Son[i]a #238
Zach Blas

Through a combination of artistic research, detective work, and an almost forensic approach to our own data trail, Joana Moll’s work exposes some of the most pressing issues of our data-driven, data-centric existence. Her research projects, talks, workshops and art pieces slip through the cracks of corporate behemoths to make sense of their polymorphic nature and reveal some of the hidden layers that shape and sustain the hypercapitalist fractal. In this podcast, we talk to Joana Moll about interfaces and their social implications, about technocolonialism, agency, surveillance, exploitation, speculation and, why not, about laughter.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Ramon Amaro that we were unable to include the first time around. Ramon Amaro is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, London, and also in the Centre for Research Architecture. His work revolves around speculative articulations in machine learning, philosophies of being, mathematics, engineering, and black ontology.

Researcher Martin Zeilinger’s work stems from a deep fascination with the grey area where blockchain-related technologies protocols and art intersect. Far from the naive triumphalism of Web3 evangelists, his approach focuses on the artists and projects that actually try to integrate some of the salient features and affordances of distributed, trustless ledgers into their practice. In this podcast, we talk to Martin Zeilinger about the poetic and political potential of the blockchain, while at the same time tracing a somewhat fuzzy timeline that connects 1960s conceptual art to smart contracts, decentralised autonomous organisations and a host of consensus mechanisms.

Possible Bodies questions and problematises the formulation, conception, and rendering of bodies across different 3D technologies such as modelling, tracking and scanning. Their affirmative critical research draws attention to the ways in which these techniques end up implementing and even amplifying a host of prejudices based on race, gender, class, age and ability which, far from being circumstantial, are woven into the actual source code of all sorts of applications. We talk to Femke Snelting about embodiments, optimisation, and 3D disasters, about the possible and the probable, parametric interfaces, and open standards, and about disobedient action research.

Artist, researcher and activist Helen Pritchard discusses some of her works and collective projects, in the more or less gray area in which computing intersects geography, design and cyberfeminist technoscience. Throughout our conversation we talk about all sorts of double bonds: orcas and sensors, fossils and fracking, alpaca and recipes, sheep and data infrastructures.

Nanna Thylstrup talks about the digitalisation of the archive and its implications. She deeply analyses two consequences that both emerge in individual and collective spheres: first, the data shadow that big data contexts generates to each user; second, the politics behind the processes of mass digitalisation.

The researcher and lecturer Ramon Amaro introduces the basics of machine learning, its criteria for assigning value, the collision between blackness and the artificial, its flaws, and the problem of impunity that all too often accompanies them. He also calls for a techno-resistance that would require us to sacrifice our current view of the world and of ourselves.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Zach Blas that we were unable to include the first time around.

Interview with Beatriz Preciado on the seminar "La nouvelle vague porno"