28 September 2026 · Reporting checked against the linked sources below.
The most interesting technology stories are sometimes the ones that begin 250 million years before the first computer. Henrietta Scholtz’s Planetary Cognitive Ecologies: Gondwana, opening at Johannesburg’s Origins Centre on 3 October, begins with Glossopteris — an ancient plant whose forests disappeared around the end of the Permian period.
The project moves between bio-based materials, computational protein design, painting and virtual reality. Scholtz’s research treats the scientific method not simply as subject matter but as artistic medium, asking what happens when biological material crosses physical, digital and public systems.
That makes the work unusually well placed for the current AI moment. Much of contemporary technology is narrated as immaterial: cloud systems, models, data and intelligence. In reality it is built from energy, minerals, water, bodies and landscapes. Gondwana pulls those layers back into the same frame.
The exhibition’s location deepens the argument. Origins Centre holds evidence of early human technology, symbolic practice and rock art. Placing synthetic proteins and computational systems beside that longer history unsettles the idea that ‘technology’ began with electronics. Humans have always built tools by reading and rearranging the material world.
Scholtz is not offering a neat reconciliation between nature and machine. The more useful proposition is that the boundary was never as clean as we pretend. If future technology is going to be sustainable, it may need to understand itself as ecological before it understands itself as intelligent.
