Art Is Not a Thing
Ars Electronica
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About This Podcast
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.
Host: Hannah Balber
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Hannah Balber, Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger
Design: Jelena Mönch
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Recent Episodes
S2E12 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…
S2E11 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…
S2E10 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…
S2E9 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…
S2E8 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,…
S2E7 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,…
S2E6 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…
S2E5 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…
S2E4 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…
S2E3 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,…
S2E2 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…
S2E1 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,…
S1E12 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,…
S1E11 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…
S1E10 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…
S1E9 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…
S1E8 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…
S1E7 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…
S1E6 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…
S1E5 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…
Frequently Asked Questions
Art Is Not a Thing has published 26 episodes since November 2023, covering topics in Arts, Society & Culture.
Art Is Not a Thing is currently highly active with new episodes monthly. Average episode length is 27m.
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