Octopus Podcast

In the fourth episode of the second season of the Octopus, Lars Wehringer from Capulcu Collective and Sam Hopkins talking about platform capitalism, how we are surveilled and consequences of that, thinking about digital resistance and giving advice how to protect your privacy (if this is even possible).

In the third episode of the second season of the Octopus, Diana McCarty and Hans Bernhard dive into collective work, the struggle of artists, techno/cyberfeminism, net culture, radio, white supremacists and much more!

Fatima Kastner: Haben Roboter Rechte?

Hans Bernhard im Gespräch mit Fatima Kastner über Ethik der Roboter, Verantwortung und Handlungsträgerschaft Künstlicher Intelligenz, der Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Globalisierung und Digitalisierung und Menschenrechten in der Weltgesellschaft.

Battling the barbarism of our time

Jean Peters from the Peng! Collective

We kick off Season 2 of the Octopus with a bang - an interview with Jean Peters from the Peng! Collective. Jean takes us inside some of the projects of the collective, from Zero Trollerance (2015), the development of an army of anti-misogny bots to Mask. ID (2015) a tool for morphing different passport photos together to googlenest (2014) a prescient spoof google product based on data extraction. In this wide-roaming discussion we explore big questions about what it means to be politically active, where the border between art and activism lies and how we can "battle the barbarism of our time".

https://pen.gg

We discuss The Alt Right with Ivan Knapp from the University College London and Zenker, an artist and game designer from Leipzig. This verbal exchange includes metaphorical and practical analysis of games and game-ecologies such as Warhammer and World of Warcraft, and stretches over phenomenons such as the Alt Right, New Fascism, the Manosphere, Incels, White Supremacists and libertarian Silicon Valley Transhumanism, but also Gamergate, Cuck Memes and Elliot Rodgers. One focus is the nostalgia of 1980s aesthetics in Alt Right music and graphics (Vaporwave becomes Fashwave), both an unimaginative vision of the future based on the past, and the effective adaptation strategies of leftist protest techniques by this new right movement. Ivan Knapp looks at all these developments from the angle of the social dynamics of adolescent male groups, talks about Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land and the dangers of Marvel comics, Zenker talks about current experiences of New Right movements in Eastern Germany, the reconstruction of fantasy worlds and his 4 years of research in the global Alt Right.

Links:

https://incels.net

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave

https://worldofwarcraft.com

https://www.warhammer-community.com

https://spectator.us/mencius-moldbug-moment

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in

https://vimeo.com/137939689

This double-bill episode compares two image recognition projects. German artist and academic Christian Sievers talks about his art project ‘World Instance’, based on ImageNet resources and Kenyan coder and neural network expert Brian Muhia discusses his application ‘Shambabot’ which identifies plant illnesses. These two image-based projects are contrasted with the work of Stefanie Glauber, an artist who employs neural networks to experiment with the world of odors and scents. Our discussion floats along and peacefully orbits the different layers of recognizing, understanding and interpreting of sources and data through machines and different senses. The podcast covers, in quite detailed technical discussions, how image interpretation and neuronal networks work.

Links: https://worldinstance.net

https://twitter.com/negamuhia?lang=en

http://www.stefaniglauber.com/odormirror.html

Today's podcast delves into the mind-bending world of Deep Fakes. Deep Fakes are AI-based machine learning technologies which can seamlessly map 'source' moving-image onto 'target' moving-image, typically used to map one persons face onto another persons body, often used in news, politics, pornography and art. Artist Max Mauro Schmid, discusses how this is done technically, and debates some of the epistemological ramifications of this with Professor Hans Bernhard. What happens when we experience these generated clips? Are we able to perceive their uncanny nature? Are notions of fake and real really useful in trying to parse these moving-images? Are the critical faculties required to live in a world in which binary constructions have broken down a cognitive burden?

Links:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/23/to-fix-the-problem-of-deepfakes-we-must-treat-the-cause-not-the-symptoms

https://www.creativebloq.com/features/deepfake-examples

Our guest on today’s podcast is the researcher and curator Mi You (Doc. Diss) who expands and extends our understanding of the Silk Road. Drawing on personal travels in Central Asia, and affiliated research by historians, Mi You speculates that the networks of the Silk Road were far more distributed and decentralised than traditional historiography accounts for. She examines paintings which evidence the smuggling of silkworms, deconstructs the contemporary Chinese state hagiography of Admiral Zheng He, and reframes the infamous tributary system of the Chinese Empire as exchange rather than donation. We end by hearing a bit about fermentation as a metaphor for cultural practices in Eurasia.

Links:

https://www.academia.edu/37890380/Silk_Roads_Tributary_Networks_and_Old_and_New_Imperialism_in_Extra_States_Nations_in_Liquidation_Cahier_4

https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/the-silk-road-9780190208929?

https://casco.art/en/studylines/unmapping-eurasia

Today's guest is Julia Scher, Professor of Surveillance Architecture at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM). We approach the tech landscape from an embodied perspective. What happens to the body when the self is digitised? How are we reckoning with the infiltrative Internet of today? How do we continue to empathise and connect with one another? Professor Scher revels in these questions, opting for tech seduction in lieu of tech pessimism. She draws a genealogy of tech from the endlessness of Californian life; the infinite highway and endless hamburger. And she relishes to the soft rounded corners of our safe contemporary devices.

Links:

http://www.juliascher.com

http://cyborganthropology.com/Steve_Mann

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520280069/the-gentrification-of-the-mind

In this podcast we talk to the artist Sophia Bauer about her research into the soundscapes of Kenyan Forests. Sophia uses sound to inquire into the presence of the past in today’s world. Inspired by the research of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, who reframes Forests as social networks in which trees help one another to survive, Sophia frames sound as a relational medium. Sounding entity produces pressure waves which move through space, penetrating everything in their way and affecting all of us, human and non-human. We talk about the fungal networks which distribute nutrients from mother trees to weaker specimens, and how sound can be a forensic tool to deconstruct notions of landscape and the hierarchies embedded in them.

Links:

https://www.ted.com/speakers/suzanne_simard

http://www.soundofnairobi.net