Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Arts has launched its second podcast series in the Tactics&Practice discursive programme, which focuses on investigative art, society and new technologies. The eight episodes will feature conversations conceived and hosted by Spanish technology writer and journalist Marta Peirano for the tenth edition of Tactics&Practice in 2021. In (Re)Programming: Strategies for Self-Renewal, she discusses key technical and societal issues ranging from infrastructure and energy to community and artificial intelligence with world-renowned thinkers. Each conversation is followed by questions from special guests and the online audience.
As a growing population is sharing an ever-shrinking planet, we have found ourselves at an existential crossroads: do we bring the mistakes of the Enlightenment and industrialisation to their logical conclusion or should we develop a capacity to reprogram ourselves as a species, in order to survive? What will it take for humanity to change its course and build a responsible future for the generations to come, and what can really be accomplished when we finally do this? Some of the solutions might be technical, but most of the obstacles are not.
In this podcast series, Spanish tech journalist Marta Peirano meets a series of world-renowned thinkers to discuss key technical and social issues, from infrastructure to energy, from community to AI. Each conversation is enriched by questions from special guests and the online audience.
Tactics&Practice [podcast]: (re)programming consists of eight episodes:
(re)programming | Ep. #1: Trigger [w/ Kim Stanley Robinson]
What Does it Take to Change the Future?
Kim Stanley Robinson stands as one of today’s most beloved science fiction writers and is a prominent exponent of climate fiction. In his novel The Ministry for the Future (2020), he envisions a scenario where India is struck by a devastating heatwave, resulting in the loss of millions of lives within days: soon after this tremendous tragedy, a climate response begins to take shape. Do we need such a shock for governments, or maybe some billionaire, to take radical actions against the climate crisis? Solutions to buy time before we reach the point of no return are already known and available, maybe a utopian horizon painted by literature can help us implement them. In his most bleak yet hopeful work to date, Robinson delves into the limits and possibilities of human cooperation under extreme circumstances.
Guests: Dr Lučka Kajfež Bogataj, climatologist and a pioneer in researching the impact of climate change; Dr Luka Omladič, philosopher, environmentalist and environmental analyst; Ida Hiršenfelder, sound artist and archivist.
(re)programming | Ep. #2: Infrastructure [w/ Benjamin Bratton]
An Alternative Earth
Benjamin Bratton is an American Philosopher of Technology, known for his work spanning social theory, computer science, design, AI, and for his writing on the geopolitical implications of what he terms “planetary scale computation”. In the conversation with Marta Peirano, he explores the main issues raised in The Terraforming and The New Normal, the speculative urbanism think tanks that have extensively explored alternative future trajectories for cities, considering them as planetary technologies.
To reorient and remobilise already existing technologies regimes and processes for purposes that are for the very long term and to preserve life on Earth, a renewed Copernican turn is necessary in theory and in practice: a technologically mediated departure from anthropocentric and individual perspectives.
Guests: Marko Bauer, translator, writer and editor; Miloš Kosec, architect and researcher; Miha Turšič, artist, designer and researcher.
(re)programming | Ep. #3: Energy [w/ Holly Jean Buck]
Can We Repair the Climate?
Holly Jean Buck works at the interface of environmental sociology, international development, and science and technology studies. In her book After Geoengineering, she takes a deep dive into the envisioning, development and deployment of tactics and schemes for deliberately intervening in the environment, including Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). What we have to do to restore the planet is clearer than ever, we have the technologies and the money to do it. The obstacle, then, is social and political. We should acknowledge that what we are facing is not a climate crisis but an ecological crisis, one where people need to have a say in the plan and where specific exit strategies for every country and reality must emerge through building a consensus in communities.
Guests: Rok Kranjc, sustainability transitions researcher, translator and editor; Senka Šifkovič Vrbica, lawyer working in the fields of legal protection of the environment; Borut Tavčar, journalist who focuses on environmental issues.
(re)programming | Ep. #4: Interdependence [w/ Anab Jain]
Posthuman Politics
Future is not only about data and trends, it is about imagination. The work of designer and filmmaker Anab Jain transports people into the future. The evolving installation Mitigation of Shock by her studio Superflux envisions a random apartment in the London of 2050 or in a Singapore that has become a flooded city in 2219. In this conversation, Jain gives the listeners an emotional vade mecum to imagine and possibly shape the future, starting with equipping themselves with many options and possibilities in order to explore those prospects and interconnections, then asking which decisions that we are taking today may affect them in the future. As indicated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, there is an urgency to reassess our relationship with what we call “nature” – we have to think of ourselves as one species among others, who are our companions.
Guests: Saša Spačal, post-media artist; Anja Planišček, associate professor at Faculty of Architecture, Ljubljana; Špela Petrič, new media artist and former scientific researcher.
(re)programming | Ep. #5: AI [w/ Kate Crawford]
Better Machines for Better Humans
Kate Crawford is a leading scholar on the social implications of artificial intelligence. Her book ATLAS OF AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence is the culmination of a five-year-long research into materiality of AI. Far from being immaterial, AI is made of flesh, sweat and fossil fuels, and is not neutral. Also, AI stands as one of the most concentrated industries of the world, with only five or six companies holding the pipelines of the data, designed to serve the capital, or for policing and for military purposes. Acquainting this is essential to resistance and change, because it’s by abstracting away the processes through which AI is made that the actual modes of production can persist. However, no political situation lasts forever and no technology is invulnerable: these planetary computational systems can be decentralised and become useful to humans and the planet.
Guests: Sanela Jahić, intermedia artist; Lenart J. Kučić, journalist and podcaster; Nika Mahnič, researcher of the digital condition(ality).
(re)programming | Ep. #6: The Cloud [w/ Joana Moll]
Everything is Not Connected
Joana Moll is a Barcelona/Berlin-based artist and researcher. Her work moves towards a crossover between art and investigative journalism with the aim to make public the hidden costs of techno-capitalism. Back in 2013, her research began with an epiphany: services like Google do not come for free, without environmental costs. As her research has proven since then, not only does the internet have a huge impact on ecosystems, but e-commerce services, browsers, dating apps and surveillance systems extract data and energy from unwitting users. What happens when we purchase an item on Amazon? Who owns the profile images posted on dating apps? How many trees are needed to absorb the amount of CO2 generated by the global visits to google.com every second? Through the artistic outputs of her findings, Joana Moll transforms these revelations into tangible concepts fostering awareness in the collective consciousness of the footprint caused by our use of the Cloud.
Guests: Dušan Caf, director of the Digitas Institute for better digital accessibility; Luka Frelih, artist, programmer and hacker; Filip Muki Dobranić, hacker, philosopher, sociologist.
(re)programming | Ep. #7: Community [w/ Astra Taylor]
Talk to Your Neighbour
Astra Taylor is an international filmmaker, writer and political organiser. She was part of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, and has been one of its best narrators and critics. Since then, in a series of legendary attempts to improve protest movements, she has become one of the essential chroniclers of contemporary acts of collective resistance. She is the co-founder of the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union organising to renegotiate and resist debts, that succeeded in changing first the narrative around student debt loans and then eventually the politics. In a media landscape dominated by social media, we want everything to go viral, but small groups of well-organised people can have a larger impact than millions protesting in the streets or online. Mass is not engaging, and the individual is not the scale for politics and change: the level for democracy is the collective. Talking to neighbours and breaking conversational taboos are the first steps for real change.
Guests: Tjaša Pureber, activist and social movement researcher; Barbara Rajgelj, human rights activist; Asja Hrvatin, social worker and activist for the rights of refugees.
(re)programming | Ep. #8: Accountability [w/ Eyal Weizman]
How to Tell
Eyal Weizman is a Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures. He founded Forensic Architecture, where he helped develop a methodology – counter forensics – for analysing cases of human rights violations around the world to provide new evidence against official narratives in international human rights courts. Counter forensics is a response to structural limitations – such as not having access to the crime scene – and makes openly available what is concealed from the public eye. Counter forensics takes all the time needed to scan and interpret enormous amounts of data and images, trying to find clues that are already in the public domain, but which we don’t know how to look at and interconnect. Secrets can be deconstructed by following the traces they leave in the visible world,harvesting what is out there, but nobody is looking at.
Guests: Urška Henigman, radio journalist at RTV Slovenia; Matevž Čelik, architect, critic, editor, researcher; Marko Peljhan, conceptual artist and researcher.
Podcasts can be followed at aksioma.org/podcast and on Soundcloud, Spotify, Google and Apple Podcasts.
COLOPHON
Host: Marta Peirano
Editing, Audio Mix and Music: Gašper Torkar
(re)programming podcast series
Produced by Janez Fakin Janša and Marcela Okretič
for Tactics&Practice #10: (re)programming
Project coordinator: Sonja Grdina
Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art
Ljubljana, 2023
Part of
Tactics&Practice
konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art
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The project konS ≡ Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.