Son[i]a #293
Ramon Amaro

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.

Jennifer Walshe studied composition and often performs as a vocalist, but her practice and a whopping list of works over the past twenty years put her in a twilight zone where music, performance art, theatre and stage writing intersect and converge. Walshe’s approach to texts, scripts and musical scores is based on a recursive process, a kind of feedback loop which includes and acknowledges all sorts of information about the text itself – the context and paratext. In this podcast, we talk to Jennifer Walshe about writing, annotating, teaching, collecting, eavesdropping, performing, faking, and a touch of machine learning.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with maverick composer Jennifer Walshe, that we were unable to include the first time around.

Researcher and creative technologist Yasmine Boudiaf describes her art practice as “tin foil hat research”. She creates playful projects rooted in deep research methodologies ranging from writing to computing, in order to shed some light on the shape-shifting White Devil tactics behind ruling powers and new technologies. In this podcast, Yasmine Boudiaf walks us through some of her experiences in the corporate world and the performative aspects of negotiating the deeply entrenched British class system. She talks about AI ethics and the theater behind policy-making as well as soft power and Newspeak.

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.

In this podcast, scholar and curator Olga Goriunova talks about the shelf life of marketing data, about legal persons and digital subjects, reading statistics as poetry, and the many mysteries of personalised targeting. Olga’s concept of Digital Subjects looks at how machine learning crunches data from search engine queries, e-commerce, social network activity and more into categories... to further enhance marketing tactics, political communication and similar practices. 

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Argentinian writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan.

We talk to Argentinian writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan about fashion, opulence, peripheries, phrenology, taxonomies, canons of beauty, luxury fakes, and migrant detention centres. An intense journey that touches on her personal history and includes references to other writers, notes on her methodology, and a few potshots at centres of power.

Researcher and activist Jara Rocha’s practice is concerned with mediating and mobilising the conditions of meaning production and materials for possibility. Fond of complexity and grounded in a trans*feminist sensibility, they explore the inequalities and stark contrasts in the distribution of the technological. They draw attention to the politics and aesthetics embedded in infrastructures and to how power organises itself, becoming simultaneously visible and inaccessible. A pure exercise in political imagination and situated dissidence that takes us from reproductive technologies to critical pedagogies in formal, non-formal, and informal structures, by way of technocolonialism and turbocapitalism. Without ever taking our eye off the global perspective and our immediate environment: from global care chains to the precarisation, invisibilisation, and offshoring of labour.

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.

We talk to Diego Falconí Travez, Lucía Piedra Galarraga and Karo Moret about slavery and love, the Caribbeanization of identities, and violence as a potential resource. They discuss affects, phobias, autophagies, and unsettling objects. And they examine the Latino world in relation to the mask of gay culture, coming out of the closet as a liberal promise, and resent(i)ment as a circular form that prevents memory from disappearing. 

Irish artist John Gerrard talks about his initial fascination with 3D scanners and about how they led him to develop his current practice, about his conception of time in art, and a particular way of understanding simulation: somewhere between contemplation and the critical gaze.

Hasan Elahi talks about data bodies and digital immigrants, about obsolete laws and cultural velocities, about little brothers, big brothers, and the potential agency of tiny secrets against big data.

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

Matthew Fuller talks about sleep, procedural imperialism, big data, post-humanity, and what he calls “denial of service attacks on people’s brains”.

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

Zach Blas talks about utopian plagiarism, biometrics, life patterns, and unthinkable moments; about identity, opacity, and paranodes; about speculation understood in terms of usefulness, and about how we can go about conceiving sensual alternatives to the internet’s total mono-narrative today.

Daniela Ortiz and Xose Quiroga carry out artistic research and actions at points where colonial narratives collide with migration control systems and with the consensus that underpins the nation state. In Fons #34, Daniela talks about the duo’s working processes, about different ways of spreading hidden knowledge, and about the nomenclature of the colonial monuments that populate the city.