The Culture & Technology Podcast

As the creative director at The Vinyl Factory, Sean shares the process behind curating Reverb, a multimedia exhibition exploring the intersection of art and sound. In this conversation, Severin and Sean look at the importance of physical context in music consumption, the value of dedicated listening spaces, and how digital platforms can enhance rather than replace analog experiences.

How can we reimagine AI as a collaborative technology? Eva Jäger is a Curator, Arts Technologist and Creative AI Lead at Serpentine, a contemporary art gallery in London. She recently curated The Call, Mat Dryhurst’s and Holly Herndon’s solo exhibition which proposes new cultural, legal, and technical rituals for art in the age of AI. Severin and Eva peel back the layers behind The Call, where they discuss the transformation of training data production into a new art form and how cultural institutions can take active roles in shaping emerging technologies through initiatives like data trusts.

Penny Rafferty is an independent writer and theorist based in Berlin. Together with Ruth Catlow she edited and published “Radical Friends: How DAOs Could Change the Art World” in 2022, a seminal book that explored the potential of decentralized autonomous organizations through essays by leading voices in the NFT, crypto-art and web3 spaces. Now that the initial hype around DAOs has cooled off, Penny and Severin took the opportunity to meet in Penny’s Berlin studio to discuss what worked, what didn’t and what’s next for using blockchains and other emergent technologies as a tool for radical imagination.

Alice Bucknell is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their work mixes elements of architecture, anthropology, ecology and science-fiction to imagine alternative worlds. In this conversation, Alice and Severin discuss the creative process of building worlds and the political and ecological dimensions of worlding as an artistic medium.

Paula Strunden is an XR artist & PhD researcher exploring multisensory and embodied spatial computing. In this conversation, Paula shares how she creates unique, multisensorial experiences in response to extended, virtual worlds.

Dragan Espenscheid is the director of digital preservation at Rhizome, the world’s leading art organization dedicated to born-digital art and culture. A first generation net artist and 8-bit musician, Dragan has pioneered Rhizome’s Digital Preservation Program since 2014 where he stewards its ArtBase collection of more than 2000 pieces of software and net art.

Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne are artists whose work subverts dominant power structures and explores alternative systems that work in harmony with their surrounding environments; such as a smell-based dating app, solar powered computer networks and sleeping pods that explore dreaming as a potential climate engineering technology.

James Bridle is an artist and author best known for their groundbreaking work on technology, ecology, and more-than-human intelligence. In this conversation, James and Severin discuss AI and other ways of knowing and seeing the world.

In this episode, we think about the planetary and a version of history that doesn’t just include humans. We do this with the help of our guest, Patricia Reed, who specializes in world modelling, helping to visualize complex data models that broaden our perspective on the world around us.

The language we often use to detail laws doesn’t relate closely enough to the physical processes that are happening within our world every day. What does it mean to have a right to breathe if the quality of air we consume is different for everyone? Together with Daniela Gandorfer, a legal and media theorist and co-founder of investigative research collective Logische Phantasie Lab, we discuss how digital technologies, philosophical approaches and legal concepts come together to shape our sense of reality.