laura tripaldi, substrates unbound — review

03 Jan, 2026

tripaldi is already doing leadership work in prophesizing the future of biotechnology, but her struggle to figure out exactly where alchemy isnt a metaphor for engineering may slow her down in the construction of future ontologies

coming off her work parallel minds translated three years ago by urbanomic, as well as an italian piece titled gender tech, both of which i intend to review soon, nyu shanghai fellow laura tripaldi has released her first work for benjamin bratton's journal antikythera titled substrates unbound.

now, the article is nearly the lenght of a small book, given that works in this publisher tend to extend into historicizational scaffolding quite a lot and pre-ground every claim heavily. which on one hand, can ocassionally come off as insufferable, but on the good side of things, it does in fact successfully prevent journal entires from feeling phoned in, and it creates new curiosities for readers who may not read natural sciences on the side.

the work is also partially intended as a response to blaise aguera's what is intelligence, and it follows the naturalistic metaphors it already sits in conversation with, at one point directly confronting its substance. what is a little dissapointing is that in parallel minds, which serves as the big breakthrough for laura, not only has the better ontological writing, but in this very work she suggests that we refer to parallel minds instead for understanding concepts like the interface.

the real dissapointing thing is that, not only is the concept interface exclusively developed in the intro to the work and almost entirely left unmentioned for the entirety of the writing, but also, if you only read this article, you would more or less be able to guess exactly everything she says about interfaces in parallel minds. the only thing that does make this situation better is that her work on interfaces in minds is extensive to a degree, and sets up scaffolded variations of the concept, being one of if not the best treatments of it in contemporary times aside from antikythera's own bratton, who treats the concept through a sociological rather than a material viewpoint.

tripaldi's main argument is that contemporary tech collapses the nature/artifice split by materially hybridizing organisms and machines; this exposes the hidden assumption that substrates are passive carriers of universal functions, which causes two dominant paradigms to fail: technomorphism, a contemporary theorist being arcas, which argues that functions are universal and substrates are interchangeable, and biomimesis, a contemporary theorist being searle, which argues that functions are bound to privileged natural substrates.

tripaldi argues that both of these collapse the agency of a stratum itself, which has plenty of implicit functions that cant be emulated, but that this is great for ontological hybridity and biotech as a field, where substrate ontologies emerge as creative forces of material interfaces.

now, there are three problems with this piece, luckily none of which ruin the structure, pacing or believability of the text given they are all self-limiting. the first is that all of the references, concepts and terms are self-limiting and only serve to reinforce the narrative. keller, parisi and newman serve a majority of the weight in concepts, and then hui and fitch are also added in for additional concepts such as technodiversity and nanointentionality. their philosophies mostly are read through a minor-academic lens and as such dont actually carry the text forward, whereas the main references do feel a bit more implicitly present in the text, such as newman who is mentioned on two largely distant chunks of the text, but still feel largely secondary to it.

what does carry the text is the genealogy that tripaldi neatly stages throughout it, where the chatpers are neatly divided, know exactly how long to stay on the topic, and are grounded empirically well enough that not only justify her point but raise additional curiosities surrounding the topics themselves, especially around her understanding of alchemy and ontology.

however, the concepts themselves are also slightly underdeveloped due to the lack of conceptual scaffolding. all her working terms such as interface, agency and substrate ontology only appear in one single chunk of the text. for the lack of conceptual weight, and the genre-intended lack of polemical weight, she does however present us with a neat narrative scaffolding, where the text at multiple different times folds back into the previous points it brings up

but this does ensure that her text reads quite much safer than what it could be if she decided to take more risks. for all the grandeur she sets up, the three main things she really tackles, which go on the order of: the alchemy question, the ontology question, and their interconnectedness, only her ontology is developed in a way that makes me feel as if there isnt an absence in commentary by her on the topic itself, and makes me keep wanting to look back to parallel minds to try to scout a more developed ontology. but it is also true that this text is intended as a reference to her more thorough work, and as a response to some more recent developments in the field, and in that sense it doesnt make me feel like it underserves its welcome.

it is problematic that nowhere in this article does tripaldi even begin to consider how its not just that alchemy and its mythological undertoning didn't have the "technical" engineering development to disregard the technics-nature split by working through substrates as ontologically codefining (inbetween mutability and interchangability) by epistemological co-construction (creation) and ontological integrative production (engineering), but that alchemy was primarily concerned with a pseudo-computational paradigm with the goal of predicting the future of machinic phyla as co-producing.

it may be that it produced ontological artifacts that emanate or "belong" as categorically multi-interfacing, but these may have been semantic tools that withdrew back into social assemblages as viruses of language or experience (correlationism - body and mind are tied) rather than underdeveloped technical devices.

alchemy's purely natural call may not install continuity between naturality and artificality but may simply be a theologically underpinned concept of deep structure as revelation through a lack of matter - that something in the simulation is a complex yet simple pre-engineered form (that narratives precede all concepts as intuitive events).

the article’s continuity thesis leans on newman’s contrast with the mechanical tradition. but “purely natural” might mean “aligned with providential order” rather than “continuous with technical reality.” continuity could be theological continuity, where nature is already technical because creation is structured rather than agential-material continuity.

the text engages in a sort of geneological overreach by treating the lineage from alchemy to synthetic biology via material replication as tied to the production of substrate-sensitive technological artifacts, all whilst never mentioning the political dimension behind alchemy as a type of authority and preservation of cultural artifacts in the form of rituals that work from a purely symbolic pov.

tripaldi, against her best intentions, through her reorientation of alchemy and her use of newman in fact lets us know that alchemy failed its argument, all it did was entertain already empirical processes that were waiting to be discovered, such as fermentations and the extended temporality of chemical substances, substitutions and cultivations of new forms of liquids and so on that led to the creation of the lab.

as such, alchemists definitely didnt become chemists in the secular sense, chemists are simply scientists or rather physicists for alchemicality. alchemicality however is still at a standby, because it wants something entirely different.

the real contemporary form of alchemy is actually biotech and not chemistry - because only biotech can allow alchemy to work with new physical matter in the form of technical implants and machinic hyla.

tripaldi actually proves the fact that all alchemy did was invent an epistemic frame, the orientation necessary for the idea that matter can be something whose internal transformations could be staged, accelerated, delayed, and recomposed.

all the engineering attempts of alchemists were complete failures, and we even scoff at them and memeticize them for producing more cultural fragments than they ever were able to create lasting scientifically-technicized cultural fragments.

tripladi does make one thing much clearer and useful for us, and that is that if the alchemical goal of creating new substrata still wants to exist, it has to pass through biotech in a way that requires semiotic metaphor to create new epistemic grounds. by criticizing technomorphism, she does re-enable philosophy and therefore language to act as as a valid and yet-productive mediator between the physical world and speculative generation, rather than its silly byproduct.

there is also one more, even bigger problem with the alchemical twist on top of bio-tech engineering that tripaldi incidentally raises and where you can note that her refusal of biomimesis still situates her way closer to a technomorphist than she'd like to admit: if silicon and neuron aren't interchangeable, but simultaneously as strata are dependant on both epistemic construction and phylical engineering, what can we make of the fact that, since neurons at least in regards to their material foundation are neither conceived of nor engineered, this technically implicates them as fundamentally alien matter when in comparison to how easy it was for us to create electric-based intelligence?

its possible that syntheticity as a concept is being re-technicized by tripaldi by way of inference, meaning the narrative itself cant defend the idea that biotech is both posteriori yet virtual, or that in its essentiality its co-relational but yet still produced through a substrate that has its own preordained interface.

before we get into computation and intentionality, tripaldi does briefly mention her thoughts on simulation, by questioning the map as territory problem and the openworm project's insistence on the functional equivalence between a worm and its fully predictable simulated physiology.

the amount of potential problems with simulations are massive, for one, the epistemic problems we can retain between arcane experience and simulated re-articulation are among the following: the existence of meta-layers of simulation that produce ambiental entropy, higher glitch amounts and the existence of the glitch as hyperreal rather than disruptive, accidentally recallable past history-as-sudden-issue, or necessity as sudden necessity.

on the ontological side, further problems arise, such as a sudden random decrease of complexity, a pooling of arcaneity in aguera's technomorphological example that only lifeforms that have all their past within themselves in fully contained inner self-replicating form can self-replicate further without loss of complexity.

even though arcas claims that any computer can emulate any other, this doesnt mean that emulation itself is a perfect copy of the original, given that virtual simulations of a given property may actually be leaving behind cultural and material residues that arent fully genetically encoded.

the key issue tripaldi may be brushing up against is that substrate plasticity itself may be not just shaped on developmental genealogies but beholden by their slow historical rise as segmentary of higher functional possibility.

all of this also precludes a minor but very important worry for the human sciences, and that is over the discipline that antikythera is trying to lean towards, or more conceretely, whether synthetic biology and computational topologies are here to help aid language as symbolic rather than as functional prosper, or whether they are here to bypass the correlationist layer of mediation entirely, to aid the triumph against the symbol entirely?

the reason i ask this question is because tripaldi by the ending of her article-book, in her quest to define interfaces as a stepping stone that should finally and rightfully destroy the hierarchies that spawn from the natural-synthetic dichotomy, doesnt put into consideration the difference between artifactal steps (fabricated components, protocols, electrodes, stimulation algorithms) and non-artifactal determinants (cellular self-organization, developmental priors, evolutionary constraints, culture drift). a step doesnt have to become a determinant, alchemy has already made that very clear.

the big issue with the ambition for neo-ontology is that the world-interior of capital, our replacement for metaphysics, already stripped away from the beauty of language as symbolic mediator, may never get to witness the day where biotechnological beings are anything more than augmented.

however, at the very least, we can thank theorists like tripaldi for navigating critical theory towards a domain where it can at the very least try to turn words back into law again, even if it wasnt exactly the way priests from theologians to alchemists had originally imagined it would go, and apparently still isnt exactly the way tripaldi herself imagines it.

even for its few shortcomings, this text is positioned in the right direction not just in its ambition but in its research and defenses, and for this reason, i give it a fresh 7, with the high hopes that in the future, tripaldi doesnt regress into studying ever greater amounts of neural lab work and ever lesser amount of alchemical rhetorics, but can actually give some of these optimistic worm scientists the reorientation they need to push us ever closer towards god.

thank you everybody for watching, if you have any questions please ask me down below and ill try to answer exclusively in metaphors extracted from tripaldi's substack. please remember that this video is just a shortened version of the full review, which offers way more intricate language and a lot more claims by me. if you want to check out the transcript or script, i have the review and additional materials down below. see you next time.

commentary:

i believe most of tripaldi's own arguments in the work come from her reading of van der lugt's liber vaccae commentary, and in it, you can clearly note how almost every single belief alchemy had, still led to a failure in ontology. tripaldi herself can only accept that it led to epistemic reorientations, but of what exact use are these than more speculation? speculation is precisely what theorists can achieve, and in this sense it is valuable, but isnt it true that the real ultimate goal of alchemy is actually to give birth to alien yet organic life synthetically? all the engineering attempts of alchemists were complete failures, and we even scoff at them and memeticize them for producing more cultural fragments than they ever were able to create lasting scientifically-technicized cultural fragments. nobody ever notes the brilliancy of alcohol beyond its immediate use value, but the iphone acts like a magic mirror between worlds in an artifical sense, which is the exact thing the alchemists wanted to do through orbs and still failed.

the ability to act as if transformations in color are magical properties - and the idea that the conquering of the world can be done through psychosomatic and telepathical means has been way more memetically influential than almost the entire field of chemistry. even chemistry itself has been syphoned into stem-nerdistry as a culturally fragmentive force, meaning that the entire alchemical epistemic layer itself is at a standby, given that alchemists are now prescribed as ritualists and anybody that wants to deal with organic matter is doing it either for disease prevention or for something even more mechanistically determinist than actual physical sciences, like the exact processual and machinized creation of organic bombs or toxins in a basement.

their arguments ranged from middle of the line debauchery like using elemental geology as a form of generation and arguing that a sibling pair has temperature zone dualities, to downright weird things like a parasitic toad-suckling that feeds on a womans breast until she dies, where paraistic feeding and poisoning transfers life-energy into transformative force. now, between the idea that they wanted to question the machinic phylum and the possibility of the reconfiguration of synthetic life through technization, and the idea that they were a ritualistic, symbolic, aesthetic and political force that experimented with the natural world in the exact same way we do now and usually fail to get results, or only get results that fit into some existing codex of understanding rather than something really meant to advance empirical reality, even if that was the implicit real ambition, which of these two goals are more likely to actually have an influence over the existing field?

it isnt even as much that alchemy itself should be bastardized, nor that by its essence it always would have been, and tripaldi is surely right that its configurative tendencies are the closest we've gotten to a non-atomistic experiental worldview, it remains to be seen how, if in any way, this influences our future ontologization, or even our desire to create a type of animate matter that actually does belong to animating rather than emanating forces. if anything, given that most alchemists were politically suspect, and given that those who werent only lead to the creation of results that took us far away from the alchemical worldview, they may have spearheaded history into making it even harder to achieve this goal.

automaticity, otherwise known as engineering or more colloquially as science and now robotics is attempting this task, because physicists, unlike alchemists, have a way easier job. real alchemists are supposed to be experimenting with live matter, not for disease prevention but for frankensteinisianism, and to reconfigure matter through technicity. this isnt a moral claim, but the point is, their ontological mission, albeit fundamentally harder, also remains entirely unresolved. maybe the creation of new epistemic modes does directly correlate with higher amounts of progress, but the underlying idea that creation sits between the boundary of synthetic and natural is something alchemy, and modern alchemy in the form of biotech is still nowhere near being able to defend. alchemy wants the existence of self-originating, non-derivative and birth-compliant matter to exist, to fundamentally ask the question of what matter needs to do to self-generate, not spontaneously, but through ritualization, divorcement of elements, and most importantly, through processes that are embedded in corporeality as aspects of substratic activity.

tripladi does make one thing much clearer and useful for us, and that is that if the alchemical goal of creating new substrata still wants to exist, it has to pass through biotech in a way that requires semiotic metaphor to create new epistemic grounds, far enough to make it valuable for physicists to even consider donating their gear to biologistics, which will be passed through the market as entertainment rather than the hellspawn of mythical beings, or the creation of conscious minds from scratch that it desperately wants itself to be. but there is one more extremely useful thing tripaldi's program does against the banal empiricism of secular world-interiors, and this is that by criticizing technomorphism, she does re-enable philosophy and therefore language to act as as a valid and yet-productive mediator between the physical world and speculative generation, rather than its silly byproduct. of course, political reality actually determines this more than she can, but her standpoint is slightly more beneficial for the humanities and therefore for the hidden underlayer of mythological continuity than blaise aguiera's own.

material embodiment itself may be underrated because of its discoverability, but a lot of the engineering steps may never exist as artifacts, yet a lot of the non-artifactal consequences of non-engineered steps may be non-trivial to the actual sequence.

we can also stage this through tripaldi's own realizations about newman: the golem being heightened and pushed way above the homunculus is a really bad sign for the idea that configuration exists. however, this also highlights a big problem with the framing of this question in the review itself: since the golem originates through jewish mythology as posessing the function of something with the power to animate the symbolic world, and to simultaneously eminate from the power of verbal magic and the word-as-law, it is almost parodic that through wiener its being reframed as the symbol of computationalism and cybernetics, when in fact, it seems obvious that its correlatory function between body and world sits way closer with alchemical reality, that symbolic reality can or could have an effect on organizing the fundamental configurations of matter into previously unthought of new realms (language as ex nihilio originator) than the cliche of the connection between transcription and computation, the binary world of simple language resorting and rearticulation that computers produce.

and then, on the ontological side, further problems arise, such as a sudden random decrease of complexity, a pooling of arcaneity in aguera's technomorphological example that only lifeforms that have all their past within themselves in fully contained inner self-replicating form can self-replicate further without loss of complexity, viewing history as meta-carrier rather than as turning point, and ontologically may also produce loss of total inferential acting/variable possibility or virtual potential as a result of loops that may be too fast or slow for some type of median expected amount of meta-layers. the reason the openworm text can pose it as a problem of predictability is because the simulation co-exists with the subject of the worm and only creates further histories, being able to augment rather than construct, where, at the moment of construction, the question becomes naturally obsolete.

this is also because we assume that only humans have symbolic history and worms are just regulatory programs, but they themselves create patterns as their own versions of the exact same archeology being mapped into the simulation that then exist in the ground, where, the ground's history itself is the exact symbolic metaphor that fails territorial mapping. how can you territorially map a territory-already? how can you map a territory-by-itself? you only remain being able to map the acting agents on it, the team at openworm may fail to consider how you can always only infer backwards.

tripaldi through the correlation between the computer and language-as-cosmological (which definitely still contains and even points to the troublesome (for tripaldi) theological element of surprise and wonder when working against constructed materiality as functions rather than aesthetics) then moves on to criticising technomorphism through phylogenetic diversity.

however, the key issue tripaldi may be brushing up against is that substrate plasticity itself may be not just shaped on developmental genealogies but beholden by their slow historical rise as segmentary of higher functional possibility, biological micromachines may be a correlate to the universe-as-nano-machine-as-space, or that space itself is nanomachinetically perfect through slow historical growth. then, computation is seen as virtual encoding, where "the world is a perfect screen" and simulation is itself a form of projection, where occurances are temporally causal in exactly fixed relational fields that through ever-smaller occurances self-build into determinization and encryption. the small micro-movement of protein folds may be so inertly complex that simulating higher possible worlds (in magnitude and complexity) is itself a form of stacked complexity that can only possibly arrive through extremely complex and fully dialectically closed synthesis that requires long fixed self-engineering developmental time periods that dont do well in a vaccuum.

in this way, tripaldi herself also falls into a minor problem, because she claims that synthetic biological intelligence is something that can actively reconfigure hybrid tech ontologies and give rise to interfaces that mediate between substrates, when so far, the animation behind protein folds, amoeba and other entities point to the idea that as long as the golem doesnt suddenly become wet, there is no way it could possibly produce ontologies that spawn interfaces whatsoever, let alone ontologies that behave autonomously, given that the physical science of engineering in its quest for an automaton has paradoxically created everything except for autonomy.

even for its few shortcomings, this text is positioned in the right direction not just in its ambition but in its research and defenses, and for this reason, i give it a fresh 8, with the high hopes that in the future, tripaldi doesnt regress into studying ever greater amounts of neural lab work and ever lesser amount of alchemical rhetorics, but can actually give some of these optimistic worm scientists the reo rientation they need to push us ever closer towards god.