Informer: Recent Episodes

Roddy Schrock

Conversations with artists, technologists, and thinkers, hosted by Roddy Schrock

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A wide-ranging and necessary conversation with composer and performer Colin Self about redefining "health" for ambitious creators. Colin discusses re-orienting their practice toward attunement: the daily skill of noticing relationships between self, others, and the environment.

We explore why, after major institutional commissions, smaller rooms often hold bigger truths. The dialogue traces how tech burnout led them toward physical craft and the building trades, uncovering why this grounded, embodied work is a vital counterweight to an over-accelerated culture.

Roddy Schrock, CHP, provides 100% online homeopathic care for creative people, entrepreneurs, and leaders. If you are navigating burnout, anxiety, or chronic fatigue, explore our online homeopathic care plans here.


Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.


All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

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A live conversation with writer Joon Oluchi Lee and jeweler Tracy Steepy on how creative people uniquely define health and why it matters. For Lee, health is the luxury of forgetting the body entirely; for Steepy, it’s the rare feeling of being fully present and generative. Both have learned that creativity cannot be forced through discipline alone—it requires a body willing to meet you there. We explore what gets sacrificed in a world designed for extraction, and how to protect a creative practice in spaces that compress it. This dialogue reveals how homeopathy, rooted in listening deeply to the individual story, can help restore the conditions for making by helping you become yourself again.

Roddy Schrock, CHP, provides 100% online homeopathic care for creative people, entrepreneurs, and leaders. If you are navigating burnout, anxiety, or chronic fatigue, explore our online homeopathic care plans here.


Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.


All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

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Kristina’s path to homeopathy began with her daughter’s diagnosis of severe autism at 14 months, followed by PANS (Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome). After encountering non-classical approaches to homeopathy that produced aggravations rather than healing, she discovered true classical homeopathy — and everything changed. Her daughter’s most severe symptoms resolved within the first month of working with a classically trained practitioner, revealing the profound difference between protocol-based treatment and individualized, gentle medicine: homeopathy at its most efficacious.

Now, just one month into her own practice at North Star Homeopathy, Kristina reflects on what surprised her most about being a student later in life, the complexity of homeopathic training, and the critical importance of understanding principles like the law of minimum dose. We explore why knowing when to refer patients is as important as knowing when homeopathy can help, and what it means to practice medicine that’s powerful enough to cause real effects — for better or worse.

What struck me most in our conversation was Kristina’s clarity about homeopathy’s role: it’s real medicine that works alongside other modalities, not against them. As she put it, her job as a homeopath is to work herself out of a job — to get clients into such a solid state of health that they don’t need her anymore. That’s a radically different vision from a healthcare system built on lifetime prescriptions and seven-minute appointments.

I hope this conversation offers a glimpse into what it takes to become a homeopath in 2025, and what the field might look like as it moves toward what the Homeopathy Research Institute calls “drama-free” integration: simply another option for people seeking health, accessible without roadblocks or unnecessary emotion.

Learn more about Kristina’s work at North Star Homeopathy.

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy, where we offer gentle treatment for creative people exploring the connection between creativity and healing. Ultradilute is organized in Warren, Rhode Island, and provides personalized homeopathic care through secure online consultations.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

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Artist and Arts Leader Shaun Leonardo joins Roddy Schrock to discuss how creative practice reveals the body's intelligence and capacity for transformation. Leonardo's decade of work with incarcerated individuals and trauma survivors has led him to a radical premise: certain experiences cannot be processed through language alone. His methodology strips away narrative to reveal the essential gestures that carry our deepest truths—what he calls the "choreography of how we've learned to move in reaction to what happened to us."

We also explore the extractive nature of arts institutions, sustainable rhythms for creative workers, and what organizational health might look like when human needs are centered. Leonardo, co-director of Socrates Sculpture Park, offers insights from both sides of the creative ecosystem. "We have to see and analyze the impact in the body. There are certain experiences that can't be articulated through verbal language."

For those drawn to natural healing, Leonardo's approach reveals timeless principles: creating safe containers for transformation, honoring individual rhythms, and trusting the body's innate wisdom—principles that reveal why both artists and healers have always known: the body remembers what the mind cannot hold.


If this conversation resonates with your understanding of how the body holds wisdom, I welcome exploring how homeopathy may support your journey. Learn more at ultradilute.com.

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy, where we offer gentle treatment for creative people exploring the connection between creativity and healing. Ultradilute is organized in Warren, Rhode Island, and provides personalized homeopathic care through secure online consultations.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

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After a decade directing an arts nonprofit and raising money and running programs for emerging artists, Roddy Schrock made an unexpected pivot to homeopathic practice. His transition wasn't a departure from creativity but its logical extension—recognizing homeopathy as what he calls "a radical healing technology" that operates through the same principles of imagination driving all creative work.

Drawing from nearly three decades of Zen practice, Schrock examines how consciousness participates in healing in ways conventional medicine is only beginning to understand. His approach centers on "creative health"—meeting people where their artistic sensitivity intersects with their wellbeing needs.

The introduction reveals how creative people face unique health challenges that standardized medical responses often miss. Schrock's methodology honors the spaces between what we can measure and what we can only witness, trusting that healing and creativity operate through mechanisms science doesn't yet comprehend.

Read his blog entry on why he made this change, here. Keep up-to-date on the launch of his homeopathic practice by signing up for the Ultradilute Newsletter.

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy, where we offer gentle treatment for creative people exploring the connection between creativity and healing. Ultradilute is organized in Warren, Rhode Island, and provides personalized homeopathic care through secure online consultations.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

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Today's conversation is with Zachary Small, staff reporter for the NY Times. I have been following their arts journalism since they wrote for Hyperallergic years ago. They're often the first to identify new, consequential developments in a field that thrives on change.

A little less than a year ago, they became a staff reporter at the Times – a well deserved and enlightened hire. In particular, they have been hot on the trail of the NFT "situation" (remember that) and I suspect we'll be hearing much more about art and digital tokenization over the months and years ahead.

Zach’s first book, “Token Supremacy: The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022,” will be published by Knopf in spring of this year.

So it was a pleasure to be able to speak to them for Informer.

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Today's conversation is with Prem Krishnamurthy, designer, author, and educator. His multifaceted work explores the role of art as an agent of transformation at an individual, collective, and structural level. This manifests itself in books, exhibitions, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts, and workshops.

He is one of those thinkers and makers whose brain is spinning out ideas and reflections as fast as you can absorb them. And I appreciate so much his emphasis on the importance of embracing juxtaposition as a prerequisite not only for artistic creativity but also as a key ingredient for healthy civic life. He argues that there is no singular America, but instead a multiplicity of Americas just as there is no singular individual: we are all collections of paradox and competing interests. 

We also talk about the ways in which the world will forever be hybrid, there's no going back to the old technologies. And how do we take what we learned from the "zoomacene" (his word) and build that into the ways in which we come together now.

This conversation, and it was very much a conversation more an interview, was a joy. And I hope you find it to be inspiring and nourishing as well. 

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What does it mean to have a body that moves in three dimensional space in our current time? How do cultural institutions better relate to the public in a way that takes into consideration the massage changes in technology over the last three years? Can relating to the other than human beings help us learn how to be better partners to the planet? These are the types of questions London-based choreographer and dancer Sara Wookey dives into. She is one of the most interesting thinkers on the relationship of bodies and material space and how post-modern dance can open windows into more rational ways of understanding our bodies in space and, as she always points out, time.

As she says, "we look back on the effects of the pandemic on the way that we choreograph ourselves in social interactions since the pandemic. We've had to raise our awareness of our three dimensional space." These days she is spending a lot of her time helping museums and other cultural organizations think through how they can take a more creative approach to engaging publics that are re-thinking their relationship to the material in the post-covid age.

I spoke to Sara last fall so some time has passed and you'll notice our references to the season feel anomalous, unless you're in the southern hemisphere. But I'm glad that's the case because everything is shifting so quickly at the moment, it is sometimes helpful to get a snapshot of where things were at even just 5 months ago in order to gain some footing as to where we are now. 

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If you are an artist, or someone who cares about the health and wellbeing of the arts in the United States, I think you will find this conversation to be both insightful and inspirational. There's only one Ruby and I am honored to be able to work with her through my directorship at Eyebeam, where she serves on the board. It was a pleasure to dig into the shifts in the culture since the meltdown of the NEA in the 90's to the current version of the culture wars we are experiencing now from her perspective, as an arts executive since the 80's. As she finalizes a new archive and website of her work and the artists that she has engaged with, this was a fine moment to capture conversations that we typically have offline.

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My friend, the designer and artist, Mushon Zer-Aviv was in town a few months ago so we sat down to catch up. Having worked in open, values-driven design in tech for the last two decades, Mushon goes deep into what he sees as being the mistakes of the early internet and how we can avoid them in the future. His thoughtfulness is always optimistic: as he says, he is a designer so he wants to design! He points to the contradictions inherent in our tendency to offload "ethics into infrastucture" and the kind of return of the tech bros singing the same song with web3. This is a wide-ranging conversation that points to so many of the current challenges while showing new paths to the future.

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Deborah has a reputation as an innovative arts leader here in New York.  Over the past couple of years, she has fully transformed into a sharp-eyed astrologer building from decades of experience in the arts as well as a lifelong spiritual practice. In this, the final Dog Days 2022 episode, Roddy and Deborah discuss the value of astrology in the context of being an arts director where everybody is obsessed with knowing the future. And what it means for Deborah to give notice, then begin a full-time astrology practice in upstate NY. This is a wide-ranging conversation about the value of art, and astrology, in creating space for people to relate to one another and is a great way to close out the summer. 

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There are a handful of contemporary net artists for whom I have particular affection. Constant Dullaart is one of them. Since I first learned of his work in the early aughts, I've found an extraordinary depth to every move he makes. As our understanding of the internet has matured, Constant's work becomes more relevant. I most recently worked with him as one of our Eyebeam fellows in our Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future initiative in 2020. I appreciated this conversation so much, his insistence on thinking through powerful ways to help people re-think ways of being together digitally, most recently creating Common Ground, the only art exhibition platform fully exited from surveillance capitalism. 

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As we enter these long, hot days of this unusual year, I'll be releasing three special episodes that aim to provide some dreamy inspiration for late summer. Between now and labor day, I'll be speaking with three dynamic artists over three episodes. The conversations move from foundational questions around what technology actually means to playful platforms for new forms of co-creation and community, and then finally to a discussion of astrology as an ancient, vital technology for spiritual practice.

These artists, Jonathon Keats, Constant Dullaart, and Astrologer Deborah Fisher, give us new space to dream as we enter these late summer days when reality seems to be consumed by the sun. I hope your are enlivened by the work of this special trio of thinkers and makers, with these Dog Days Special episodes.

Today's episode of Informer, part 1 of 3 Dog Days Special episodes, is with experimental philosopher and artist Jonathon Keats. Jonathan's work forefronts ways in which decisions are made in technology, highlighting the fact that they are decisions, not inevitabilities. He talks about technology as a way in which we become who we are and one which can also distort who we become. I think you'll enjoy this episode, as it articulates a lot of the topics that I've been exploring this year. i find his work to provide an insightful foundation, a look at the first causes that brought us to where we are, from human's first use of the pick axe to this moment of emergent capitalisms based on surveillance and instrumentalization of behavior.  Jonathon has a background in philosophy and brings it to bear in a practice that is always burrowing into our innate relationships between the technologies we create and how that influences our sense of self. 

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B Covington, a multi-modal sound artist whose work is as formally challenging as it is joyfully satisfying, was in New York last month and sat down for a conversation with me at my office in Brooklyn. I enjoyed our time so much an it is the first episode of Informer that was recorded in person. 

We started by talking about the incredibly radical work of the Public Television Workshop, creators of Sesame Street, and the influence that had on B's practice and his ideas around "public narrativity". Our rollicking, wide-ranging conversation then took us many places, including their contemplation of the media's framing of the relationship between Michael Jackson and his sister LaToya and how that acts as inspiration for their new composition. I also enjoyed B's thinking about ways we might work more closely with AI as a creative force.

I think of this conversation as part 3 in my "AI Personhood" series that began with an interview with K Allado McDowell, followed by James Bridle in episode 17. I encourage you to check those out if you haven't already.

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James Bridle imagines new modes of invention and engagement inspired from relationships with non-human beings. He's a fascinating thinker and this is one of my favorite conversations.

His relentless inquiry into how we can co-create technologies that better serve the world, not just a few humans, is inspiring. His latest book, Ways of Being, is a tour-de-force of imagining not only how our definitions of intelligence can expand to be more all-encompassing to how these new definitions can open new ways of imagining our relationships to machines. 

James Bridle

Charles Stross

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

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I first heard about K when they were active in the electronic music scene of the bay area in the early 2000's. I've enjoyed following their work from that time into becoming a force for thoughtful engagement with AI, thinking about it in very expansive way, involving anthropology and cosmology.

I find that their work unites the abstract with the personal in an elegant way, spotlighting the weird and unexplained in the technological. It was an absolute joy to connect on today's episode.

K Allado-McDowell

Amor Cringe (K's new book)

Google Art and Machine Intelligence

Weird AI Reading List by K Allado-McDowell

Dale Pendell

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I really enjoyed this chance to catch up with her and hear what she's seeing as being exciting developments in the fields of art, technology, and science. And we had a great time discussing what an intra-institutional approach to building a new tech-art infrastructure could be, as a counterpoint to the dominance to the dominance of a few tech. companies. We get into the weeds on potential funding structures that would allow non-profits to collaborate to build a more humane and human version of the metaverse. 

Shownotes and links: https://www.informerpodcast.com/episodes/15/index.html

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"As an artist I am trying to see the hidden connections between things and trying to understand things that I feel as a person that thinks in slightly different ways." - Angelo Plessas

In early February of 2020, I was invited to an impromptu lunch at the lovely and large home of artist Chrysanne Stathacos in the Kolonaki neighborhood of Athens, the day before my return to New York.

We all have moments that stand out as markers of the time before covid and all that has been left in its wake. That afternoon with friends in Athens stands for me as one of those poles representing the time before. It would have been memorably enjoyable on its own, without all the fear, change and upheaval that followed. But due to its pivot-like quality, the gathering takes on a sort of weightiness. It seems appropriate that this was also the occasion in which I met Angelo Plessas, an artist whose work is focused on technology’s relationship to spiritual growth. I remember him discussing with me his plans for the Gwangju Biennial and how his work was going to explore the topic of healing and technology. In retrospect, his practice couldn’t be more profoundly in-sync with the world that emerged.

Angelo is someone who, from the beginning, has been and remains deeply invested in understanding the internet not only as a tool but also how it exists inside each of us, deep in our interiority. When speaking again, after more than two years of the whole world moving almost fully online, he remains an optimist. It is a welcome change whenever I speak with Angelo, someone who feels that the internet remains queer and is capable of bringing people together in a positive way. Who’d believe it, given the doom and gloom prophesied by seemingly everyone else.

I enjoyed this conversation with Angelo a lot. I think we need more people thinking like he is, finding moments of healing in our relationships with technology. We talk about a number of things, including his recent collaboration with Acne Studios in producing a fashion line from his singular style of quilting, made from materials that protect our bodies from electro-magnetic fields being generated by the devices that surround us.

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It's always a pleasure to be in conversation with Mendi and Keith Obadike. The sound art duo have been working together for 25 years, which gives them perspective to be able to identify trends, changes, and ongoing challenges in the field. Their sound work is beautifully designed, often utilizing the human voice as an instrument, and typically they take on issues often ignored in sound art, like race relations in the United States or the country's histories of exclusion. In this conversation, we covered a lot of ground, including their recent refusal to accept an award from ZKM, a media arts center in Germany, due to that organization's public disclosure of their difficulties in adjudicating within an offensive and false dichotomy of quality vs diversity.

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I had the privilege of visiting an insightful and rich exhibition at Albright-Knox, Buffalo, last month. Co-curated by curator and art historian Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan and artist Paul Vanouse, it focused on the impact of "difference machines" AKA computers in shifting our notions of identity. Featuring many artists that I have been fans of for years, I hope that this ground exhibition continues to make waves. You can dig into their ideas on this, the latest episode of Informer.

"You can not talk about contemporary life without talking about technology."

Photo: Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan and Paul Vanouse standing in front of Saya Woolfalk's Landscape of Anticipation 2.0, 2021. 

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There are so many fascinating stories to be told about the present and future of technology in the arts, especially in this moment of a profound, digital turn. Tamiko Thiel, a truly singular artist, tells a numbers a number of them. As a very early innovator in the field of VR, along with a side career as product designer which includes creating the visual design of the The Connection Machine, the world's first AI computer and now in the permanent collection of MoMA, her work has been and continues to be groundbreaking. It's motivated by a deep curiosity about what it means for humans to make technology and how we might do so in a way that doesn't sacrifice our planet in the process.

Any one component of Tamiko's life and career seems rich enough to launch its own spin-off podcast, with Tamiko right at the center of some unwritten but influential history. Whether it's about her father being the first to patent shipping containers, then shockingly losing the patent, to Steve Jobs in the 80's asking his marketing manager to hire Tamiko after seeing her visual design of the Connection Machine and then being told that it's too late, Tamiko's gone off to Europe to be an artist!

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Zach Lieberman is one of the leading creative coders and digital artists in the world. And what I love about the way Zach works is that he is equally dedicated to thoughtful and open pedagogy as he is to creating poetic digital works. This wide-ranging conversation reveals the motivations in his co-founding of the School for Poetic Computation as well as his continuing fascination with the human, machine dialogue that results in the creation of new worlds. 

For those listeners who may not know, DOS was an operating system that was fully text-based and was marketed as being an accessible for home users to access programs and software and also opened the door to people like Zach to start to create by typing in words and then seeing them magically transform into activities on the screen. He begins by recounting one of those early experiences. Zach begins by describing one of those early, magical moments.

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I’m excited to share this fascinating conversation with LA-based artist Lauren Lee McCarthy. She reminds us that, actually, creating technology is one of the most human of activities. Her work is largely about trying to get us to take responsibility for the machines we are building. She suggests, that we need to get “out of our dorm room” in how we approach machine learning and the way it’s changing the world. She states, “the difference between machines and humans is that humans can reflect on their values to make decisions about the future. Machines can’t.” I hope you’ll enjoy learning about this emerging artist who is poised to make a big impact.

The idea that we need to get “out of our dorm room” in how we approach machine learning and the way it’s changing the world feels right to me. I hope you enjoyed this conversation and you’ll check us out online at informerpodcast.com.

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I’ve known Julia Christensen for quite a long time, since we were both graduate students at Mills College in Oakland in fact. One of my first memories of her was when we were both in  Pauline Oliveros’s composition class.

Since then, I’ve kept up with Julia’s work on and off over the years, seeing her when she would exhibit in town or by catching up at artist retreats in upstate New York. I think it’s the expansiveness of her work that has always intrigued me most, leaping from the micro to the macro with ease. Ranging from her studies and photography of how local communities creatively re-use defunct “big box” stores to now creating work intended to communicate life on earth to beings in other galaxies, she is driven by getting to the bottom of things, even if that means interrogating possibilities alongside jet propulsion engineers. 

What I love about artists with a research-based practice is that they look outside themselves for answers and then fearlessly shift their focus as new revelations emerge. Like Julia, artists who work this way bring a quality of real-time investigation and appraisal to their work. This faith in process, constantly creating from the elements discovered whatever they may be, strikes me as having the quality of altruism, something shared among all the artists I admire.

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Last month, I had the opportunity to speak to Mutale Nkonde about her work in leading AI For The People, a non-profit communications agency that utilizes art to engage communities in the risks and rewards of machine learning. Her work has taken on new urgency as quantum, or super high-processing computing, becomes the standard driving machine learning systems.

In this episode, I discuss everything from how she started in a career in journalism then went on to taking jobs with people and organizations with “funny names” in the mid aught’s. I appreciate her focus on the role that funding plays in the tech. world, particularly the damage it causes when it incentives certain ideas of normalcy, typically constrained in narrow, white, cis-het notions of what the future should be. That particular version of the future doesn’t include people like her and she asks, “what could happen when the people creating the technology are black women inspired by the science fiction of Octavia Butler?”

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I’ve known Commissioner Casals for a number of years, since his time at the Highline, where he was creating very forward looking public art programs. His philosophy of building cultural democracy is quietly radical, particularly in a city like New York which has spent most of the last twenty years betting on high-profile legacy institutions. It seems to me that Gonzalo is working to draw a new map of interdependence for the arts in New York.

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Bassem Saad has a background in design and architecture, and he talks about how viewing a Shana Moultin piece at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris triggered his hunger for making video. I find his work deeply incisive in this strange moment, and it was a pleasure to speak to him on the line from Berlin. I began by asking him about how he grew up, where, and how he made the transition from architecture to art. 

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Lynn Hershman Leeson and Roddy Schrock discuss everything from tech's origins in porn and military research as well as the challenges she faced of working as a woman in a patriarchal art world.

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On episode two, I had the immense pleasure of taking part in a wide-ranging conversation with Jesse Darling, a Berlin-based artist whose work has been featured in numerous exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Serpentine Gallery and the Tate Britain. I mostly listened, as Jesse generously served sharp, insightful observations on how we define technology, the fallacy of the digital commons, and life as an artist in an increasingly precarious world. 

Jesse’s lived experience of exploring embodiment through performativity, from online sex work to playing in bands, allows for insights into issues such as how we all are forced to run our own business and brand, not to mention our sex lives, from our computers and phones. I left the conversation with a shift in my perception of the world; Jesse’s words illicit profound awareness of the fragility of things in the same manner as their visual work. 

Jesse Darling

Gravity Road (Artforum)

NTGNE (Serptine)

-->People we mentioned:

Cameron Rowland (Wikipedia) 

Nora N. Khan

American Artist

Phoebe Collings-James

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Stephanie Dinkins speaks about always being on the edge of technology, while becoming disillusioned with careers in publishing and advertising as well as navigating a world which wants to overlay its own narratives on her as a person and a practitioner. Stephanie’s story speaks to anyone who has worked or is working on finding their way as an artist in a world under capitalism. And, she lays out the inherent limitations in trying to improve tech. development by imbuing it with perceived “values.”

I find Stephanie’s work to be incisive and playful in the way that it gets to the impacts of AI, due to its universal ability to shift large components of how we live on this planet. And underlying all of her work is an optimism that is very welcome, particularly at this time when there is a tendency towards a dystopic imagination. Stephanie’s response is to neither go full utopia or full dystopia, but, as she puts it, full pro-topia.

Stephanie Dinkins

Secret Garden

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On this inaugural episode, it’s a pleasure to be in conversation with Kate Crawford. I’ve known Kate for quite a few years; I’ve invited her to be a part of numerous panels and projects throughout that time and am always captivated by her eloquence in laying out emerging challenges in our relationships to technology. She does so in a way that centers artists as part of the solution. It’s unsurprising to discover that she also is a musician, with a background in composition and currently in the band Metric Systems, which I’d highly recommend.

Kate is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, the co-founder and director of research at the AI Now Institute at NYU, a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media, a senior fellow at the Information Law Institute at NYU, and an associate professor in the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

She recently published a book called Atlas of AI. This book really opened my mind about the ways in which our current adoption of AI, at a societal level, is really just the latest moment in which humans have been blinded by science, allowing tools to determine our ethics, rather than the other way around.

Atlas of AI

AI Now Institute

Metric Systems (Kate's band)

Trevor Paglen