Son[i]a

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. 

Cultural worker, researched and artist Daniel Gasol describes himself as a “faggot child of the proletariat and cultural worker,” not (just) to provoke a response, but as a carefully calibrated strategy, fully aware that it immediately highlights the class privilege that informs any contemporary artistic practice and possibility of being. In this podcast, makes an against-the-grain reading of Spain’s Vagrancy Law (1933-1970) and Law of Social Danger (1970-1995) through the prism of class, in which he reviews literature and criminal records  from the National Archive of Catalonia in order to show the criminalisation of the underprivileged classes and of the proletarian body.

Teresa Lanceta is an artist, art historian, researcher, and teacher. In this conversation, the sense of touch reclaims space from the gaze. At the same time, we recover the wisdom of weaving in terms of community, as an open source code for those who know and perform it. And through this repetitive, necessary gesture, technique becomes form, and form becomes language. Thus the margins disappear and give way to rhombuses, torn bits, darning, mending... depending on what’s going on at that moment in time.

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.

We talk with philosopher, writer, and teacher Marina Garcés about education and knowledge, about the future, and about time as raw material. We consider the question of how to appear and think with others in this present moment, which demands our active involvement. We discuss the meeting of unequals, and the possibility of strangeness becoming a link. We also explore the logic of the sinking ship or “every man for himself” and the evolution of the words “disobedience” and “freedom”, which leads Marina to emphasise the importance of forming alliances rather than thinking from the reductionist position of unity. At the same time, she invites us to imagine how to weave together worlds that are falling apart.

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.

In a body of work that encompasses the creation of texts, recordings, performances, concerts, websites, listening sessions, educational workshops, and archives of conversations, Jaume Ferrete explores everything that affects and influences the ideologies of the voice. His projects openly refrain from naturalising identity and address vocal production as a complex social phenomenon, shaped by the surrounding echoes and reverberations. 

In this podcast, Jaume Ferrete talks about Helen Harper, about the bodily discipline of telephone operators, and about the Voder as a clear example of drag. He cites deafness as a crucial phenomenon fuelling the history of sound technologies and connects some key moments—from the Voder to WaveNet—in the development of voice synthesis technologies.

It’s not just that Marc Vives’s work eludes categories and concise descriptions, which it does. Rather, it is like a kind of art of elusion itself, a tenacious and obstinate exercise in dodging limits and clear formalisations. His is a generative systems art, an alchemy of closeness, a kind  of cartomancy that zeroes in on social relations and interpersonal  connections. And It tends to put pressure on the logic of the white cube and the logic of cultural management, one thing on top of the other, all at once. In this podcast we talk to Marc Vives about swimming, about nerves, about floors stripped of paint, and about strategies for eschewing comfort and courting risk and emptiness in the usually safe environment of the art world.

Multidisciplinary artist Cecilia Bengolea sees dance as a tool and a medium for empathy and emotional exchange. She is particularly interested in anthropological research on contemporary and archaic forms of dance, and devotes herself to learning techniques, movements, and choreographies from around the world, using them to shape her own artistic vocabulary: an embodied movement and dance archive—built up individually and collectively—, in which the body becomes an animated sculpture for performance, video, and installations. In this podcast, Cecilia Bengolea talks about her life journey, a state between constant flux and sensual impulse that draws on Thai boxing and pole dancing as well as contemporary dance and dancehall.

Jessica Ekomane is a sound artist and composer, and a lecturer in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Ekomane’s quadraphonic performances and installations approach algorithmic/computer music as a social practice that is grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics, and explores listening expectations and their societal roots. In this podcast, we talk about the freedom of play, eMule, pipe organs, the limitations and flexibility of Max/MSP, early non-Western sound synthesis, DIY research, quotas, minimalism, and her early love for Ligeti and Destiny's Child.