Ancient Material Knowledge Is a Blueprint for Future Technology

Beatriz Cortez and Ronald Rael both reject the premise that older material intelligence belongs to the past. Cortez frames her work around “multiple temporalities”: time does not move only forward, and the gifts of ancestors do not arrive in a single historical line. Rael makes the same argument through architecture. When people describe his work as combining “the most primitive technology with the most advanced technology,” he says they have the order wrong: earth and earthen materials, developed across 10,000 years of human building, are the advanced technology; the robots are the clunky newcomers.

For Cortez, linear time is not just a neutral model. She said it carries an idea of progress and acceleration that leads toward the destruction of the planet, and that it comes with a Darwinian understanding of Indigenous peoples. Her work is therefore invested in imagining futures where Indigenous peoples survive and thrive because ancestral technologies are recognized as technologies.

Cortez described ancestral knowledge as a set of “gifts of generosity” sent forward, though not in any orderly sequence. They arrive circularly, simultaneously, and at different scales. Her task, as she described it, is to catch and point out those buried treasures: in a porch in Los Angeles, in a volcanic particle carried around the planet, in a seed vessel, in an iceberg, in a cave that can only be entered and exited with the tide.

Rael’s version of the argument is architectural and material. He is interested in what happens when technologies from different temporal frames meet without one being treated as obsolete. Robots and mud, in his work, do not symbolize a clean replacement of craft by automation. They are placed together to make another possibility visible: a 21st-century architecture that can return to earth not as nostalgia, but as ecological necessity and design intelligence.

Nora Lawrence drew out the political stakes of that temporal critique. If linear progress is assumed, she suggested, intervention can seem unnecessary: the future will simply improve. Cortez and Rael both work against that complacency. Their practices treat the past not as a completed archive but as a set of methods, materials, and obligations that can interrupt the present.

Beatriz Cortez entered architectural art by looking at Los Angeles as an immigrant from El Salvador and seeing temporal layers that the city’s vernacular architecture tends to erase. She described a dome-like porch next to her former home in San Fernando, built by Dan Montelongo, an Apache Mescalero builder whose distinctive porches appear in parts of Los Angeles including La Cañada, La Crescenta, Pasadena, and San Fernando. The porches are marked by large, protuberant rocks; to Cortez, they immediately signaled that an Indigenous builder had been there.

The point was material, not only biographical. The porch form she showed — a house-like structure with a corrugated metal roof and a facade crowded with protruding metallic rocks — held together neighborhood architecture, Indigenous craft, and sculptural translation without smoothing out the roughness of the original detail.

That recognition changed how Cortez understood the neighborhood. The house next door was owned by Connie, a Lakota woman. A porch built by an Apache Mescalero had, a century later, become home to a Lakota woman in a working-class Los Angeles neighborhood. Cortez read that not as coincidence but as a poetic message about migration, labor, and delayed belonging. The immigrants who clean gardens, clean houses, and raise children in Los Angeles, she suggested, carry a future relation to those houses too. Her phrasing held the point as an imagined temporal arc rather than a policy prediction: one hundred years from now, they too might inhabit those places.

Her space-capsule works emerged from that layered sense of home. One capsule incorporated the industrial landscape of Los Angeles, the rock language she learned from Montelongo’s porches, colonial architecture, and craftsman architecture. It included a trunk large enough for her body, a stairway toward a tent imagined for zero gravity, a bookshelf, a desk, and a fireplace. The speculative object still looked as if it had been assembled from an earthly, industrial place: a faceted capsule of rusted and weathered metal set in a dry landscape.

The work was speculative, but its speculation was domestic. To build worlds where everyone can fit together, Cortez said, required assembling different ways of understanding shelter.

Cortez repeatedly turns domestic and architectural forms into vessels for migration across human and nonhuman scales. In Glacial Erratic, she imagined a large boulder displaced thousands of miles by melting ice into a landscape where nothing around it was familiar. In Chultun El Semillero, she imagined a capsule not for rocks but for seeds. In these works, rocks, seeds, and their methods of placement become carriers of ancient technologies inherited from ancestors.

The volcano Ilopango, installed at Storm King Art Center, extended that thinking to planetary scale. Cortez made the work during the pandemic while thinking about the eruption of Ilopango in the year 536, before El Salvador was El Salvador. She described particles from the eruption covering and darkening the sun for about 18 months, cooling the Earth, and landing across the planet. Later, she traveled to the Arctic looking for particles from that eruption.

The volcano’s movement mattered as much as its form. Cortez showed it first as a faceted dark metal mountain installed on a lawn among trees, then as a volcanic sculpture carried by boat on the Hudson River. She described that river journey as a performance, with the volcano traveling from Storm King to EMPAC at RPI. The work made geological displacement visible as migration: matter from an underworld sacred to her ancestors could move through river, atmosphere, ice, and soil.

The lesson she drew was intimate rather than abstract. Wherever she walks, including Aspen, particles of the underworld sacred to her ancestors may be under her feet. That idea made migration “warmer and more important” for Cortez. Human beings are constrained by borders and documents, but volcanic ash travels otherwise. Lawrence noted that Cortez’s volcanic particles can move more readily than a human can. Cortez’s work makes that asymmetry legible through matter: ash moves, seeds move, ice moves, rocks move, and those movements carry histories that human borders cannot fully contain.

Ronald Rael is best known for the 2019 project that inserted three bright pink teeter-totters through the US-Mexico border wall, allowing people on both sides to play together. For him, the project begins from a reversal of the common understanding of borders. Borders are usually imagined as places that divide. Rael describes them as places where things come together: countries, languages, foods, beliefs, religions, and cultural practices.

The teeter-totter project’s force lies in the simplicity of the spatial operation. The wall cuts through a sandy landscape; the pink seesaws pass through it; people on both sides move together. A structure designed to separate becomes, for a moment, a hinge.

That view is grounded in biography and geography. Rael’s studio is in Colorado, where his family has lived for seven generations, and where, he said, his people have inhabited the region for several thousand years. Thirty miles south of Aspen, as the crow flies, lies the former historic US-Mexico border along the Arkansas River. His interest in borderlands is therefore not only about the contemporary wall. It is about a longer and shifting history in which a boundary now treated as fixed has moved, and in which communities have lived through those changes.

The teeter-totter project was, in Rael’s terms, an act of culture jamming, rebellion, and resistance. The material and spatial gesture was simple: the vertical elements that keep people apart can be turned 90 degrees and made to connect them. A single material can carry more than one story. What is designed for exclusion can be reoriented toward play.

When President Biden stopped border wall construction at the end of the Trump administration, Rael said hundreds of thousands of pounds of steel were left fallow along the border. He and his collaborators smuggled 10,000 pounds of that steel to a museum and made House United / Casa Unida. The installation used the steel elements that hold the wall’s vertical pieces in place to create a house-like structure that opens up, “lifts the veil,” and invites in light and space. The gallery image showed dark vertical steel beams curving upward and outward, more like an opening fan or wave than a defensive wall.

Beatriz Cortez read the work through another set of histories. The structure reminded her of un abanico, a Spanish fan from colonial times. Its perforations became lace; light moved through what had once been border material. In the future imagined by the work, she said, one would not suspect what the border once was. The material does not forget its origin, but it is not condemned to repeat it.

Rael also described the role of play in confronting the border wall’s violence. His book Borderwall as Architecture treats the wall as an architecture of violence and a designed structure with spatial effects on people, animals, and land. But his way into those conversations is often playful. He made snow globes as architectural models that illustrate stories about the wall. One contains a wall, small graves on both sides, and a cat on top. It looks cute, he said, and the cuteness makes the viewer able to approach the underlying story: the federal government bulldozing through a Native American burial ground to build a border wall.

Play, in this account, is not an escape from violence. It is a way to make people stay with what they might otherwise turn away from. Cortez recognized a similar speculative capacity in play. In a game, someone can die and ask to be alive again; players can relocate instantly to New Mexico. Play permits impossible reversals, portals, and futures. Her domes, shelters, and capsules inhabit that speculative space while remaining tied to real conditions of surveillance, migration, and fear.

In Marfa, Cortez placed geodesic domes called Shelter in conversation with Donald Judd’s works, John Chamberlain’s works, and the Border Patrol headquarters nearby. She recalled building an archway with Rafa Esparza on one side of the road while Border Patrol detained two workers at a gas station across the street. In that setting, a dome could become a small portal to another dimension: a form of shelter, play, and joy under conditions where she felt the limits of what she could do.

Ronald Rael works centrally with adobe: earth, straw, water, sun, and wind. He emphasized that it is not a poor material, nor a material confined to certain countries. It exists on every continent except the frozen one, in urban and rural settings, across class positions. In southern Colorado, the first lieutenant governor of the state, Lafayette Head, lived in a palatial adobe mansion. Head later became Indian agent to the Tabeguache Ute tribe.

Rael’s contemporary adobe work moves between research, building, and technological experiment. For the last seven years he has explored how robots can 3D print buildings from mud. His experiments include 15-foot-tall silos in Center, Colorado, which he described as meditations on earth and sky; a 3D-printed structure in Taos with seating, shade, and a 3D-printed horno, a mud oven used with the community for bread and food; and what he described as the largest 3D-printed earthen structure in the world, made for Desert X.

The works were shown at architectural scale: tall cylindrical adobe forms in an open Colorado landscape; a view upward through a coiled mud cylinder to a circle of blue sky; an undulating 3D-printed structure in Taos with seating and a dome-shaped horno; and an aerial view of a maze-like earthen structure on desert ground. These were not tabletop prototypes. Rael presented them as architectural experiments large enough to occupy, cook in, walk through, and gather around.

The process is deliberately low in additives. When an audience member asked whether stabilizers were mixed into the mud, Rael answered: “No cements, no plastics, no epoxies, nothing. Just ancestral intelligence. That’s the AI that’s employed there.” When asked whether even micro-pulverized straw was excluded, he clarified that straw is included: earth, straw, and water.

Rael tied the ecological stakes of earthen construction to contemporary toxicity. He connected the point to the Los Angeles fires in which Cortez lost her house, saying that burned homes leave excessive toxins in the air, land, water, and bodies. Architecture, he argued, has been complicit in toxicity for at least 200 years. Earthen building is one way to address that complicity.

Asked about scalability, Rael said earthen building is entirely possible at scale. It is recognized in building codes, its engineering mathematics are understood, and multi-story earthen buildings have existed for centuries or millennia. He pointed to Taos Pueblo, a five-story, thousand-year-old building within a day’s drive of Aspen where people still live. The barriers, in his account, are less about feasibility than bureaucracy, economics, markets, and the work required to move those systems.

Beatriz Cortez added a cautionary example from Marfa. Donald Judd, she said, did not trust adobe and placed cement between adobe bricks to make a wall stronger or safer. But the cement held water in place; instead of draining, the water drained the adobe out. The adobe disappeared and the concrete became a lace-like remnant. Her point was not merely technical. Modernity has taught people to trust concrete and steel as stronger than ancient technologies. But those ancient technologies, she argued, remain “top of the line.”

For Rael, adobe is not only a material solution. It is also an archive. He is now a steward of the Lafayette Head building in southern Colorado, and his project Exhuming Home re-excavates it by remaking adobes and displaying artifacts found while searching for home in the site. The building is not innocent. Rael described it as the place where the Indian agent documented enslaved Native Americans in Conejos and Costilla counties after the Civil War — people he identifies as ancestors of his community. To dig into the building is therefore to dig into earth and research at once.

The image shown for Exhuming Home paired an old open book nestled among adobe bricks with an interior wall made from adobe units arranged into hundreds of small niches. It made Rael’s phrase “archive” visible: the bricks were not only structure, but containers, frames, and evidence.

Older adobe bricks may contain bone fragments or pottery; later bricks may contain glass or plastic. Material history is embedded in the wall. In Exhuming Home, after archaeologists told him that the disturbed site had been so bulldozed and mixed up that there was no formal archaeological reason to preserve it as found, Rael chose reverence through categorization and cataloging. He identified and displayed fragments — bone, nails, books, and other remains — as special items.

One story concentrated the scientific and spiritual force of that archive. Rael described a man named Michael who grew up in the Indian agency and helped him make bricks. Michael remembered digging an outhouse as a child with his father and finding a body wrapped in leather and fringe, with a breastplate: a Native American ancestor. His father told him, “tápalo, tápalo” — cover it up — and they dug elsewhere. Decades later, Michael showed Rael the area. Looking down at the ground, Rael found the largest piece of obsidian he had ever seen. Archaeologists told him it had traveled more than 200 miles to the site, sometime between 200 and 1,000 years ago.

Rael did not claim to know whether the obsidian had been placed there intentionally. He described the moment as one that challenged him to connect the scientific and archival with the spiritual and beyond. Cortez responded with a teaching from her Kaqchikel friends: ancient objects have will and life, and decide whom to reveal themselves to.

Rael’s approach to research is continuous with that willingness to dig. He described installing an exhibition of contemporary artists in the Americas who use adobe at the Harwood Museum in Taos and the Fort Garland Museum. Both museums are adobe buildings, but the Harwood’s adobe had been covered by layers of cement plaster, lime plaster, and latex paint. Late one Friday, he and Rafa Esparza cut into the interior wall with a diamond blade saw and exposed a line of adobe from 1916. To find what one is looking for, Rael said, one has to dig.

Community ownership adds another test of architectural work. Asked how artists balance intention with community response, Rael said successful community projects require allowing communities to take ownership, even when that changes the work in ways the artist would not have chosen. He described a project in southern Colorado in which his own community made 40,000 adobes to build a large labyrinth. His version was austere, minimal, and pure. The community built it, took ownership, and added santos, decorations, homemade furniture, and other elements. Rael admitted he wished it had remained pure, but it did not. They loved it, and it was theirs. His conclusion was simple: one has to respect that.

The video Ronald Rael showed framed the robot not as autonomous replacement but as a difficult collaborator. Rael described a “delicate dance” with the machine: touching the mud, feeling the hose, controlling the robot, moving around it. He loves the smell, texture, light, and feel of the material, and wants audiences to connect the past and future through that embodied experience. Earthen structures, he said, are visceral because humans evolved to build them.

Asked what happens if the intimate dance with technology is lost, Beatriz Cortez first answered from her own process. She does not use software to design her steel works. She improvises, welds everything herself, and responds piece by piece. Because she does not draw the work in advance, no fabricator can simply execute it. The welder becomes an extension of herself. She also rejected a pure boundary between human and machine: people already live as hybrids, with contacts and other technologies in their bodies. What matters is how one relates to materials and improvises with them.

Rael answered by distinguishing intimacy from romanticizing labor. He likes to have his body near the robot so he knows where it is going, comparing the process to handling a horse and rope. But the larger issue, he said, is the loss or transformation of labor. He does not romanticize heavy physical work. If machines can spare bodies from mixing mud, lifting, pushing, and repetitive building, he welcomes that.

For Rael, the optimistic version of automation is not the disappearance of agency but its redirection. Humans should guide machines so that machines help them do something else. Tools can become part of the iterative creative process. He recalled early clay 3D-printing workshops where artists feared the sound of the printer was “the sound of our obsolescence.” He compared that fear to what may have happened when the pottery wheel appeared: a new tool did not end creativity, but changed what could be made.

Cortez added that the creative process does not occur only during fabrication. Planning, scanning, seeing through walls, seeing from the back side — these are also creative moments enabled by contemporary tools. She uses a pallet jack to lift her pieces. The point is not to preserve an untouched human maker against technology. It is to decide which forms of technological assistance enlarge perception, protect bodies, and deepen relation to material.

Beatriz Cortez works largely with steel and plants, and she understands both as earth-related materials. Steel can be read as industrial, but through hammering she tries to remove that industrialization and return it to rocks, boulders, glacial erratics, icebergs, and earth. The labor is physical: she beats metal on sandbags, warming and transforming it through repeated force. Even a material associated with hardness and industry becomes malleable and soft under that contact.

Her plant work opens another archive of migration. Cortez described research into the history of agricultural explorer programs in the United States, including efforts before the Department of Agriculture sent people elsewhere to bring back profitable crops. Palm trees, oranges, dates, and avocados become part of that story. Avocados, she noted, are from Guatemala and El Salvador, though they are now called California avocados.

In Cortez’s account, those plant migrations are tied to the creation of monocrops for profit and to histories of eugenics and white supremacy. But she also described a different migrant history carried by plants: people hiding seeds in socks or suitcases so they can plant something that reads as home in a backyard. Plants create worlds while carrying the histories of how countries, scientific institutions, migrants, and ancestors have taught people to relate to them.

Cortez said she published work on the memory and migration of plants, drawing from archives she found at Caltech in the genetics department. Her interest is not botanical in a narrow sense. Plants, like rocks and steel, are part of the larger claim she made throughout the discussion: matter is not inert raw material awaiting human meaning.

That claim becomes explicitly spiritual in her account of Kaqchikel collaborators. Cortez described a Maya Kaqchikel community that writes about objects from under the earth as carrying the ability to form community with ancestors. Such objects should not be turned into artifacts, in that view. They should be allowed to remain spiritual objects because they are alive.

This distinction between artifact and living object matters across Cortez’s work. An artifact is a thing removed from its active relations and placed into historical custody. A living object, in the account she relayed, can carry will, spirituality, memory, and community. Her work with steel, seeds, volcanic particles, and Arctic forms keeps returning to that proposition without treating it only as metaphor.

Cortez’s trip to Svalbard pushed this attention to matter beyond human architecture. She traveled there looking for particles from the Ilopango eruption, but what stayed with her were nonhuman architectures: icebergs, pebble circles, matter arranged by vibration, organisms invisible to the eye. She described walking on land with no one there and seeing circles made by sound, as if sand had been thrown over a speaker. Small pebbles and larger pebbles had been sifted into patterns by the vibration of matter.

The Arctic iceberg she showed was not a backdrop for human experience. It was an architecture not meant for humans: jagged, blue-tinted, fleeting, floating in dark water under a gray sky. Cortez later made Adrift in a Mirrored Sea, Hans Buchta as an homage to an iceberg she witnessed. She emphasized that architectures are not always meant for human bodies. Archways are not always for us. Structures can self-build because, in her words, matter is intelligent and self-organizing.

That shift of scale continued in her story of looking at Arctic ice under a microscope. A casual plan to collect ice for a mojito turned into an encounter with countless zooplankton in the water and ice — millions of creatures not visible to human eyes. They have stayed with her, and she has been trying to make them at different scales so that human scale does not define them. She described this as an effort to think through nonhuman ways of seeing.

Her current work for a triennial in Japan connects the Pacific Ocean, El Salvador, conquest, trade, and survival knowledge. She described a cave near Acajutla, in the place where her ancestors lived. When the Spaniards came, Pedro de Alvarado wrote that Indigenous people were ahead of him and then behind him, and he did not understand how. Cortez ties that history to the landscape: a cave that can be entered at low tide, cannot be exited at high tide, and becomes safe if one knows the rhythm. Every six hours the tide changes. Knowing land and tide, she said, was how ancestors survived.

The cave therefore becomes more than a form. In Cortez’s account, it gathers architecture, spirituality, landscape knowledge, colonial encounter, and temporal intelligence. Its usefulness depends on reading the ocean’s timing rather than imposing a single human schedule.

An audience member who works with children and sensory integration asked whether buildings made from earth might affect learning and calm. The question connected directly to the sensory claims both artists had been making: that materials are not neutral backgrounds, and that bodies respond to the environments made around them.

Beatriz Cortez agreed that built environments affect the body and mind. She referred to studies about pink being used in high-security prisons because, in her account, it paralyzes and makes people passive, and she argued that adobe would be healthier for the brain. For children, she added, getting dirty and helping build with adobe matters because the brain needs to imagine how to build.

Ronald Rael answered by making an argument from bodily memory. People who enter adobe buildings often say they feel good and smell good. Adobe excites the senses through temperature, smell, texture, and touch. He described the argument as “touchy feely,” but the logic he offered was evolutionary: humans have evidence of working clay for at least 30,000 years, and for the last 10,000 years have used earth to make habitats around their bodies. If human beings evolved to shape space this way, he suggested, then entering an earthen building can feel like returning home.

He compared this to animal habitat. He has worked with scientists trying to make artificial nests for birds and other animals, and found it difficult to persuade an animal to inhabit a geodesic dome. But a habitat made of the materials and forms the animal evolved to use feels comfortable. He suggested the same may be true for humans: children in earthen spaces may calm down because the space corresponds to a deep bodily inheritance.

That argument returns the discussion to the central dispute over what counts as advanced. Ancient technologies are not primitive in Rael’s and Cortez’s accounts because they are old. They are long-tested forms of relation among bodies, materials, climates, and communities. To bring them into the future is not to retreat from innovation. In their work, it is to ask whether innovation can proceed without erasing the knowledge already present in mud, seeds, steel, caves, ash, and adobe walls.