ArchaeaBot lecture at University of Hertfordshire Biocomputation Group

Alex May gave a lecture on ArchaeaBot: A Post Singularity, Post Climate Change Lifeform at the University of Hertfordshire Biocomputation Group on 20 April 2018. Presented while the project was still in development, the talk introduced the work as an underwater robotic installation shaped by research into archaea, machine learning, and speculative futures beyond familiar human-centred ideas of life.

The lecture set out the project’s conceptual and scientific frame clearly. Developed with Anna Dumitriu, and involving collaboration with Imperial College and the University of Hertfordshire, ArchaeaBot asked what a life-form designed for survival after climate collapse and technological singularity might be. That made the Biocomputation Group a particularly exact context for the talk, because the project sits directly between computational systems, robotics, and biological thinking rather than borrowing those ideas only as metaphor.

Within May’s wider practice, the lecture matters as an early public articulation of one of the major collaborative works that would soon go on to exhibition. It shows the project at the stage where research, speculation, and technical development were still being assembled into form, making the talk part of the work’s development history rather than only a later reflection on a finished piece.