Bio_lent Machines
About the event
How can we undo the violence that has been wrought on our planet due to urbanisation, inequality and global warming?
In our first Dean’s Lecture for 2025, international guests Claudio Rossi and Daniela Atencio will discuss how machines can work with the natural environment to create alternative methods of caring for and restoring the land.
Focusing on contemporary Latin America, Rossi and Atencio use the landscape's complexity as a testing ground for looking at architecture as Bio_lent Machines – or machines that build machines. This new way of thinking about architecture frames the design practice as a machine that uses technology to reverse the various forms of destruction inflicted on our world.
Together, Rossi and Atencio will address modern social and environmental threats while demonstrating how architects, landscape architects, urban designers and planners can rise to the challenges of the future.
This future-focused lecture will explore the use of the robotic arm as a tool in the creative design process, revealing new and exciting creative approaches rarely explored in Australian design industry and academia.
Rossi and Atencio believe that machines building machines can serve rather than destroy our landscapes. This groundbreaking approach opens a conversation about how we design things and the design process’ impact on people and the planet.
Their vision is that planetary damage and the toll it takes on human life will one day be replaced with Bio_lent Machines.
About the speakers
Claudio Rossi is a Dr in Architecture, Master in Urban Design, and Architect with experience in architectural, landscape and urban projects in the professional and academic field that have been awarded, such as: the Urban Project for Coast of Venezuela after the Natural Disasters of 1999. Lecturer, critic, reviewer and/or visiting professor in Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture in different universities in Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Perú, Italy, and United States. Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Torino [2018-2019], FIU [2024]. Associate Professor at Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia. Research topics: Architectural Anomalies. Biolent Cities: Collisions / Frontiers in Latin-America cities. Robot_Lab: Hyper_artifacts.
Daniela Atencio is an Architect / Master of Design Research in Emerging Systems, Technologies and Media at SCI_Arc / Visiting Professor at FIU-2024 / Associate professor and researcher at the Universidad de Los Andes where she coordinates computational design courses / Her work covers topics of advanced technologies in architecture and design, representation, computational design, robotics in architecture (computer-controlled), published and/or exhibited by: Venice Architecture Biennale, the International Association for Robots in Architecture, ACADIA, DigitalFutures, SIGraDi, Routledge, among others. Author of the book Robotic Translations: Design Processes —Latin-America, published by ACTAR. Member of the Women in Robotics Association, among other related institutions. Lecturer and/or jury at SCI_Arc, UCLA, University of Melbourne, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Kent State University, Texas A&M, Universidad de Monterrey, The University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, among others.