We explore changing attitudes to work post-pandemic and re-evaluate the importance of rest as a creative space. We hear from Bayo Akomolafe about the fertile spaces of the cracks, Black Power Naps on rest as a radical act and we lie down to contemplate art in Somerset House with artist Raquel Meseguer Zafe, after her workshop for this year’s Hyper Functional Ultra Healthy programme.

In March 2020, the non-stop nature of our 24/7 world came to a stop. For many in the Western world, it allowed us a space to reconsider the way we value our time and with that our relationship to work. Now, amidst the strikes and the resignations, a new movement  is emerging called ‘Soft Life’. which seeks to sidestep the values of hustle culture for slowness and ease.  How can softness open up new ways of being in the world and create different types of value? Could it be a way of healing our relationship with the natural world at a point of crisis?

In this four-part series we take the idea of ‘soft life’ as a launch off point to explore alternative ideas around work, time, the body and ecology emanating from Somerset House and beyond. We talk to radical thinkers, artists and writers, who are carving out these new ways of being in the body, centring the soft and the in-between, finding space for rest and looking at ways of expanding time beyond the clock.

A new limited series for the Somerset House Podcast

Soft Life is part of a growing number of movements challenging the way we work. How can soft approaches in art help us rethink our relationship to time, the body and the earth? 

In March 2020, the non-stop nature of our 24/7 world came to a stop. For many in the Western world, it allowed us a space to reconsider the way we value our time and with that our relationship to work. Now, amidst the strikes and the resignations, a new movement  is emerging called ‘Soft Life’. which seeks to sidestep the values of hustle culture for slowness and ease.  How can softness open up new ways of being in the world and create different types of value? Could it be a way of healing our relationship with the natural world at a point of crisis?  

In this four-part series we take the idea of ‘soft life’ as a launch off point to explore alternative ideas around work, time, the body and ecology emanating from Somerset House and beyond. We talk to radical thinkers, artists and writers, who are carving out these new ways of being in the body, centring the soft and the in-between, finding space for rest and looking at ways of expanding time beyond the clock.  

Soft Life is produced by Alannah Chance and Axel Kacoutié

With sound by Axel Kacoutié and additional music by Ellen Zweig

Artist Leila Dear explores whether geometry could be a universal language 

What do our attempts to communicate with extra-terrestrials say about us?  Jerwood artist in residence, Leila Dear uses geometry as a way of thinking about interdependence and non-human design.  In this episode of The Process she explores whether geometry could be used as a ‘Lingua Cosmica’, a universal language by which to communicate with other intelligences beyond earth.  Given the prevalence of geometric patterning within the natural world and the universal limitations of physics, could geometry provide a way of relating to other minds without preferencing our own?   

She puts the idea to Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI institute (the Search for Extra-terrestrial Life) who is sure we will find evidence of aliens within the next 20 years.  This led Leila to reflect on the other forms of mind we already share the earth with. She is joined by science writer Philip Ball to discuss how a better understanding of animal and plant intelligence might help us de-centre the human.  

 

The creative process is inspired by worlds beyond itself.  The Somerset House podcast series 'The Process' brings those worlds together, platforming the big conversations which go on to inspire new work. 

Drawing on our creative community on site and from the exhibition programme, each episode follows one artist as they explore an idea from their practice to see where it ends up.  We hear their journey from the studio on, as they invite other thinkers to discuss an idea that has come out of a work in progress and help shape where it might go next. 

Producer: Alannah Chance  

Series Presenter: Laurent John  

Theme music: Ka Baird  

Additional music: Aylu (Mana Records) Lord Tusk 

Mastered by: Nick Ryan  

Produced as part of the Creators Programme 2022  

Supported by The Rothschild Foundation 

The artist Libby Heaney spent many years as a quantum physicist researching the concept of quantum entanglement, the way objects can affect each other even when separated by vast distances, or what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’.  It’s an idea that challenges our assumptions about the physical world and for Libby it offers up fertile ways of rethinking old hierarchies. In this podcast we take up this mystery and dance with it, seeing where metaphors of entanglement can take us. Firstly Libby talks to biologist Susanne Wedlich about slime and how this shape shifting substance can help us get closer to the quantum world. She then sits down with deep listener and dream expert IONE, the partner and lifelong collaborator of Deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros. IONE and Libby meditate on how a practice of quantum listening can entangle us with both the physical and the metaphysical world, including a connection beyond death.

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Libby Heaney is a London based artist with a PhD in Quantum Physics, who works across moving image, performance, installation and physical media, usually combining these with advanced technologies such as machine learning, game engines & quantum computing - a new type of computer that processes information on particles following the weird laws of quantum physics. 

Heaney is widely known as the first person to make art with quantum computers. Her artwork Ent-, commissioned by Light Art Space, 2022, has been exhibited across continents and received substantial international press in places like Der Welt, Wallpaper* and Spike Art.  

Before retraining as an artist at Central St. Martins, London, Heaney completed a PhD in Quantum Information Science at the Uninversity of Leeds and led her own research at the University of Oxford, publishing around 20 papers on the topic of quantum entanglement. She won the HSBC and Intitute of Physics, UK, Very Early Career Woman Physicist of the year in 2008. 

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The creative process is inspired by worlds beyond itself.  The Somerset House podcast series 'The Process' brings those worlds together, platforming the big conversations which go on to inspire new work. 

Drawing on our creative community on site and from the exhibition programme, each episode follows one artist as they explore an idea from their practice to see where it ends up.  We hear their journey from the studio on, as they invite other thinkers to discuss an idea that has come out of a work in progress and help shape where it might go next. 

Producer: Alannah Chance

Series Presenter: Laurent John

Theme music: Ka Baird

Additional music: Pauline Oliveros and IONE, Aylu (Mana Records) Carmen Jaci and Irama Gema 

Mastered by: Nick Ryan 

Produced as part of the Creators Programme 2022 

Supported by The Rothschild Foundation 

Film maker Morgan Quaintance is interested in what AI can teach us about being human. For his commission for our digital platform Channel, he set out to explore divergent cultural attitudes to AI between the UK and Japan. But when he started putting out requests for interviews, he was met with a wall of silence.  Public institutions, AI developers, robotics companies and schools all seemed unwilling to reply and the film couldn't be made. Frustrated about the stonewalling he'd experienced, he started to think more about the process and what this says about the development of AI. Why was there such overwhelming silence from companies developing this technology? What does this say about some of the moral questions that go into its formation?  Morgan is joined by The Guardian’s tech journalist Alex Hern and AI artist Nouf Aljowaysir to try to find out.  

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundaton for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland. Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.  

The creative process is inspired by worlds beyond itself.  The Somerset House podcast series 'The Process' brings those worlds together, platforming the big conversations which go on to inspire new work.  

Drawing on our creative community on site and from the exhibition programme, each episode follows one artist as they explore an idea from their practice to see where it ends up.  We hear their journey from the studio on, as they invite other thinkers to discuss an idea that has come out of a work in progress and help shape where it might go next.  

Producer: Alannah Chance  

Series Presenter: Laurent John  

Theme music: Ka Baird  

Additional music: Harry Murdoch   

Mastered by: Nick Ryan  

Produced as part of the Creators Programme 2022  

Supported by The Rothschild Foundation 

Elizabeth Bernholtz, aka Gazelle Twin, has had paranormal experiences since her early childhood. Ever since she’s been both terrified and thrilled by the occult, gripped by stories of poltergeist possession and famous hauntings. Fresh off the back of her commission for The Horror Show at Somerset House, Gazelle Twin is getting back into the writing process for her next album which explores her long held fascination with ghosts.  We join her as she considers what it would mean to take these stories seriously and to harness her fear as a creative fuel. She talks to artist Mark Leckey, also inspired by the supernatural, about how he uses samples as a form of haunting and how art can be a form of self-exorcism.  Ghost hunter Innes Smith helps unpack the hauntings she experienced in her childhood home.

The creative process is inspired by worlds beyond itself.  The Somerset House podcast series 'The Process' brings those worlds together, platforming the big conversations which go on to inspire new work.  

Drawing on our creative community on site and from the exhibition programme, each episode follows one artist as they explore an idea from their practice to see where it ends up.  We hear their journey from the studio on, as they invite other thinkers to discuss an idea that has come out of a work in progress and help shape where it might go next.  

Producer: Alannah Chance 

Series Presenter: Laurent John 

Theme music: Ka Baird 

Mastered by: Nick Ryan 

Produced as part of the Creators Programme 2022 

Supported by The Rothschild Foundation 

The creative process is inspired by worlds beyond itself.  The Somerset House podcast series 'The Process' brings those worlds together, platforming the big conversations which go on to inspire new work.  

Drawing on our creative community on site and from the exhibition programme, each episode follows one artist as they explore an idea from their practice to see where it ends up.  We hear their journey from the studio on, as they invite other thinkers to discuss an idea that has come out of a work in progress and help shape where it might go next.  

In this second series we take a turn for the unexplained, starting with a ghost story from musician Gazelle Twin, who explores how art can be a form of exorcism with artist Mark Leckey. Film maker Morgan Quaintance reflects a recent film that couldn't be made and examines the culture of secrecy in AI. Artist Leila Dear asks how geometry can help us communicate with life on other planets and Somerset House Studios resident Libby Heaney explores quantum entanglement, through the prism of slime and deep listening. 

Producer: Alannah Chance

Series Presenter: Laurent John

Mastered by: Nick Ryan

Produced as part of the Creators Programme 2022

Supported by The Rothschild Foundation

Many African Filmmakers, both on the continent and in the diaspora, have been using the medium to connect and communicate across time and space.

Having grown up both in Nigeria and the west, Akinola Davies Jr attempts to bridge the gap between traditional and millennial Black communities in both locations. Award-winning filmmaker and author of Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground Dr. Robin J. Hayes joins in for a discussion of their personal journeys as filmmakers.

Questions and complications of the metaverse are broken down by artist collective Keiken, whose cross-dimensional practice merges the physical with the digital by building online worlds and augmented realities.

Here they meet with Jazmin Morris, a creative computing artist and educator based in London whose own practice and research explore representation and inclusivity within technology.