Art Is Not a Thing

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 the public space and why we might want to 'measure' cities in terms of emotionality by training algorithms to search for signs of love on the streets.

Resources:

The Radicality of Love by Srećko Horvat
The Shadow (1981) by Sophie Calle
Noise by C. R. Sunstein, D. Kahneman, and O. Sibony
The Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford
Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin
Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari 

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.  Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

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 their relationship to the material realities that (re-)/produce.

Resources:

The Eye of the Master by Matteo Pasquinelli
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
Material Witness by Susan Schuppli
Into the White by Chris P. Heuer
Operational Images by Jussi Parikka
Living Surfaces by A. Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.  Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

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 privacy and use it to produce new social, cultural, and political dynamics. At the edges of what looks like an inescapable panopticon society, we find hope in the role of art, research, critical thinking, and organisations that prove “none of this is natural or inevitable”, in levelling the playing field.

Resources:
Selling the American People by Lee McGuigan
Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet by Matthew Crain
The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World by Ajay Singh Chaudhary
When the Clock Broke by John Ganz
Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization by Andrey Mir

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.  Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

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? What political imaginaries make that possible, or become possible through feminist approaches to technology? Host Ana-Maria Carabelea tries to answer these questions in conversation with Professor Judy Wajcman and visual and multimedia artist Silvia Binda.

Resources:
Baltan Laboratories, Technology Otherwise
Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
OffDAC

Books by our guests:
Feminism Confronts Technology by Judy Wajcman
TechnoFeminism by Judy Wajcman
Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism by Judy Wajcman

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.  Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

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 engagement with the democratic processes. We talk to Marta Peirano, Nina Jankowicz & Fabian Scheidler about how mis- and disinformation alter the societal fabric and what the future of journalism holds.

Resources:
The Social Dilemma
The Facebook Dilemma
Joy Buolamwini - Algorithmic Justice League
Bad News - Play the fake news game!

Books by our guests:
Against the Future. Citizen Resistance in the Face of Climate by Marta Peirano
The Enemy Knows the System by Marta Peirano
How to Be a Woman Online by Nina Jankowicz
How to Lose the Information War by Nina Jankowicz
The End of the Megamachine - A Brief History of a Failing Civilization by Fabian Scheidler
The Stuff We Are Made of - Rethinking Nature and Society by Fabian Scheidler

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.  Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

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, New, whose methodology Country Centred Design, utilises Indigenous knowledges in the design of places, experiences, and critical technologies.

Resources:
Atlas of AI but Kate Crawford
Out of the Black Box: Indigenous Protocols for AI by  Angie Abdilla, Megan Kelleher, Rick Shaw, Tyson Yunkaporta
Beyond Imperial Tools: Future-Proofing Technology through Indigenous Governance and Traditional Knowledge Systems by Angie Abdilla

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.  Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

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 Nutrition Project, an initiative that builds tools to mitigate bias in artificial intelligence - and Ndapewa Onyothi Wilhelmina Nekoto - an independent researcher & community builder, part of Masakhane.   

Resources:
QT.bot - Sitting here with you in the future by Lucas LaRochelle (CA)
Ceux sans qui la terre ne serait pas la terre by David Shongo (CD)

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer


Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.  Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

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 Hao about the hidden labour behind the so-called data 'extraction', its appropriation through practices reminiscent of colonialism, and what needs to change for the AI industry to stop perpetuating harmful practices in which data is yet another commons turned into a commodity.

Resources:
AI Colonialism Series by Karen Hao, Heidi Swart, Andrea Paola Hernández, Nadine Freischlad
Power and Progress - Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson


Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.  Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

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 adoption of new technologies and their impact on society. The Digital Deal Podcast, invites artists, cultural critics and theorists, and AI experts to discuss how new technologies reshape our democracies and help us make sense of these changes.


Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The European Digital Deal is a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.  Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

If you want to find out more about the European Digital Deal, check out our website  www.ars.electronica.art/eudigitaldeal/en/.