I got to speak with the brilliant Ali Alkhatib about his blog post "defining AI" -- an object, subject, metaphor, and discursive formation used amongst all of us trying to figure out how to grapple with AI's ownership, deployments, and impacts. Who gets to define AI? Is it just computer scientists? What are the stakes of having it defined only technologically? Recorded December 23, 2025. Released January 13, 2025.

Ali Alkhatib (website)

https://ali-alkhatib.com/

Defining AI

https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

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I start the new year with an episode on "data colonialism". I had the great pleasure of speaking with Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry about our contemporary relationship to corporations, about the idea that there’s no capitalism without colonialism (and vice versa), about how human lives are being exploited these days, and about data being a cheap resource. Recorded December 16, 2024. Released January 6, 2025. 

Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo216184200.html

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Such a delight speaking with Déborah López and Hadin Charbel, incredible artists-architects-scholars as investigators of future possibilities in light of climate change rapidly changing arctic (and other) landscapes. We discuss a range of art projects, from large installations to projections to speculative fiction, and how these modes and conditions can help us think and feel about alternate endings -- in our teaching and in our day to day embodied, lived realities. Recorded Dec 12, 2024. Released Dec 30, 2024.

Artists website

https://pareid.com/

Artists Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/pareid.architecture/ 

Pareid creates organ-like installation from corrugated plastic tubes in Madrid

https://www.dezeen.com/2022/04/20/pareid-everywhere-nowhere-installation-urvanity/

Re: Arctic

https://vimeo.com/469736816?&login=true 

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In this episode, I spoke with Chris Gilliard (@hypervisible) about AI’s encroachment on universities and what this means for collaboration — i.e. learning, writing, thinking and feeling. This conversation puts out a warning of sorts to universities adopting AI given that, as a technology, it is built off of stolen materials, relies on extraction and colonial labour practices, is racist, misogynist and transphobic in its outputs, and terrible for the environment — all issues the university claim to value and fight against? Recorded Dec 11, 2024. Released Dec 16, 2024.

“ChatGPT Should Not Exist” by David Golumbia (Dec 14, 2022)

https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/chatgpt-should-not-exist-aab0867abace

“Practico-inertia” by Rob Horning (March 1, 2024)

https://robhorning.substack.com/p/practico-inertia 

“Critical keywords of AI in education” by Ben Williamson (November 8, 2024 )

https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/ 

“Big AI Companies Need Higher Ed … but Does Higher Ed Need Them?” by Collin Bjork (Dec 2, 2024)

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/12/02/universities-must-beware-reliance-big-ai-opinion

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It was a real honour and joy to speak with someone whose work has so significantly shaped my own (and many of us writing about data centers): Jennifer Holt joined me for a chat about US cloud policy. The Cloud is understood in this episode through the lens of policy, which means we grapple with who owns data, its infrastructures and our data futures. We also talked a bit about what the latest US elections might mean for Big Tech... Recorded Nov 20, 2024. Released Nov 25, 2024.

Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548069/cloud-policy/

CMSW podcast: Jennifer Holt, “Cloud Policy: Anatomy of a Regulatory Crisis”

https://cmsw.mit.edu/podcast-jennifer-holt-cloud-policy-anatomy-regulatory-crisis/

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Listen to the data center's hum with your feet first... on this episode, Trent Wintermeier and I discuss what it means to absorb sound through the body and "hear" vibrations with and through your limbs and ears. We discuss what this means for folks living near data centers, especially in places imagined as kinds of sacrifice zones. Recorded Oct 9, 2024. Release Nov 11, 2024.

Trent Wintermeier

https://trentwintermeier.cargo.site

Affective Footprints

https://www.heliotropejournal.net/helio/affective-footprints

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In this episode, I have a conversation with Remmelt Ellen from AI Safety Camp. We discuss AI safety and his 44-page book Artifical Bodies outlining AI harms from the perspective of someone really grappling with the ethics, hype, and harms of the industry and beyond. Recorded Oct 4, 2024. Released Oct 28, 2024.

Artificial Bodies

https://workflowy.com/s/artificial-bodies/znDloerXJaEQvKF6#/846236876b45

AI Safety Camp

https://www.aisafety.camp/

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Everyone should read Lisa Yin Han's Deepwater Alchemy! It's a stunningly well written book about how we come to value the ocean through various extractive mediations. Recorded Sept 27, 2024. Released Oct 14, 2024.

Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor

How underwater mediation has transformed deep-sea spaces into resource-rich frontiers

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517915940/deepwater-alchemy

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Joana Chicau is a designer, researcher and coder, with a background in choreography and performance. We had a truly delightful chat about how dance can make you understand data differently. Recorded Sept 13, 2024. Released Sept 23, 2024.

Website

https://joanachicau.com/about.html

Publications

https://researchers.arts.ac.uk/2383-joana-chicau/publications 

Choreographing You

https://re-coding.technology/choreographing-you/

From Individual Discomfort to Collective Solidarity: Choreographic Exploration of Extractivist Technology 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378139744_From_Individual_Discomfort_to_Collective_Solidarity_Choreographic_Exploration_of_Extractivist_Technology

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It was such an honour to be in conversation with Siobhan Angus about what can only be describe as a masterpiece: her book Camera Geologica. Recorded August 8, 2024. Released Sept 9, 2024.

Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography

https://www.dukeupress.edu/camera-geologica

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