of this century, we are likely to

witness more flooding, dramatic weather patterns, and

resource shortages, which will reach tipping points where

systems behave unpredictably and which we are currently

powerless to describe or prevent.

Nature does not obey the linear laws of machines but

operates in complex contextualised and

irreversible way, which exist beyond the singularity in

places that we cannot see clearly.

We may think of these conceptual opacities as the

black sky for which we need a different tool set.

And this is black sky thinking.

Black sky thinking is tactical,

propositional, and iterative.

It draws existing threads or experience together and weaves

a loose reality fabric from them.

It then repeats the process until we can start to see the

world around us again clearly and bump confidently up

against its warp and weft under new blue skies.

I'd like to talk about a particular singularity to

offer an example of black sky thinking, the interstellar

singularity, which occurs when humans leave the solar system.

Our journey to the stars may be happening

sooner than you think.

Right now, Icarus Interstellar are catalysing the

construction of a world ship in Earth's

orbit within 100 years.

I am project leader for Persephone, which is one of

the projects of Icarus Interstellar and responsible

for the living interior to this world ship.

This may be thought of as a unique kind of nature that

supports its space-faring inhabitants.

But since this project will be realised in more than one

lifetime and also exists within an age of exponential

technological change, it is difficult, if not impossible,

to see how we can even begin to imagine how we might deploy

the necessary technologies to construct the living fabric

for a world ship that does not already exist.

Persephone inhabits black sky thinking territory.

My work addresses the unknown challenges of building a

living environment for this world ship by harnessing the

computational properties of matter, powered by subatomic

networks, chemical relationships,

and flows of energy.

These take place in parallel and operate in real time.

So we can think of the natural world as a kind of technology

itself and harness its potential, using the

techniques of natural computing , a term that was

inspired by Alan Turing's interest in the computational

powers of nature and provides us with an alternative

technological platform to machines, which helps us map

and shape continually unfolding solution spaces.

The outputs of this approach propose a new kind of nature,

with its own unique laws, based in physics and

chemistry, of the systems that underpin the world ship.

So rather than extrapolating the consequences of conceptual

models, black sky thinking literally feels its way around

possibilities by mapping and working the nature of reality

without having to know the future.

And Persephone will shape her world by horizontally coupling

her native physical and chemical systems together

through her soils, which function as a highly complex,

self-producing natural computer.

My research explores natural computing systems, such as

chemistries that are lively and resists the decay towards

equilibrium to grow structures like chemical worms and banded

soil-like substrates.

Indeed, nature's technologies are unlike those of machines.

They are not made from a world of geometrically-bound objects

but are born from a dynamic field of possibility that is

based on networks, relationships, and flows.

Such technologies are so familiar to us that we take

them for granted, as they already

exist beneath our feet.

Indeed, these soils are the foundation of all

civilizations.

They occur spontaneously, acting as chemical

transformers, whose effects can be expressed in terms of

land fertility.

Soil technology may help us feel out way around a new kind

of reality, not by consuming resources but by endlessly

transforming matter in complex entanglements of flow and

metabolism that result in fundamentally life-promoting

events, ones that we can shape.

The story of Mother Shipton directly speaks to my work,

not because of her conceptually-forged bold

prophecies that spoke of times when men could walk and

communicate under water or even when women were to wear

trousers to straddle transport systems as if astride a

broomstick.

However, I am drawn to the legend of a woman who embodies

a complete deconstruction of our aesthesized views of

nature, which Timothy Morton and Slavoj Zizek declare get

in the way of dealing with the materiality of the actual

world we inhabit through our preconceptions.

But I'm most compelled by Mother Shipton's legend

because at the very place she lived, as it harboured an

architectural scale computer.

Mother Shipton's petrifying well was the place where soft

objects were turned to stone.

This has nothing to do with the anti-natural tendencies of

a profane women but may be attributed to the synthetic

properties of elemental infrastructures.

Nor are the features of the well simply a natural

phenomena, untouched by humans.

They are carefully orchestrated by the drivers of

our material reality, based in physics and chemistry,

operating in conjunction with people who came to

ritualistically place soft objects in the

mineral-rich waters.

Here, the transformation begins.

The soft object becomes saturated with water, which

flows through the porous matrices

by capillary reaction.

And as the water evaporates from these permeable bodies,

it leaves limestone-like deposits

behind, like kettle scale.

The mouth of the well drips stone objects from its damp

matrix, which are hung by threads that suspend the soft

bodies between the ground and the air, where they wait to be

transformed into something more lasting, that enfolds

sacrificial items like teddy bears, lobsters, brushes, and

even John Wayne's hat into the fabrics of the rocks.

These processes, as magical and unconventional as they may

seem, exist today and embody a rudimentary framework for a

natural computer.

In its current form, these may be considered as a

stone-spinning web, which can act as a primordial prototype

to harness what David [INAUDIBLE]

calls pre-natural forces, and offers us a glimpse of an

emerging technological fields.

Such technologies may not only be developed through our

increasing knowledge of chemistry, physics, and

biology, but may also be evolved into more

sophisticated computational matrices that function as

artificial soils and may eventually bring world ships

to life, or help us invent new forms of construction ,

repair, and recycling for our increasingly

resource-constrained cities.

So these unnatural forms--

hag and worldship--

share something in common with all living things, in that

they defy the very odds of their existence.

Yet they do not survive by submitting to the random

lottery of evolution, but are post-natural hybrids that

manipulate the fabric of reality by drawing its

material threads together and shaping it through their own

force and will, as incessant acts of survival and growth.

Using the technology of natural computing, these

post-natural bodies spring firm fabrics out of elemental

cycles and grow new worlds from the very guts of nature.

And they claim to an existence that they do

not assume as a given.

In full view, the drip, drip, dripping off the Mother

Shipton stone web permeates and transforms the soft bodies

carefully placed in its immortal well.

Sometimes it spins this way.

And other times it twists that way.

From time to time, strange and unexpected nodules bulge

expectancy.

And in those prodigious moments that proceed a

decision, it seems that life itself may split the sack and

all is possible.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]