Son[i]a #363
Martin Zeilinger
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Ever since Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin White Paper in 2008, the blockchain has sparked vigorous public debate and managed to carve out a place in the collective unconscious in a wide variety of contexts beyond the speculative bubbles of cryptocurrency. The promise of disruption and radically different new opportunities connected to blockchain-related technologies has also been amongst the main talking points in countless digital art projects – even if that promise has often not lived up to the hype. Researcher Martin Zeilinger’s work stems from a deep fascination with the grey area where these 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.
Seth Siegelaub
Interview with Seth Siegelaub about the sociocultural framework of the sixties and his association with contemporary art production.
Zach Blas
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.
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.
Ramon Amaro
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.