Son[i]a #379
Yasmine Boudiaf
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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.
As part of the Algerian diaspora and with a background in science, Yasmine’s projects investigate the relationship between technology and social structures, cultural memory, and policy-making, drawing on a mix of traditional and non-traditional research methods to analyse and compare publicly available data and infrastructures.
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. She invites us to think about passive forms of resistance and to come up with non-colonial forms of cultural archiving. She also points out the lack of originality in how the state and capitalism work or, as she puts it, how “they are not the sophisticated minds they make us think they are”.
Lydia Ourahmane
Lydia Ourahmane is an Algerian-born multidisciplinary artist who has spent much of her life in the UK. In her installations and interventions, the notions of object and subject—considered separate in Western thought—converge and dialogue between the public and private, the alien and borrowed, migration and extractivism, everyday life and the affective materiality of things. In this podcast we talk (in total darkness) to Lydia about her relationship with echo as a phenomenon for the creation of negative space, about listening as a trigger for singular experience. We also talk about her connection to spirituality through her family experience, a community persecuted for its faith in her home country. Finally, we hear some open questions about the idea of home, belonging and freedom, and about the miraculous, the unexplained and the absolute.
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.
Marissa Malik
It’s tempting to describe Marissa Malik’s practice as a crossroads—one where music production intersects with mysticism, DJing and astrology. But the way she talks about these complementary aspects instead suggests that they are all on a sort of Möbius strip, a continuum with no beginning or end, on which they harmonically coexist and feed back on each other. This paradoxical geometry relies on a worldview and a critical gaze that has allowed Marissa to explore and put her own spin on the correlation between language, racial segregation and gender, especially in the framework of diaspora communities like her own. We sat down with Marissa Malik to talk about language, rituals, migration, mysticism, barriers, queerness and sexuality in her musical domain.