Future Based Podcast

This podcast is part of the Witchcraft made Science series, a collaboration with curator Lieke Wouters. In this podcast, we approach the witch as a stereotype as well as a new feminist icon. Making space for the spiritual, the scientific and the sceptical aspects of witchcraft, all seen from an

Alexandra Neuman is an interdisciplinary reptile currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Drawing on ideas from postcolonial theory and multi-species feminism, her work focuses on positioning human being as an ecological process rather than as an individual body or self. She received a BFA in Visual Arts and Anthropology from Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis (2015) and an MFA in Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego (2021). She is a past participant of the Arteles Residency in Haukijarvi, Finland, the PRAKSIS Residency in Oslo, Norway, and the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Berlin. Her films have shown at Anthology Film Archives, Museum of the Moving Image, and the Eyeslicer. She is a Webby Award Honoree as well as the recent recipient of the Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences (IDEAS) grant at Calit2.

We talk with her about the card deck radical becoming in the ongoing now, which is inspired by the divinatory practice of the Tarot, this interactive card deck employs the potential of play, chance, and continuous reshuffling towards unraveling the humanist doctrine of separation. through the conflation of implicit anthropocentric binaries such as nature/culture, life/nonlife, human/animal, male/female, mind/body, past/future, same/other, self/world, radical becoming in the ongoing now envisions a praxis of planetary subjectivity in which every Now moment is an opportunity for submerging oneself into the moisture of the W/hole. (source: Alexandra Neuman)

This podcast is part of the Witchcraft made Science series, a collaboration with curator Lieke Wouters. In this podcast, we approach the witch as a stereotype as well as a new feminist icon. Making space for the spiritual, the scientific and the sceptical aspects of witchcraft, all seen from an artistic lens. In this episode, we welcome artist and researcher Emily Pelstring.

Emily Pelstring is an artist and filmmaker, and is faculty in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Emily's artistic research comes out of a desire to challenge normative ways of thinking about technological development by bringing antique media into contact with contemporary images. Her work takes interest in the material contingency of the cinematic spectacle, the evolution and cultural perception of various media forms, and the intersections of science and magic. These inquiries have been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, and the results have been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, DIY spaces, and festivals. She has directed many music videos and short experimental films, specializing in animation techniques for 16mm film and vintage analog video. In addition to her solo work, Emily is engaged in ongoing artistic collaborations with Jessica Mensch and Katherine Kline, her “sister-crones” in the trio The Powers. Their most recent collaboration, Sistership TV, was a web-based variety show that gathered numerous collaborators and guests to explore themes like human-animal communication, telepresence, hysteria, and witchcraft. Emily was also a core organizer of an international symposium called The Witch Institute at Queen's University, which brought together scholars, artists, and practitioners to explore the meaning and impact of current media representations of the witch. (source: Emily Pelstring)

Dr. J. Lee Nelson studies microchimerism, a state in which cells exchanged by mother and child during pregnancy persist in both individuals for many years. Her interdisciplinary research team investigates the health consequences of this phenomenon. In 1998, Dr. Nelson reported the first study linking an autoimmune disease with the lasting presence of fetal cells in mothers. Because women generally develop autoimmune diseases more often than men, these findings have led to a new avenue of investigation into a range of diseases in which the immune system begins attacking the body’s own tissues. By learning more about microchimerism, Dr. Nelson hopes to help improve the success of blood stem cell and organ transplantation. Her team also investigates the role of microchimerism in cancer development, infectious diseases such as AIDS and complications of pregnancy.

Viraj Joshi is a designer, technologist, and futurist based in London. He designd curious objects and fiction with great affinity towards our technological and social futures.

Viraj is also the Creator of Eliza. Eliza is a series of cartoons that personifies an AI and places them in fun, strange, and unforeseen situations. Through humour, existentialism, and some futures-thinking; Eliza asks us to investigate our relationship with our technological world that we've built for ourselves. For more information, click here.

In this podcast, our new host Chetana Pai goes into conversation with Viraj about non-human centred AI.

Dr Elselijn Kingma is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. Between completing her PhD in Cambridge in 2008 and joining Southampton in 2013, Elselijn held positions at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda (USA); King's College London, and Cambridge. Elselijn's has research interests in philosophy of medicine, philosophy of biology, metaphysics and applied ethics. From 2016 she is Principal Investigator on a five research concerning 'Better Understanding the Metaphysics of Pregnancy'. Elselijn also has a part-time appointment as Socrates Professor in Philosophy and Technology in the Humanist Tradition, at the University of Eindhoven (NL). Before studying Philosophy, Elselijn obtained undergraduate degrees in Clinical Medicine (2004) and Cognitive & Neuro Psychology (2004) at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands.

Rudy van Belkom is a futures researcher at the Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends (STT). He recently published his book about ethics in the design process (‘AI no longer has a plug’) that offers developers, policymakers, philosophers and basically anyone with an interest in AI, tools for integrating ethics into the AI design process. The main question of his research is always: what future do we want? We need to ask ourselves what purpose we want to use technology for, rather than seeing it as purpose in itself. How can we use technology to create a better world? And what exactly is a better world? Currently Rudy is focusing on the impact of technology on the future of Democracy. In addition he developed an ethical design game for AI, inspired by the scrum process, that can be used to translate ethical issues into practice. The essence of the game is based on the position paper that he wrote together with the HU research group on AI and was accepted for ECAI 2020: ‘An Agile Framework for Trustworthy AI’. Van Belkom also investigated the role of AI in the future of his own field.

In this first podcast for the Creating Life project, Marjolein goes into conversation with Dan Molter. Dan is a naturalist, expert mushroom photographer, and lecturer of philosophy University of Tennessee Knoxville. His research is in scientific metaphysics, with a focus on questions of biological individuality. Questions such as “What is an organism?”, are answered in context of scientific theories and models, and these latter tend to carve nature in incongruent ways. In this podcast, Marjolein talks to Dan about the life cycle and multiplicity of mushrooms, and ventures into the analogy of mushroom's multitude to human beings: Where does the individual end and the other begin? And what is a species anyway? Is it a group of organisms? Must they be similar in some way?