Son[i]a #379 Yasmine Boudiaf

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”.