Rachel Armstrong

High concept science fiction adventure written by scientist Rachel Armstong, featuring an extended family circus troupe that has the ability to travel through spacetime using a technology that can draw fundamental cosmic threads from the ether.

Origamy

Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives

Can the timid schoolteacher, the laidback guy-next-door, and two cheeky border collies overcome their painful pasts and form a home together? Ana Hamilton stood up for herself and sent a man to prison. Now he’s out and she’s on the run. Arriving in the small North Queensland town of Elizadale, Ana finds herself reigniting her lost social life with new friendships, yoga, and dog agility training with her beloved border collie. But with the threat of revenge pursuing her, Ana can’t dare put down roots. Liam Maguire has it all, a beautiful house and a thriving business. Passionate about Elizadale’s tourism, he’s about to open a café to highlight fresh produce from his family’s banana farm, Shadow Creek. All that’s missing from his life is the right woman … and the intriguing new teacher may be the one he’s been waiting for. But burned by a city girl before, can Liam risk his heart over another blow-in with flighty feet and shadows in her eyes? Drawn together through a budding friendship and the playful antics of their border collies, Ana and Liam begin to open their hearts. But as danger lurks in the darkness, can Ana risk staying in Elizadale with him when she may need to run again? Or worse, have her life violently cut short and leave Liam bereft? Book One of the Shadow Creek Series

Home Among the Palm Trees

Science, Technology and the Human Form

Totally Wired

'A tender second-chance romance. Rachel Armstrong has a fresh, unique voice.' - USA Today bestselling author Alyssa J. Montgomery Amidst pristine beaches, gorgeous hikes and breathtaking sunsets in the Whitsundays, can Mirabella convince the man she's always loved to open his heart to her and her child? All Mirabella Goldring wants is a family. So when she falls pregnant to her boyfriend of six months, it's not the end of the world. Until she arrives in Sydney to surprise him and is met by his wife. Pregnant, alone, and facing her biggest fear-becoming a single mother-Mirabella heads back to the airport to return home to Melbourne. The last person she expects to encounter is her high school sweetheart, now millionaire CEO, Lincoln Crawford. Lincoln is also down on his luck. Recently separated from his wife, he has given up his dreams of a family and is ready to live a life of solo adventure; starting with a trip to the Whitsundays originally planned for two. But when he runs into the girl he let get away ten years ago, he impulsively invites her to come with him. A tropical vacation with an old friend who looks like she needs cheering up sounds perfect. When sparks start to fly, both Mirabella and Lincoln wonder if this might be something more. But there's one problem: After his own cold childhood living with a stepfather who didn't love him, Lincoln swore he would never adopt another man's child ... and Mirabella is now a package deal.

A Feel Good Summer Romance from a Debut Australian Author

Reunited with the Millionaire

In this ground-breaking book, the first to provide an overview of the theory and practice of experimental architecture, Rachel Armstrong explores how interdisciplinary, design-led research practices are beginning to redefine the possibilities of architecture as a profession. Drawing on experts from disciplines as varied as information technology, mathematics, poetry, graphic design, scenography, bacteriology, marine applied science and robotics, Professor Armstrong delineates original, cutting-edge architectural experiments through essays, quotes, poetry, equations and stories. Written by an acknowledged pioneer of architectural experiment, this visionary book is ideal for students and researchers wishing to engage in experimental, practice-based architectural and artistic research. It introduces radical new ideas about architecture and provides ideas and inspiration which students and researchers can apply in their own work and proposals, while practitioners can draw on it to transform their creative assumptions and develop thereby a distinctive "edge" to stand out in a highly competitive profession. ansform their creative assumptions and develop thereby a distinctive "edge" to stand out in a highly competitive profession.

Designing the Unknown

Experimental Architecture

If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a "machine" would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we recognize as part of "being alive."Liquid Life references a third-millennial understanding of matter that seeks to restore the agency of the liquid soul for an ecological era, which has been banished by reductionist, "brute" materialist discourses and mechanical models of life. Offering an alternative worldview of the living realm through a "new materialist" and "liquid" study of matter, Armstrong conjures forth examples of creatures that do not obey mechanistic concepts like predictability, efficiency, and rationality. With the advent of molecular science, an increasingly persuasive ontology of liquid technologies can be identified. Through the lens of lifelike dynamic droplets, the agency for these systems exists at the interfaces between different fields of matter/energy that respond to highly local effects, with no need for a central organizing system.Liquid Life seeks an alternative partnership between humanity and the natural world. It provokes a re-invention of the languages of the living realm to open up alternative spaces for exploration, including contributor Rolf Hughes' "angelology" of language, which explores the transformative invocations of prose poetry, and Simone Ferracina's graphical notations that help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling, and designing with fluids. A conceptual and practical toolset for thinking and designing, liquid life reunites us with the irreducible "soul substance" of living things, which will neither be simply "solved," nor go away.

Liquid Life

Neil Spiller

Throughout the ages architects have attempted to capture the essence of living systems as design inspiration. However, practitioners of the built environment have had to deal with a fundamental split between the artificial urban landscape and nature owing to a technological 'gap' that means architects have been unable to make effective use of biological systems in urban environments. Protocell Architecture is an edition of AD that shows for the first time that contemporary architects can create and construct architectures that are bottom up, synthetically biological, green and have no recourse to shallow bio-mimicry. In the next few decades, synthetic biology is set to have as much, if not more, impact on architecture as cyberspace and the digital. The key to these amazing architectural innovations is the Protocell.

Protocell Architecture

This book sets out the conditions under which the need for a new approach to the production of architecture in the twenty-first century is established, where our homes and cities are facing increasing pressures from environmental challenges that are compromising our lives and well being. Vibrant architecture embodies a new kind of architectural design practice that explores how lively materials, or 'vibrant matter', may be incorporated into our buildings to confer on them some of the properties of living things, such as movement, growth, sensitivity and self-repair. The theoretical and practical implications of how this may occur are explored through the application of a new group of materials. Characteristically, these substances possess some of the properties of living systems but may not have the full status of being truly alive. They include forms of chemical artificial life such as 'dynamic droplets' or synthetically produced soils. As complex systems, they are able to communicate directly with the natural world using a shared language of chemistry and so, negotiate their continued survival in a restless world. Vibrant architecture may create new opportunities for architectural design practice that venture beyond top-down form-finding programs, by enabling architects to co-design in partnership with human and nonhuman collectives, which result from the production of post natural landscapes. Ultimately, vibrant architecture may operate as an ecological platform for human development that augments the liveliness of our planet, rather than diminishes it.

Matter as a CoDesigner of Living Structures

Vibrant Architecture

Alison Davis

Linda Martin

Laura Keenan

Amy Budrikis

Arianne Chavez

Bronwyn Jones

Carolyn Abbs

Elfie Shiosaki

Ellie Fisher

Guy Salvidge

Leonard Goulds

Mabel Gibson

Mark Hackleton

Nadia Rhook

Olivier Breton

Priya Kahlon

Rachel Isaacson

Robyn Lunn

Sabian Wilde

Scott-Patrick Mitchell

Susan Midalia

Yann Toussaint

Rashida Murphy

Daniel Pitt

Cassie Ahearne

David Allan-Petale

Alicia Bakewell

Nicki Blake

Aileen Boyer

Hannah Cockroft

Brooke Dunnell

Kiri Falls

Miriam Fisher

Jess Gately

Diana Grove

Peter Horgan

Geoff Hutchison

Luke Kelly

Beth Kirkland

Paul Laverty

Amber Moffat

Rebecca Newman

Caroline-Iris Nutter

Gillian O'Shaughnessy

Emily Tsokos Purtill

Jo Pollitt

Lisa Rodrigues

Reaf Rogers

Dettra Rose

Gemma Sidney

Tim Stalker

Stevie Sutton

Sabrina Dudgeon-Swift

Melanie Talbot

Ros Thomas

Catherine Traicos

Nikki Wilson-Smith

A contemporary collection of 100 flash, micro and hybrid stories, each 500 words or less, by rising and established writers. Building on the success of Night Parrot Press's first collection, Once, Twice Not Shy showcases the best of Western Australian authors writing in this exciting, challenging and condensed genre. Small but mighty, the stories linger long after reading them.

One Hundred Short Short Stories

Twice Not Shy

As space ventures have become more numerous, leading scientists and theorists have offered ways of building a living habitat in a hostile environment, taking an ‘ecosystems’ view of space colonization. The contributors to this volume take a radical multi-disciplinary view of the challenge of human space colonization through the ongoing project Persephone. This book fundamentally challenges prevalent ideas about sustainability and proposes a new approach to resource austerity and conservation and providing truly sustainable approaches that are life-promoting. Readers will learn the details of the plans for Persephone – a real project that is part of the company Icarus Interstellar’s plans for the design and engineering of a living interior on a worldship to be constructed in Earth’s orbit within 100 years. Although the timeframe itself is only an estimate, since it is contingent on many significant developments, including funding and technological advances, the industry consensus is that within 100 years we will see manned space exploration beyond our solar system. This notion is shared by organizations such as the Initiative for Interstellar Studies and the DARPA-funded 100-year starship project. This book specifically develops the principles for the construction of a living habitat within a worldship – a multi-generational starship that contains its own world that supports colonists as it travels across great distances between stars at a speed much slower than light. Far from being a sterile industrial setup, such as the ISS, or even being a bucolic suburbia as proposed by Gerard O’Neill in the 1970s, this worldship will provide the pre-conditions for sustaining life beyond Earth’s environment, which may also lead to the evolution of non-terrestrial ecologies. Drawing on the principles of ecopoiesis and insights offered by the Biosphere 2 experiment that demonstrated what we have to learn about ecosystem construction, this book proposes first designing the soils of such a space. It should then be possible to set up the conditions that a first generation of colonists may experience in leaving our solar system to find new worlds to settle - perhaps in spreading life throughout the universe. Although the book takes a unique view of ecology and sustainability within the setting of a traveling starship it is equally concerned with the human experience on artificial worlds. Chapters come from a range of multi disciplinary thinkers who shed light on the brave new future ahead from different angles.

A Living, Self-Sustaining Spaceship

Star Ark

On a distant planet, Rune 66, an experimental biologist called The Chronicler fortuitously makes contact with humankind. The Gray s exploratory encounters with earthlings lean towards the blantantly sexual. Broadcast live on the alien planet s Anatomy Channel, these assorted bouts of interplanetary perversion become a ratings phenomenon. In time, senior Grays start to worry that the humanoid s way of living and loving poses a serious threat to the identity of a species that prides itself on intellectual prowess and the denial of carnal ways. The Gray s Anatomy is a bright, cunning, unquestionably original satire of mass media, sex, morality, the body, extra terrestrials and the shape of things to come.

The Gray's Anatomy

Soft Living Architecture explores the invention of new architectures based on living processes. It crafts a unique intersection between two fast-developing disciplines: biomimicry and biodesign in architecture, and bioinformatics and natural computing in the natural sciences. This is the first book to examine both the theory and methodology of architecture and design working directly with the natural world. It explores a range of approaches from the use of life-like systems in building design to the employment of actual growing and living cell and tissue cultures as architectural materials - creating architecture that can change, learn and grow with us. The use of 'living architecture' is cutting-edge and speculative, yet it is also inspiring a growing number of designers worldwide to adopt alternative perspectives on sustainability and environmental design. The book examines the ethical and theoretical issues arising alongside case-studies of experimental practice, to explore what we mean by 'natural' in the Anthropocene, and raise deep questions about the nature of design and the design of nature. This provocative and at times controversial book shows why it will become ever more necessary to embrace living processes in architecture if we are to thrive in a sustainable future.

An Alternative View of Bio-informed Practice

Soft Living Architecture

In this ground-breaking book, the first to provide an overview of the theory and practice of experimental architecture, Rachel Armstrong explores how interdisciplinary, design-led research practices are beginning to redefine the possibilities of architecture as a profession. Drawing on experts from disciplines as varied as information technology, mathematics, poetry, graphic design, scenography, bacteriology, marine applied science and robotics, Professor Armstrong delineates original, cutting-edge architectural experiments through essays, quotes, poetry, equations and stories. Written by an acknowledged pioneer of architectural experiment, this visionary book is ideal for students and researchers wishing to engage in experimental, practice-based architectural and artistic research. It introduces radical new ideas about architecture and provides ideas and inspiration which students and researchers can apply in their own work and proposals, while practitioners can draw on it to transform their creative assumptions and develop thereby a distinctive "edge" to stand out in a highly competitive profession.

If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a "machine" would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we recognize as part of "being alive." Liquid life references a third-millennial understanding of matter that seeks to restore the agency of the liquid soul for an ecological era, which has been banished by reductionist, "brute" materialist discourses and mechanical models of life. Offering an alternative worldview of the living realm through a "new materialist" and "liquid" study of matter, it conjures forth examples of creatures that do not obey mechanistic concepts like predictability, efficiency, and rationality. With the advent of molecular science, an increasingly persuasive ontology of liquid technologies can be identified. Through the lens of lifelike dynamic droplets, the agency for these systems exists at the interfaces between different fields of matter/energy that respond to highly local effects, with no need for a central organizing system. Liquid Life seeks an alternative partnership between humanity and the natural world. It provokes a re-invention of the languages of the living realm to open up alternative spaces for exploration: Rolf Hughes' "angelology" of language explores the transformative invocations of prose poetry, and Simone Ferracina's graphical notations help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling, and designing with fluids. A conceptual and practical toolset for thinking and designing, Liquid Life reunites us with the irreducible "soul substance" of living things, which will neither be simply "solved," nor go away. Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architecture at Newcastle University (UK), and has also been a Rising Waters II Fellow for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (April-May 2016), TWOTY futurist in 2015, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, and a Senior TED Fellow in 2010. She is also the coordinator of the Living Architecture project, an EU-funded project that establishes the principles for our buildings to share some of the properties of living things, e.g. metabolism, operating at the intersection of architecture, building construction, bio-energy and synthetic biology. She is also the author of Vibrant Architecture (De Gruyter, 2015), Star Ark: A Living, Self-Sustaining Spaceship (Springer, 2017), and Soft Living Architecture: An Alternative View of Bio-informed Design Practice (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Liquid Life: On Non-Linear Materiality

Rachel Armstrong

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