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?”

Informer is the podcast of Ultradilute, a service to explore homeopathy, build health, and nurture creativity in an absurd world.
Founded by Roddy Schrock, Ultradilute is a modern homeopathy practice for curious minds and complex cases.
🌀 Learn more at ultradilute.com
📬 Questions or comments? Email us at [email protected]

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.

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. 

Informer is the podcast of Ultradilute, a service to explore homeopathy, build health, and nurture creativity in an absurd world.
Founded by Roddy Schrock, Ultradilute is a modern homeopathy practice for curious minds and complex cases.
🌀 Learn more at ultradilute.com
📬 Questions or comments? Email us at [email protected]

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.

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.

Informer is the podcast of Ultradilute, a service to explore homeopathy, build health, and nurture creativity in an absurd world.
Founded by Roddy Schrock, Ultradilute is a modern homeopathy practice for curious minds and complex cases.
🌀 Learn more at ultradilute.com
📬 Questions or comments? Email us at [email protected]

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.

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

Informer is the podcast of Ultradilute, a service to explore homeopathy, build health, and nurture creativity in an absurd world.
Founded by Roddy Schrock, Ultradilute is a modern homeopathy practice for curious minds and complex cases.
🌀 Learn more at ultradilute.com
📬 Questions or comments? Email us at [email protected]

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.

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

Informer is the podcast of Ultradilute, a service to explore homeopathy, build health, and nurture creativity in an absurd world.
Founded by Roddy Schrock, Ultradilute is a modern homeopathy practice for curious minds and complex cases.
🌀 Learn more at ultradilute.com
📬 Questions or comments? Email us at [email protected]

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.

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

Informer is the podcast of Ultradilute, a service to explore homeopathy, build health, and nurture creativity in an absurd world.
Founded by Roddy Schrock, Ultradilute is a modern homeopathy practice for curious minds and complex cases.
🌀 Learn more at ultradilute.com
📬 Questions or comments? Email us at [email protected]

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.