Son[i]a
Artist/scientist David Burraston talks about his rainwire project and how using rain as a creative medium has led him to an ongoing research that could overcome some recognized shortcomings in the field of rainfall measurements. He also talks about complex systems and creative practice in science, with an overview of CA and its applications, including his findings on CA rule space self-organization using modular synthesizers and CA sequencers.
American composer-producer Lyra Pramuk talks about key moments in her childhood and adolescence, which was marked by a rigorous religious and musical education, and about her subsequent journey to deconstruct her assigned identity, taking refuge in her love of science fiction and role-playing games as basic strategies for reinventing herself. We also chat about performativity, resisting the text, non-verbal music, live vs studio work, the recording logic of the music industry, the importance of queer community building, and clubbing in Berlin.
Naeem Mohaiemen talks about pragmatic politics and failed masculinities, about Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi, and Salvador Allende, about the backstories of "Two Meetings and a Funeral", and about the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. We also talk about the generative aspect of melancholy, behind-the-scenes politics, and the importance of keeping up the search for the things that we still do not know.
Artist, researcher and activist Helen Pritchard discusses some of her works and collective projects, in the more or less gray area in which computing intersects geography, design and cyberfeminist technoscience. Throughout our conversation we talk about all sorts of double bonds: orcas and sensors, fossils and fracking, alpaca and recipes, sheep and data infrastructures.
Aura Cumes charts a lucid historical path through colonial processes, analysing the mechanisms of control, violence, and dispossession that have perversely shaped the identity of the native-servant, relegated in favour of the progress and well-being of white men, their families, and their capital. Racism and sexism thus progress side by side, in a web of exploitation in which hierarchies often overlap.