Art Is Not a Thing
Art Is Not a Thing is a podcast series about art as a practice of critical inquiry, knowledge production and world-building. From media art, bio-art, sound art to digital activism, speculative design, or data storytelling, the series delves into artistic work that reflects on, questions, and reimagines our practices in and of the world. The series is developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1.
Episodes
Quantum Uncertainty in a Capitalist Reality
In this episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea is joined by artist Libby Heaney. Libby’s work engages quantum processes as active constraints that undo linear causality, hierarchical relations, and the bounded subject. After a crash course into key concepts, they discuss the potential and limitations of quantum to challenge existing social and political paradigms by proposing new modes of knowledge pro
Succumbing to the Machine: Desire in the Age of AI
In this episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea is joined by artist Erin Robinson. Her work, XXX Machina, operates as an autonomous desire machine that generates an endless stream of synthetic erotic imagery. They discuss desire, eroticism, human intimacy, and corporeality from Lacan and Bataille, all the way to today's shift brought by artificial intelligence.Host: Ana-Maria CarabeleaProducers: An
Challenging VR's Procrustean Bed: Disability, Tactile Epistemologies, Worldbuilding
In this episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea is joined by artist Iz Paehr to talk about inherently ableist technologies. Their work Feeling Virtual: An Archive of Touch looks at how digital technologies can be used to make cultural heritage more accessible. Challenging the sensorial hierarchies and ableist assumptions built into XR technologies, Iz explores the potential of touch and disabled ways of
Anthropocene Oscillations
In this episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea is joined by researcher and lecturer Alex Damianos and architect John Palmesino of Territorial Agency. Two years after the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy's decision to reject the proposal to recognise the Anthropocene as a geological unit, they discuss where the Anthropocene is today and where the debates are heading. Host: Ana-Maria Carabel
The Politics of Seeing and Being Seen
Using both the conditions and limitations of the photographic medium, Trevor Paglen's investigations into state surveillance, military operations, and data collection raise questions about truth, deception, and imagination. In this episode, Hannah Balber talks to the American photographer, author, and geographer about UFOs, psyops, the power of manipulation, and how seeing and being seen are
Computational Compost: Against the Resource Intensivity of Data Centers
In this episode, Hanna Balber talks with architect Marina Otero Verzier about the environmental cost of data centres. Challenging the image of the 'cloud' as an immaterial entity, her project, Computational Compost, uses heat from computer servers to power a vermi-composting machine, thus imagining a potential symbiotic relationship between digital technology and nature. Art Is Not a Thi
System Vulnerability
In this episode, Hannah talks to German media artist Simon Weckert about the societal impacts of digitalisation and his artistic strategies to disrupt, redirect, or reduce the logic of systems to absurdity. His work points to the vulnerability of allegedly infallible digital systems and the risks of relying on them.Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration wi
Post-truth Museums and Their Post-colonial Directors
In this episode, Hannah Balber talks to German-Iraqi artist Nora Al-Badri about the colonial inscriptions borne by Europe’s cultural heritage. Her work, The Post-truth Museum, reignites seemingly irresolvable debates about restitution. In glitchy deepfakes, the artist puts postcolonial theory in the mouths of former museum directors (rather than institutional discourse), in an attempt to signal wh
Imaginative Futuring for Social Change
In this episode, Hannah talks to members of the Kairos Futura collective from Nairobi, Ajax Axe, Abdul Rop and Willie Ng'ang'a. Their project, The Wild Future Lab, won this year's S+T+ARTS Prize Africa, an initiative of the European Commission, recognising pioneering projects in Africa that catalyse social change by blending science, technology, and art. The Wild Future Lab not only
Robotic Journeys through the Andes
In this episode, Hannah talks to Golden Nica winner Paula Gaetano Adi about Guanaquerx, the first robot in history to cross the Andes Mountains. More than a technical object, Guanaquerx is a poetic, political, and collective operation that was two years in the making, involved a transdisciplinary team and fused ancestral knowledge with contemporary robotic technologies. Its symbolic crossing of th
Outsourcing Ethics: A Robot Speaks Our Violence
In the podcast episode, Hannah talks to artists Thomas Kvam and Frode Oldereid about their installation Requiem for an Exit - a piece featuring a towering robot delivering a haunting monologue about the darker side of humanity. The piece confronts audiences with the enduring legacy of human violence and the ethical responsibilities humans outsource to bureaucratic and technological structures.Art
Web of AI: Linking Homes and Battlefields
In today's episode, we talk to Sarah Ciston about their award-winning project, AI War Cloud Database. The project visualises the links between everyday life technologies and military infrastructure, and reflects on the increasing automation of war.Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1. Host: Hannah BalberProducers: Ana-Maria Carabelea,
Making Kin: Cells, Software, Synthetic Selves
In today’s episode, we are joined by artists Charlotte Jarvis and Zoran Srdić Janežič, and writer, educator, and curator Rick Dolphijn to discuss entities at the intersection of wetware, software, and hardware, and how they challenge our definitions of life, reproduction, parenthood, or care.Resources:Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family by Sophie Lewis Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Ret
Touching Memories
In this episode, host Ana Carabelea talks to Yulia Sion, Nuno Correia, and Michael Banissy about the power of haptics and sound in recreating and conveying memories, as a way to build empathy and bridge generational gaps in the digital age.Resources:The Sirens of Titan by Kurt VonnegutAudio-Vision: Sound on Screen by Michel ChionMultisensory Experiences: Where the senses meet technology by Carlos
Virtually Real: Writing Transmedia Spaces
In this episode we talk to Lara Lesmes + Fredrik Hellberg of Space Popular, Pierre Christophe Gam, and Brooklyn J. Pakathi about spaces - private, public, real, virtual, but most importantly transmedia spaces that confuse these definitions and open us to different ways of inhabiting spaces, interacting with one another, performing rituals, or building communities. Resources:The Nutmeg’s Curse: Par
Labour in the Greenhouse: Reaping the Fruits of Automation
Greenhouses are sites of encounter between humans, plants, and machines, as well as socio-economic and geopolitical regimes. Within them, intricate stories of our day-to-day food production are weaved out of both visible and invisible threads. In this episode, we talk to artists Špela Petrič and Penelope Cain, and doctoral researcher Carolien Lubberhuizen about the intricacies these spaces hold.R
Computation, Improvisation, Narration
The stories we tell about, with, or for technologies matter. Can we demystify misnomers such as artificial intelligence through storytelling, role-playing, and improvisation? In this episode, we talk to dmstfctn (Francesco Tacchini and Oliver Smith) and Lawrence Lek about how they build narratives around complex computational systems.Resources:The Tricks of the Trade by Dario FoDadda by Brood MaRo
Love and the City
What happens when our public behaviour is constantly monitored? Do we still hug, kiss, or allow ourselves to be vulnerable in public, does it stop us from being at our worst? In this episode, we talk to artist Noemi Iglesias Barrios and Guggenheim curator Noam Segal about surveillance systems in the public space and why we might want to 'measure' cities in terms of emotionality by traini
Operational Hoaxes
It’s easy to discard fakes and hoaxes as misinformation. But that might be too abrupt an ending to a discussion about the aesthetics of non-fact and the role of synthetic images in our visual landscape. In this episode, we talk to Martyna Marciniak and Jussi Parikka about synthetic images and their relationship to the material realities that (re-)/produce.Resources:The Eye of the Master by Matteo
There's Hope at the Edges of Power
In today's episode, we talk to Meredith Whittaker of Signal and artist Calin Segal about what surveillance and the concentration of power in the hands of a few tech companies mean for society. We discuss the context that made it possible for these companies to capture data without regard for privacy and use it to produce new social, cultural, and political dynamics. At the edges of what looks
Regendering Technology
In this episode, we look at the historical entanglements of technology and gender. Made in the image of their (often male) designers, technologies end up serving and reproducing patriarchal systems. How can technology finally "undergo a sex change" to overcome its current gender inscriptions? What political imaginaries make that possible, or become possible through feminist approaches to
Truth Preachers
The changes in how information is collected, produced, and disseminated leave their mark on the way information is consumed. This episode unpacks the qualitative shifts the algorithmic dissemination of information has brought to the media landscape and how in turn that affects citizens and their engagement with the democratic processes. We talk to Marta Peirano, Nina Jankowicz & Fabian Scheidl
Truth Makers (Part II)
In this episode, we discuss how the data sets used in machine learning adopt hegemonic discourse and existing biases and, what’s more, amplify them, and we talk to some of the people out there who are fighting back. Our guest is Angie Abdilla - a palawa woman, founder, and director of Old Ways, New, whose methodology Country Centred Design, utilises Indigenous knowledges in the design of places, e
Truth Makers (Part I)
In this episode, we discuss how machine learning and artificial intelligence adopt hegemonic discourse and existing biases and, what’s more, amplify them, and we talk to some of the people out there who are fighting back. Our guests are Kasia Chmielinski (they/them) - Co-Founder of the Data Nutrition Project, an initiative that builds tools to mitigate bias in artificial intelligence - and Ndapewa
Data Lords
In this episode, we unpack the ownership and production of data that feeds today's hungry algorithms. What has thus far been described as a process of extraction reveals itself more and more as production. We talk to artist, filmmaker, and writer Hito Steyerl and award-winning journalist Karen Hao about the hidden labour behind the so-called data 'extraction', its appropriation thro
Intro Episode
In this short episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea introduces The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) and the reasons and visions that drive it.The Digital Deal Podcast is part of the European Digital Deal a three-year investigation into the accelerated and often unconsidered adoption of new technologies and their impact on society. The Digital Deal Podcast, invites artists, cultural
