Art Is Not a Thing
by Ars Electronica
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
Episodes
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Is Mediation Normalization? On Mass Shootings, Shock, Recording, and Broadcasting
In today’s episode, host Hannah Balber talks about gun violence in the United States with American visual artists and filmmakers Ryat Yezbick and Milo Talwani. Their project The Innocence of Unknowing is an AI-driven animation that interrogates how mass shootings are mediated, remembered, and...
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When did we start trusting AI-generated rumours?
In today’s episode, host Hannah Balber discusses rumors, power, and the way narratives are crafted, manipulated, and distorted: from the political intrigues of the Mughal court to today’s AI-driven media environment. Our guest is the Indian-American artist and researcher Parag Mital. His recent...
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Can Humans and Fungi Design Together?
In today’s episode, host Hannah Balber discusses the agency and design capabilities of fungi with our guest Feifei Zhou. Feifei is an architect and artist who co-curated Fungi. Anarchist Designers together with anthropologist Anna Tsing. The exhibition asks what happens when we stop thinking of...
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Could Your Future Kin Be an Avatar?
In today’s episode, host Hannah Balber discusses digital doubles, identity and a new kind of technological theater with Finnish media artist Hanna Haaslahti. Her most recent work, Ancestors focuses on exploring the narrative possibilities of digital doubles. In an immersive room, AI-generated...
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Has the internet always been sexy?
This episode kicks off a new season, produced in cooperation with Radio Ö1–Austria’s leading cultural voice. Today, radio journalist Hannah Balber from Radio Ö1 talks to American artist and technologist Mindy Seu about sex and its influence on the internet. Mindy’s work combines archival research...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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....
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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 Vonnegut...
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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,...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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?…
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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…
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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…
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About this show
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
Hosted by
Ars Electronica
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