Big one this week, artist and researcher Kyle McDonald did the gruelling work to calculate the energy and carbon cost of Ethereum, and we try to break down those numbers, calculate their relative impact, discuss critiques of web 3 and debate why they are mostly coming from where they are coming from.

Ethereum Emissions: https://kylemcdonald.github.io/ethereum-emissions/

Kyle's art: https://kylemcdonald.net/

Follow Kyle: https://twitter.com/kcimc

Who Pays Artists?: http://www.whopaysartists.com/

People staring at computers: https://www.wired.com/2012/07/people-staring-at-computers/

We had a long and wonderful chat with Ali after reading his "Who Goes Crypto?" piece on the increasing number of working people opting into investing money into the casino of crypto and meme stocks rather than adhere to crumbling narratives over how the economy works, and for whom. We also dive into an area of his expertise, online disinformation and it's political ramifications. 

Holly dips out half way through the discussion, she wasn't feeling great and we did not realise at the time she had contracted COVID. Fortunately all is well now, but that will explain the occasional coughing and spluttering.

Thanks everyone, have a great week

We've been wanting to have this conversation for some time! Scott Moore joins us to discuss Gitcoin's efforts to sustain open source developers, the emerging culture shock between late 20th century free software ideologies and new proposals to get developers paid (which parallels a lot of the culture shock happening in the art and music world rn), discuss the role crypto may play in funding and sustaining public goods, and deviate into why setting good precedent may be important in anticipation of rapid onset AI. 

We sound a little croaky for this episode and the next one because we had a bit of COVID in the house. All is good now thankfully. Stay safe out there everyone, and thanks

We had a wonderful friday night hang with artist Deafbeef, who has had a crazy year transitioning from full time blacksmithing to becoming a respected artist known for his on-chain audio visual experiments. After an intense year we try to go as far off script as is possible and just talk about art, satire, music making and cooking videos.

Check out Deafbeef's work: https://www.deafbeef.com/

Follow Deafbeef on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/_deafbeef

Stuff we discussed

Brad Troemel's Athletic Aesthetics: https://thenewinquiry.com/athletic-aesthetics/

Media Archaelogist Erkki Huhtamo: http://www.erkkihuhtamo.com/

Folie à deux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux

Etoy Corp https://etoy.com/

Frank Zappa at the PMRC hearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgAF8Vu8G0w

Wonderful to welcome Jess from Seed club, who help web communities make the transition to member owned DAOs! 

Apply for Seed Club: https://seedclub.xyz/

Follow Jess: https://twitter.com/thattallguy

Slaying Moloch, starting the first crypto art registry, Bowie Bonds, Data markets and data unions with Ocean Protocol's Trent McConaghy

Trent has been very influential to our thinking. There are few people who can talk with such fluency on matters we care about, even better build compelling alternatives. 

In this we discuss how he and his wife Masha built the first crypto art registry, Ascribe, long before the concept of an NFT existed. We also discuss how his latest project Ocean Protocol proposes to hand us control of our data at the dawn of the next internet. 

Follow Trent: https://twitter.com/trentmc0

Trent's Blog: http://trent.st/blog/

Ascribe: https://www.ascribe.io/

Ocean Protocol: https://oceanprotocol.com/

Swash: https://swashapp.io/

 In conjunction with this years Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts titled "Iskra Delta "curated by Tja?a Poga?ar we interviewed Janez Skrubej, the author of "The Cold War For Information Technology: the Inside Story".

 Inside indeed, as Janez was the former CEO of Iskra Delta, a major contender on the world stage for not only personal computers, but also large scale networked IT systems. Based within Tito?s Yugoslavia it was caught in the crosshairs in the cold war, working between the US, Soviet Union, China, and India, with each corresponding intelligence agency pushing their own agenda. Janez was the managing director during this time, and was personally paid visits by the presidents of the Soviet Union, China and India, as well as the CIA and KGB. Ultimately the conflicting interests overpowered the small IT company and it closed, leaving Europe without a major contender in the global IT race. 

It?s a treat to speak to Janez about this extraordinary situation, and to imagine an alternative history where Iskra Delta might have had a fighting chance.

Read The Cold War for Information Technology: The Inside Story: https://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-Information-Technology-Inside-ebook/dp/B00C1NWL2E

Follow Janez Skrubej updates: http://sbpra.com/janezskrubej/

We cannot wait to see this film! http://senca-studio.si/en/portfolio/sparks-in-time/

Check out the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic arts, with contributions by Other Internet, John Akomfrah, Simon Denny, Josh Citarella, us and more!: https://34.bienale.si/en/

Hi everyone!! We often have discussions on here about web 3 representing a real opportunity for the independent music industry, and Bruno Guez is an expert on how that might end up transpiring, from his time working as a label head, directing the Merlin Network and more recently in building Revelator.  

Check out Revelator: https://revelator.com/

Follow Bruno on Twitter: https://twitter.com/brunoguez?lang=en

Rhea Myers conceptualised a new art world by curiously tinkering with new tools and seeing what art she could make with them. We catch up with her to reflect on the earliest days of crypto art, her experiments with the medium and their art historical roots in 60's conceptualism, the current state of the field, Loot frenzy and the recent arrival of the dragonslayers, and some areas she feels are yet unexplored.

This was crazy fun.

Follow Rhea on twitter: https://twitter.com/rheaplex

Read and check out Rhea's Work: https://rhea.art

Conceptual Art, Cryptocurrency and Beyond: https://www.furtherfield.org/conceptual-art-cryptocurrency-and-beyond/

Ethereum Art Market: https://rhea.art/ethereum-art-market

Certificate of Inauthenticity: https://rhea.art/certificate-of-inauthenticity

Tokens Equal Text: https://rhea.art/tokens-equal-text

Rhea's writing on Furtherfield: https://www.furtherfield.org/author/rhea-myers/

Furtherfields (excellent) book Artists Rethinking the Blockchain: https://torquetorque.net/wp-content/uploads/ArtistsReThinkingTheBlockchain.pdf

Rhea's Gallery Kate Voss: https://www.katevassgalerie.com/

Flow Blockchain:  https://www.onflow.org/

Fingerprints DAO: https://www.fingerprintsdao.xyz/

Thrilled to welcome artist, educator and meme master Max Alper (La Meme Young) to join us to discuss running an online art school, sound and meme pedagogy, musical body building and deliver an on the ground report of crypto excessiveness arriving in his new home of Puerto Rico.

Learn music with La Meme Young: https://www.patreon.com/la_meme_young

Follow his incredible Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/la_meme_young/?hl=en

Brian Ferneyhough - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8RTPYaWXj8

Jason Eckardt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrY1V2Q3iwI

Nitro - Freight train - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGf5NxLQoEo

Our first ever in person discussion this week with writer and curator Shumon Basar to discuss his new book with Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Extreme Self, published in accompaniment with the exhibition "Age of You" most recently hosted at Jameel Art Centre, Dubai.

We discuss a number of neologisms that appear in the book, not least Shumon's concept of  "Emotional Capitalism", the growing and alarming gulf between reality and the stories we have to comprehend it, and how art institutions might hope to keep up!

Read The Extreme Self:

Europe: https://doyoureadme.de/shop/culture-society/the-extreme-self?v=3a52f3c22ed6

US: https://www.artbook.com/9783960989738.html

Dazed Interview: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/53342/1/extreme-self-age-douglas-coupland-shumon-basar-hans-ulrich-obrist-interview

Watch Shumon's Visual Essay "Season Ending (The Day Of Forever): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzAc8yRWGCo 

Hey everyone,

thanks again for your support! We have a great cast of people joining us over the next few weeks. In line with our recent emphasis on collective character development, we invited Arif Khan and Juliet Gardner of Alethea AI to discuss the incoming age of synthetic media, collectively and autonomously created characters, their concept of interactive NFTs and much more

Check out Alethea AI: https://alethea.ai/

Follow Arif: https://twitter.com/ArKhan

Follow Juliet: https://twitter.com/cybersomeone

If you have spent any time online recently, you have no doubt seen an explosion of remarkable images generated from text with Latent Visions, VQGAN and CLIP. We spoke to Adverb, the creator of Latent Visions, about his project, Promptism, and where we see these applications developing in the next few years (or at this pace, months). 

Unmissable discussion with someone who has contributed so much to the field this year!

Follow Adverb: https://twitter.com/advadnoun

Thrilled this week to invite artist and author Emily Segal, whose debut auto-fictional novel ?Mercury Retrograde? tells the story of a young artists attempt to reconcile the abstract landscape of overfunded startups and the art world, set in New York between Occupy and the Trump Presidency. We discuss what can be learned from the post-internet era as we stand at the precipice of a new internet, the tensions created by the meeting between financial and social capital, what the hell an artist is anyway now?? and Emily?s recent deep dive on funding new literature projects with web 3.

Read Mercury Retrograde: https://delugebooks.com/products/mercury-retrograde

Deluge Books: https://delugebooks.com/

$NOVEL on Mirror: https://emily.mirror.xyz/0AFENlMKv9amUC1OJIZY26udpISw_raXkoEcvelPvzg

Nemesis Global: https://nemesis.global/

Hi everyone, this week we are thrilled to invite author and developer Daniel Suarez, whose self published science fiction book Daemon became a cult success for its hard science fiction depiction of a narrow AI preprogrammed to re-order the world after the death of it's game developer author. We discuss Daemon and it's follow up Freedom?, how those books inspired aspects of the formation of Ethereum, the importance of reframing narratives through art, and Daniel's more recent work, Delta-V, researching the economics of space exploration. This is a really fun one!

Daniel Suarez: https://daniel-suarez.com/

On twitter: https://twitter.com/itsdanielsuarez?lang=en

Daemon: https://www.amazon.com/DAEMON-Daemon-Daniel-Suarez/dp/0451228731

Freedom?: https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-TM-Daemon-Daniel-Suarez/dp/0451231899

Delta-V: https://daniel-suarez.com/Delta-v_synopsis.html

Super excited to share this one, on the advent of our collaboration for Holly+, we are joined by Chris Deaner and Yotam Mann of Never Before Heard Sounds, a brand new company releasing AI music tools, to discuss approachable AI tools for music making, the inevitable model economy, new approaches to DAWs and the Holly+ project more generally!

Never Before Heard Sounds: https://heardsounds.com/

Follow them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HeardSounds

Play with Holly+ (and share your results!): https://holly.plus/

Happy to welcome activist and science communicator Zion Lights to discuss Energy Justice, the scientific consensus around Nuclear Power, the shaky morality of Degrowth positions, Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and her new advocacy organisation, Emergency Reactor!

Zion Lights: http://www.zionlights.co.uk/

Join Emergency Reactor: https://www.emergencyreactor.org/

Continuing our DAO thread we are thrilled to be joined by Aaron & Priyanka of OpenLaw, instrumental in formulating and passing the Wyoming DAO legislation, and stewards of NFT art collection DAO Flamingo, Tempest DAO and The LAO. We discuss what a DAO is, what the legislation means for human and nonhuman DAOs, art collecting in web3 and how DAO governance has been working in practice. 

This is a great introduction to DAOs and early experiments in the medium for the unfamiliar!

Apologies for the imperfect audio, our laptop decided to rebel just as we started the call. 

Next week we continue the theme by inviting Science Fiction author Daniel Suarez, whose book Daemon had a hand in inspiring the concept of the DAO in the first place, as discussed in this episode :)

Thanks again for your support everyone, have a wonderful week

Watch Josh's streams: https://www.twitch.tv/joshuacitarella

Listen to Josh's interviews: https://www.patreon.com/joshuacitarella

Joshua Citarella - 20 Interviews Book: https://www.amazon.com/20-Interviews-Joshua-Citarella/dp/1034279270/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=joshua+citarella&qid=1611597124&sr=8-1

Welcome to TikTok, the Wildly Popular Video App Where Gen Z Makes the Rules: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-tiktok-wildly-popular-video-app-gen-rules

Follow Jon: https://twitter.com/jgkoomey

Turning Numbers into Knowledge: http://www.numbersintoknowledge.com/

Estimating Bitcoin Electricity Use: A Beginner?s Guide: https://www.coincenter.org/estimating-bitcoin-electricity-use-a-beginners-guide/

SORRY, WRONG NUMBER: The Use and Misuse of Numerical Facts in Analysis and Media Reporting of Energy Issues: attached ;)

Mike Berners Lee: How Bad are Bananas?: https://www.amazon.com/How-Bad-Are-Bananas-Everything/dp/1553658310

Brandolini's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Rully Shabara: https://www.rullyshabara.id/

Senyawa: https://www.rullyshabara.id/senyawa

Alkisah: https://alkisah.net/

Participating label list: https://alkisah.net/track-list/

Raung Jagat: https://www.rullyshabara.id/raung-jagat

New Design Congress: https://newdesigncongress.org/en/

On Weaponized Design: https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/on-weaponised-design

This is Fine: Optimism and Emergency in the P2P network: https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine

Cade: https://shiba.computer/

Follow Cade: https://twitter.com/helveticade

Foundation: https://foundation.app/

Foundation on Twitter: https://twitter.com/withFND

Kayvon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/saturnial

Lindsay on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindsay_Howard

Sign up for updates on the Marine Snow project: https://marine-snow.co/sss

Follow Tony Lashley: https://twitter.com/tooonyl

Pseudodoxology Podcast Network: https://www.patreon.com/Pseudodoxia

"The Deluge": https://medium.com/@EdwardWaverley/the-deluge-f62968b20972

"The Sublimity of Permanent Collapse": https://medium.com/@EdwardWaverley/the-sublimity-of-permanent-collapse-and-the-leibnizian-problem-of-monadic-optimization-inherent-in-70d6e8be095a

Books!

Anything by Frederick Beiser

The Art of Memory by Frances A.Yates :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Memory

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind

Logic and the Art of Memory (The Quest for a Universal Language) by Paolo Rossi:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo3620360.html

The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press by Lina Bolzoni and Jeremy Parzen:

https://utorontopress.com/us/the-gallery-of-memory-2

LibGen: https://libgen.is/

Scissor Labels Essay: https://j.mirror.xyz/RUeJfZEZxr-hkuzUCakQyUuf2kOJVMPPiAWBaQFhhqc

How it was funded via $ESSAY: https://j.mirror.xyz/uVGCCwwm3k341lPpxaJmHTZROESVse9Pe_rmbiuUAC0

John Palmer: https://johnpalmer.site/#/

Kara Kittel: https://twitter.com/karakittel?lang=en

Toby Shorin: https://tobyshorin.com/

Other Internet: https://otherinter.net/

http://audreyt.org/

Back in the saddle with Artist and Musician Lawrence Lek for the advent of his latest film AIDOL (2019) and the release of it's wonderful soundtrack on Hyperdub.

We discuss AI Pop Stars, SinoFuturism, IP and cultural stereotypes, NFT murder plots and a great deal more

Have a wonderful week all :)

LINKS

Lawrence Lek: https://lawrencelek.com/

AIDOL OST (Hyperdub): https://hyperdub.net/products/lawrence-lek-aidol-ost

AIDOL Trailer: https://vimeo.com/331655114

Geomancer Trailer: https://vimeo.com/251303726

In celebration of his new book "Hope Runners of Gridlock", we chat to polymath Simon de la Rouviere about designing new economies, never ending stories, Metamodernism and maintaining hope!

Buy the book!  https://blog.simondlr.com/posts/hope-runners-of-gridlock

Follow Simon's writings! https://blog.simondlr.com/

Follow Simon! https://twitter.com/simondlr

A rare conversation with designer David Rudnick  

https://void.davidrudnick.org/

A brief history of tokens and tulips, NFT aesthetics, energy dramas, fan brigades, social tokens and the meataverse with Daniel Keller (New Models)

Check out New Models!

https://newmodels.io/

https://www.patreon.com/newmodels

Topic marks!

3:00 NFTs and Post Internet

5:00 Metahaven ?Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?? https://www.amazon.com/Can-Jokes-Bring-Down-Governments/dp/099291468X

7:00 NFTs for n00bs / What is an NFT

11:30 Ethereum Name Services

15:00 History of the space

16:00 Cryptokitties

20:00 Tulip Mania was overblown!

22:00 Terra0?s Flowertokens

24:00 Price and market

26:00 Present state of NFTs

29:00 Traditional art market improvements

31:00 Current NFT aesthetics

35:00 Horizontalism and ?democratisation?

38:00 Beeple

40:00 Sedition and earlier experiments

44:00 NFTs, Ownership and My Collectible Ass

57:00 NFTs tied to physical objects

62:00 Protocols vs Symbolism

65:00 Crypto energy drama

77:00 Social and Community Tokens

82:00 Gas fees

91:00 Non custodial protocols

94:00 Matt Liston?s 0xOmega

98:00 Portable identities

102:00 The meataverse

108:00 What does Interdependence mean to Dan?

Hello everyone! Over the moon this week to welcome Professor Jason Edward Lewis and Suzanne Kite of the Indigenous Protocol and AI Working group!

We discuss the origins and goals of the project, different perspectives on creating AI elders, lessons about communicating with non human intelligences from various Indigenous groups, where utopian freedom of information ideas clash with ideas of self determination, and speculations about building a Hawaiian programming language. 

We may take a break next week, but have plenty more great conversations recorded for you all. Thanks again for your support and have a safe and warm, albeit not ideal, holiday period

In this episode we welcome the full Audius squad, Roneil Rumberg, Forrest Browning and Clayton Blaha to discuss their new music protocol, how it establishes the rails for artist led, rather than centrally mandated, pricing and design of economic and interactive relationships, Soundcloud and the dangers of platform risk, and the ways in which we might drag people away from centralised platforms and communicate the benefits unlocked by decentralised scene ownership.

It was a wonderful discussion and I left it feeling very confident that this group of people are onto something! Head over to audius.co to take a look around.

Have a sweet week, we?ve got a lot more coming!

LINKS

https://audius.co/

https://twitter.com/AudiusProject

https://twitter.com/roneilr

https://twitter.com/ForrestBrowning

https://twitter.com/FerrariJetpack

In the advent of their new book ?Pharmako-AI?, co-written with OpenAI?s GPT-3 system, we speak to K Allado-McDowell (and GPT-3) about creating with an inhuman (and a human), the nature and history of intelligence, and focussing art and technology towards healing.

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the book Pharmako-AI, and are co-editor, with Ben Vickers, of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. Allado-McDowell records and releases music under the name Qenric.

Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI.  They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.

Buy Pharmako-AI: https://ignota.org/products/pharmako-ai

Check out Kalla's other work:  kalladomcdowell.com

The Inclosure of Reason (by Anil Bawa-Cavia): https://technosphere-magazine.hkw.de/p/The-Inclosure-of-Reason-ecTsvnENeC1GXtmgRNaMH9

Let's talk about elitism.

Buy Eliane's incredible book Elitism: A Progressive Defense

https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/elitism-a-progressive-defence

We welcome author Matt Colquhoun to discuss his release of TWO new books exploring the work of the late, great Mark Fisher.

We discuss Mark's life and legacy, Post Capitalist desire, accelerationism, the various misinterpretations of Capitalist Realism, and the need for psychedelic new fantasies.

Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/postcapitalist-desire-the-final-lectures/

Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/egress-on-mourning-melancholy-and-mark-fisher/

Xenogothic: https://xenogothic.com/

It was difficult to coordinate release schedules with the CIA but we got there in the end

This week we discuss the CIA and the art world with Frances Stonor Saunders, author of the canonical book in this field "Who Paid The Piper?". 

Big thanks to the HKW for facilitating this discussion, and be sure to check out the other programming from their "Disappearance of Music" event.

LINKS

Who Paid the Piper?:https://granta.com/products/who-paid-the-piper/

HKW Disappearance of Music: https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2020/das_verschwinden_der_musik/start.php#:~:text=The%20discursive%20digital%20music%20festival,or%20under%20strict%20protective%20measures.

Hi everyone

In this episode we welcome Nathan Schneider, professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, significant player in the platform co-operativism movement and the originator of the term ?exit to community?

We discuss the state of platform co-operativism today, the intersections between more traditional coop communities and the emerging crypto world, the history of co-ops, and as usual we get to gleefully dunk on the mythologies of the centralised platform economy.

xxxx

Hi everyone,

happy to share  a conversation this week with The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, whose petition making demands of Spotify to improve terms for artists has gathered over 20,000 signatures and counting.

We discuss those demands in detail, other initiatives they have undertaken and take the rare opportunity to have a conversation about living under streaming with other actively touring musicians .
 

LINKS

Sign up for Justice at Spotify: https://www.unionofmusicians.org/justice-at-spotify

Get involved with UMAW: https://www.unionofmusicians.org/

Follow them: https://twitter.com/UMAW_

Buy a Downtown Boys record: https://downtownboys.bandcamp.com/

We join Sarah Friend, core dev from talk of the town project Circles UBI to discuss the crazy few weeks they have been having giving away a UBI through social trust networks. We pull apart how the project works and discuss the history of local currencies, potential dystopian scenarios, "weird fatigue" and  the turbulence of pursuing an art practice that involves building things that do stuff.

We went on a recording frenzy this past week so have a bunch more great episodes lined up. Hope you are all good!

Links!

Circles UBI

https://circles.garden/

Sarah's other work

https://isthisa.com/

2017: The year the blockchain got weird

https://www.coindesk.com/2017-year-blockchain-got-weird

Hi everyone!

This week we welcome Dee and Jacob from Zora, a new organisation that is building tools for artists to issue tokens around their creative practices.

We discuss their idea of dynamic pricing of art releases and at the advent of the musician RAC releasing his $RAC token through ZORA, the new space of artists and their audiences owning a stake in the value they interdependently create in the world. We also talk a tour around the very short history of artist token models, how these new tools are enabling financial literacy, what not to do, and what other potential models could emerge from this nascent era of collectively owned cultural institutions.

This was a really fun and optimistic conversation, and if you are interested to learn more about the project, be sure to check out http://ourzora.com or reach out to Dee or Jacob on twitter.

Have a great week and thanks again for your support!

LINKS

http://ourzora.com

https://twitter.com/js_horne

https://twitter.com/dg_goens

Back with a conversation with a special person and close friend of the podcast Jay Springett

Jay is a writer, theorist and podcaster who falls into a special category of people where we can say with some confidence that whatever they are thinking about will be commonplace in a few years. We discuss a passion of his, Solarpunk, cultural fracking, universe construction, permaculture, Russia?s real jurassic park, K pop and the factory model, reality modelling and aerospace, conspiracy theories and much more.

Can?t recommend enough that you check out Jay?s various cultural contributions, and hope you are all having a wonderful week.  

LINKS

thejaymo.net

Permanentlymoved.online

Comeinternetwith.me

https://www.thejaymo.net/solarpunk-rusted-chrome/

http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/solarpunk-grand-dress-rehearsal/

https://www.thejaymo.net/seeing-through-the-debris/

https://stacktivism.com/

This week we are thrilled to welcome the author and critic Huw Lemmey in celebration of his new novel Unknown Language, written in collaboration with Hildegard of Bingen and out now on Ignota books

We discuss what it is like to channel the dead and write a novel together, Hildegard's visions and genius, constructed languages, and Bad Gays; Huw?s wonderful podcast with the historian Ben Miller.

We could have talked for a few lifetimes :)

Thanks again for the support and have a wonderful week!

LINKS

Unknown Language out now on Ignota Books

https://ignota.org/products/unknown-language

Utopian Drivel, Huw's weekly Substack!

https://huw.substack.com/

Bad Gays pod!

https://badgayspod.com/

Huw on Twitter

https://twitter.com/huwlemmey

The second part of our discussion facilitated in collaboration with Sonar +D and Ars Electronica.

Particularly excited to share this one, where we reflect upon what foundations of the club economy appear to be most exposed by the current crisis, discuss Richie's work with AFEM to help get producers paid, and speculate on the possibility of new and necessary economic relationships between DJ's and producers under a guild model.

Links

Sonar +D https://sonarplusd.com/

Ars Electronica https://ars.electronica.art/news/en/

AFEM: https://www.associationforelectronicmusic.org/initiatives/

Really happy to welcome Other Internet to the podcast, an independent strategy and research squad based between New York and Berlin.

Their recent essay ?Squad Wealth? looks at the phenomenon of interdependent squads emerging on the internet as a necessary progression from the atomized independence economy.

We discuss Squad Wealth and their other incredibly useful conception of Headless Brands, the redundancy of the binary left/right axis when tracking emerging cultural developments, critiques that have been leveled against their Squad analysis, and different decentralized institutions and arrangements that are forming to spread big squad energy.

Wonderful group of people. Hope you are having a good week! We have a bunch of great guests lined up into the fall, and now have electricity in the space. Although given the way things work in Berlin it might be a few months before we might have an internet connection?

Links

https://otherinter.net/squad-wealth/

https://otherinter.net/web3/headless-brands/
 

Last night we recorded a long and fun conversation with the Hugo award winning author and futurist Bruce Sterling. As you will hear Bruce has a great deal of knowledge about a great deal of stuff, and as well as his early writing helping to establish the cyberpunk movement, he was also among a handful of people who set the countercultural tone in San Francisco at the dawn of WIRED and the dot com boom. He is also a curator and expert on digital art. 

We discuss his being the first WIRED cover story, new information he uncovered on the relationship between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, the first science fiction writer; a woman referred to as ?mad Madge?, Qanon as Christian fundamentalist Scifi, Amazons beginnings as a sci-fi bookstore, ideas from early dot com times that people didn?t pick up but maybe should have done more with, and to close we have a fiery debate about the merits and pitfalls of the name of this podcast and a conversation with GPT-3.

Bruce is a treat to talk to and a fountain of wild knowledge, we hope its fun to listen to. Have a great week.

This week we are thrilled to bring a conversation with Amy C. Beal from UC Santa Cruz, whose book "New Music New Allies: Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification" not only gives us insight into the role that German state funding has played in American experimental art since the Second World War, but also offers clues as to the unique responsibilities and complications inherent to that continued funding to the present day. 

We get to discuss how the US State Department funded Jazz concerts throughout Europe, the CIA involvement in cold war soft power art games, and she shares some novel insights as to the level of internal discrimination posed towards female Avant Garde composers of the time. 

Amy is a deeply researched guest, and we hope that the contemporary implications of this conversation are clear to see.

Have a great week!

Links:

New Music New Allies: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Amy-C-Beal/dp/0520247558

It?s a hot one! This afternoon recorded a discussion with Mixcloud CEO and DJ Nico Perez, and our studio was so hot that we had to keep all the windows open for our own health and also to keep the laptop from spontaneously combusting! As a result this recording is resplendent with the occasional child screaming or dog barking, but hopefully that adds to the experience :)

Nico joined us to discuss Mixcloud's select feature for directly supporting artists, how their bold move to introduce payment splits between DJ?s and artists could potentially be taken further, club culture under COVID-19 and the new terrain of artist live streaming, and the importance of building strong foundations for strong scenes in opposition to the ?one size fits all? model that is fortunately receiving its fair share of criticism online at the moment.

Thanks again for supporting us!! We hope you are having a great week and are well hydrated!

Links (feel free to request if we missed one!)

Mixcloud Select: https://www.mixcloud.com/select/

AFEM/Get Played Get Paid: https://www.associationforelectronicmusic.org/initiatives/

This week we welcome Jesse Walden, who recently announced the launch of Variant Fund, which looks to support what he describes as ?The Ownership Economy?. We discuss Jesse?s background as an artist manager, his early experiments with putting tools into artists hands to control the destiny of their work online, the opportunities that decentralised networks offer to help us transition from the centralised platform economy in music and culture more broadly, and how distributing ownership to users and artists can help us transition from atomised and individualist support systems like Patreon towards more ambitious collective, interdependent(!), models online and in real space.

Mat and Jesse get really deep into some of these ideas, and if some of the technical speak is unfamiliar stick with us as we spend a lot of the conversation cycling back to hopefully demystify it. We hope you enjoy it and have a great week!

Links

The Ownership Economy: https://variant.fund/the-ownership-economy-crypto-and-consumer-software/

MediaChain Labs: http://www.mediachain.io/

Saga: https://fallowmedia.com/2015/dec/mat/

Bitcoin: https://bitcoin.org/en/

Ethereum: https://ethereum.org/en/

Passion Economy and The Future of Work: https://a16z.com/2019/10/08/passion-economy/

Media 2020: Rise of the Renaissance Creator: https://medium.com/@jarroddicker/media-2020-rise-of-the-renaissance-creator-459daec4bc6b

Defector: https://defector.com/

Foundation: https://withfoundation.com/

Jonas Lund Token: https://jlt.ltd/

For the second part of our conversation series with contemporary fiction writers we are over the moon to have a chat with Elvia Wilk, who released her debut novel ?Oval? last year to great acclaim.

Oval is a beautiful book that depicts a world at vastly different scales, not least addressing the contemporary role of the artist as embedded in wider economic systems. We discuss how art communities in the shifting economic landscape of Berlin inspired some of the books themes, the increasingly entangled relationships between artists and corporations, the hyperstitional anxiety of seeing gestures from marginal scenes influence wider culture from your bedroom while also simultaneously feeling very little agency over the future, and how some of her writing related to machine learning takes on new dimension in the wake of OpenAI?s release of the GPT3 API.

Thanks again for listening and have a great week :)

Links

Read Oval - https://softskull.com/dd-product/oval/

"My Kid Could Do That" - https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/my-kid-could-do-that/