Octopus Podcast

Our third podcast engages with some of the ideas, and fears, regarding computer-led cognition, as proposed by James Bridle in his book New Dark Age. Our discussion flows, and meanders over a contemporary landscape populated with notions of code/spaces, hyperobjects and computational thinking. We discuss the enmeshing of the digital and the physical environments that we live in, the limitations of computer science and modelling, and the shadow of the male ego in the tech landscape of today. We mull over the significance of Deep Blue and AlphaGo, and the singular obsession with speed in the financial sector. Finally, we end up by opening our imaginations to the explosive contemporary folk culture of conspiracy theories.

Links:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3002-new-dark-age

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/codespace

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjects

https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace

In the second episode of ‘Octopus’, lizvlx aka Liz Haas, Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard talk broadly and widely about the art market. With a focus on new technologies and potential new distribution strategies they discuss how the murky and opaque world of art dealing negotiates visions and techniques of transparency such as Blockchain? On a further level, they reflect and report on how artists like UBERMORGEN experiment with the surveillance capitalist tools of the Internet and how do they explore new models of producing and thinking about art.

Links:

https://cutt.ly/ge5UcO5

https://redlines.network

For the inaugural podcast session of ‘Octopus’, Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard discuss the often invisible infrastructural networks of our contemporary world. The cables, the railways, the roads, the freeports, the free-trade zones and the export-processing zones (EPZ) that trace an often indiscernible architecture of power.

Using Extrastatecraft, the illuminating text by Keller Easterling, as a launchpad, our discussion roams from the idiosyncratic marketplaces being exploited in the slums of Nairobi to the mesmerising physicality of the cable networks that snake around the globe. We tentatively conclude that the only thing that knows the system is the system itself.

Links:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2163-extrastatecraft

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass

https://redlines.network

Introduction of the Octopus Podcast