most listened podcasts 2019
Peter Zinovieff
Peter Zinovieff talks about how he assembled the world's first personal computer, his time at EMS and the team that accompanied him, about the listening room, academia, and the tribulations of paper-tape; about engineering, experimentation and how not to keep a sound archive; about Unit Delta Plus, how to run a synthesiser off a windmill, and how to kindly ask a computer to make us a beautiful composition.
Bernard Stiegler
Bernard Stiegler talks about education and smartphones, translations and linguists, about economic war, climate change, and political stupidity. We also chat about pharmacology and organology, about the erosion of biodiversity, the vital importance of error, and the Neganthropocene as a desirable goal to work towards, ready to be constructed.
Raqs Media Collective
Raqs Media Collective founder Monica Narula talks about raga, the technological body, public domain, the ineffability of time, the Mahabharata, politics of language, exhaustion, dilation and the legibility.
José Luis Barrios Lara
The philosopher, art historian, curator and critic José Luis Barrios Lara reflects on the founding myth of the West, modernity, and the invention of the other. He considers identity politics as a political tool and a means for the management of bodies in space, questions the effectiveness of the epistemologies of the South, and interprets the global migration crisis as a form of neo-slavery. A grim scenario in which, he says, certain intersections of art and politics still have the power to destabilise the semantic field of representation and make room for the subversive.
Mark Fisher
The cultural impact of Mark Fisher's work continues to grow years after his death in 2017. His tough but always accessible dissection of the system and its endemic problems was captured in essays, posts, and books, such as Capitalist Realism, which gave rise to this conversation. The book explores the dangerous connection between neoliberalism and mental health, almost as a tragic portent of his death, although it is much more than that. In the podcast, Fisher talks about the avalanche of repercussions of the 2008 financial crash, particularly in relation to the idea of capitalism as the only possible framework.