Episodes
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Our latest mini-series on the New Weird begins with the premier of Philip Speakman’s, Reality Break, a 15 minute audio work, which follows the recollections of 4 facebook employee’s Dungeons & Dragons game in the summer of 2020. Set before Facebook’s Metaverse was released to the public, Reality Break explores the social conscience of these worldbuilding employees. Timed to distract from Frances Haugen’s whistleblowing, which revealed how Facebook’s understood the harm their algorithmic choices made, we address what weirding can do or make sense of, as worldbuilding becomes increasingly co-opted by tech corporations such as facebook. Speakman is the unheard dungeon master at the edge of this piece, drawing analogies between the historic connections of multiplayer games and dungeons, from MUD systems in the 1970s, to 4chan, the metaverse or the weird basement that appears at the end of the work. Together we ask if weirding is a more accessible tool to reimagine our present, that doesn’t require the commitment of imagining a new world, and how the uncanny draws attention to norms enforced by late stage capitalism.
For our regular listeners, you’ll also notice our newest member of the Future Artefacts FM team, Rebecca Edwards, who we’re thrilled to have developed our latest mini-series on the New Weird, and more projects coming soon!
Artists @philipspeakman
Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
Philip Speakman’s practice explores fiction as a technology, and how the imaginary transgresses its unreality through the media, communication and narrative technologies of its times. In the last year he has screened work at Flat Earth Film Festival 2023 (Iceland), delivered a workshop ‘A Self Induced Hallucination’ at the Lethaby Gallery (London), and presented Katabasing, a mixed reality performance for Gossamer Fog’s Alt_R virtual reality studio. His essay '“It May Start Out As A Game But It Ends Up A Whole World”; Creepypasta, QAnon, and the Anomalous Tales of the Internet' is to be published in a special issue of the journal Contemporary Legend later in the year. He graduated from MA Fine Art at the The Slade in 2023.
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Is it possible to decolonise mineral collections? How might our understanding of mineralogy support climate activism or anti-racist methodologies?
For the second part of our double bill with co-founder Niamh Schmidtke, we are listening to the final half of Pulling Blood from a Stone, a 35 minute radio play. Alberto Duman joins us as co-presenter, addressing key questions in act 3 and 4 about how minerals might hold kinship with specific places or peoples affected colonisation. Diving into Tsumeb, Namibia, in the early 1900s, and a near future in Berlin, these two acts are voiced by minerals which want to fight against oppressive colonists, and the impact of geology’s categorisation of their elements. We touch on how anthropomorphising such rocks can help share their stories and rebellions. This also becomes a way to unpick the roles of these beings within our technology, such as in batteries and the ways their voices might be heard through a miners’ strike, the shattering of stones in oxygen or the rise and fall of mountains.
Pulling Blood from a Stone is part of the Earth Water Sky Environmental Sciences and Art Research, Commissioning and Production Programme curated by Ariane Koek and funded by Fondation Didier et Martine Primat to whom we give grateful thanks.
Artists @niamhschmidtke
Host @ellaberto @influential_bro
Music @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
Niamh Schmidtke (b.1997, Dublin) explores the political complications of ‘being green’ by cultivating conversations with the environment, through speculation, audio, ceramics and installations. They examine the relationship between listening and speaking, to consider the kinds of voices that deep time, the sea, or humans could have with one another. In 2023 they were the EARTH artist-in-residence at the Technological University of Berlin, with Science Gallery International, a research residency with the university’s mineral collection. Recent projects also include How to Harness the Wind (2023), a collection of 3D printed clay crystals mimicking those mined for wind turbine construction, funded by Arts Council Ireland, as part of the Hunt Museum’s, Night’s Candles are Burnt Out exhibition. Schmidtke is the SADP (formerly SAUL) artist in residence, researching local clays through workshops and lectures with students. They hold an MFA (Hons) from Goldsmiths, University of London (2021), and a Ba (Hons) from LSAD (2019). They have co-produced the radio show Future Artefacts FM with artist Nina Davies since 2021, receiving an Arts Council England National Lottery project grant, and funding from the Elephant Trust.
Alberto Duman is an artist, university lecturer and independent researcher whose work is situated between art, urban studies and social practice. He is interested in the cultural production of urban spaces, narratives and atmospheres, and the agency of art within the immaterial economy of this production.
In 2016 he was the Leverhulme Trust artist in residence at University of East London, where he produced the project Music for Masterplanning. In 2018, the co-edited anthology from the project 'Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Loss and Opportunity from East London' was published by Repeater Books.
He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts and Programme Leader for the MA Expanded Printmaking at Middlesex University in London, a convenor of the online course PILOT at Autograph and a member of the DIG Collective.
His ongoing project ‘Haunting the Future City’ is developing through educational spaces, films, exhibitions, ‘talking ghosts’ collective writing workshops, conference presentations and building up towards a PhD at Kings College London, Human Geography department.
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Episodes manquant?
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If we could communicate with the minerals around us, what voices would we hear? What would they speak about? And what relationships would rocks and minerals have with one another?
For this special double bill, co-founder Niamh Schmidtke is sharing their recent audio play, Pulling Blood from a Stone, across two episodes. We have invited guest Alberto Duman to co-present the first half of this 35 minute work. Act 1 and 2 follow pre-history, set 2 billion years ago, and in 500BC, where we are introduced to groups of minerals discussing what it means to be alive and the types of autonomy they have on the planet. Together we discuss the implications of speculating on mineral conversations, and what roles they’ve had in human history, namely in the production of cultural objects and as examples of wealth across time. We collectively imagine the roles communication has, and what ways we make contact with rocks, crystals and stones without speech. Touching on the politics of time, and how we might connect deep time and political time scales, as a way to live well during climate crises, this first episode begins our thoughts about the connections between non-human beings and the scientific valuations placed upon them.
Pulling Blood from a Stone is part of the Earth Water Sky Environmental Sciences and Art Research, Commissioning and Production Programme curated by Ariane Koek and funded by Fondation Didier et Martine Primat to whom we give grateful thanks.
Niamh Schmidtke (b.1997, Dublin) explores the political complications of ‘being green’ by cultivating conversations with the environment, through speculation, audio, ceramics and installations. They examine the relationship between listening and speaking, to consider the kinds of voices that deep time, the sea, or humans could have with one another. In 2023 they were the EARTH artist-in-residence at the Technological University of Berlin, with Science Gallery International, a research residency with the university’s mineral collection. Recent projects also include How to Harness the Wind (2023), a collection of 3D printed clay crystals mimicking those mined for wind turbine construction, funded by Arts Council Ireland, as part of the Hunt Museum’s, Night’s Candles are Burnt Out exhibition. Schmidtke is the SADP (formerly SAUL) artist in residence, researching local clays through workshops and lectures with students. They hold an MFA (Hons) from Goldsmiths, University of London (2021), and a Ba (Hons) from LSAD (2019). They have co-produced the radio show Future Artefacts FM with artist Nina Davies since 2021, receiving an Arts Council England National Lottery project grant, and funding from the Elephant Trust.
Alberto Duman is an artist, university lecturer and independent researcher whose work is situated between art, urban studies and social practice. He is interested in the cultural production of urban spaces, narratives and atmospheres, and the agency of art within the immaterial economy of this production.
In 2016 he was the Leverhulme Trust artist in residence at University of East London, where he produced the project Music for Masterplanning. In 2018, the co-edited anthology from the project 'Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Loss and Opportunity from East London' was published by Repeater Books.
He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts and Programme Leader for the MA Expanded Printmaking at Middlesex University in London, a convenor of the online course PILOT at Autograph and a member of the DIG Collective.
His ongoing project ‘Haunting the Future City’ is developing through educational spaces, films, exhibitions, ‘talking ghosts’ collective writing workshops, conference presentations and building up towards a PhD at Kings College London, Human Geography department.
Artist: Niamh Schmidtke
Hosts: Alberto Duman and Nina Davies
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Mat Jenner
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
Sound Actors (in chronological order): Deborah S. Phillips, Oğuzcan Özyurt, Claudia Wiedemer, Sydney LaFaire
Audio Contributions: Dr. Johannes Giebel and Nikolai Azariah
German Translator: Beatrice Zaidenberg
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Recent EU law now allows citizens to complain if they have been harmed by AI, but what if they have co-conceived your offspring without you even knowing it?
For Future Artefacts 20th Episode we’re welcoming back Nina Davies with her new work SubScanners, alongside guest co-host Rebecca Edwards. This is the fourth work in a series of fictional traditional dances which loosely follow the structures of western folk dance; agricultural, spiritual, war and courtship. Set within a 15 minute fictional podcast from a nearby future, the characters discuss InterReproduction in the space sector, a reproduction research program for deep space exploration. They share InterRepro’s "counterfeit labour scandal", resulting in the emergence digital offspring and of new courtship rituals called SubScanning.
Davies presents questions on relationships with digital personhood inside and outside of a phone screen, and how reproduction and labour might exist outside of the body. Together we imagine what types of digital kinship might exist for these offspring, how we could care for them as children, and what their material connections to us might be.
SubScanners warns us about the corporate consumption of public law, presenting a fiction where digital persons are co-opted by corporate guardianship and the only way people can regain control of their digital selves is to play these companies at their own game and settle the matter in family court.
Working primarily with video, performance, writing and installation, Nina Davies considers current dance phenomena in relation to the wider socio-technical environments from which they emerge. Previous research projects have included; the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices. Her work has recently been exhibited and shown at Matt’s Gallery, London; Transmediale, AdK, Berlin; Seventeen, London; Pradiauto, Madrid; and, Chemist Gallery, London. Her work has been selected to partake in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2023; Circa x Dazed Class of 2022 and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. In 2021 she co-founded Future Artefacts FM with artist Niamh Schmidtke and was awarded an Arts Council Project Grant to produce their 2022 programme and in 2023 they produced a mini series for Het HEM’s online programme The Couch.
Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, interweaving fluid approaches to production, dissemination and representation of artwork, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture.
Artist: Nina Davies
Hosts: Rebecca Edwards and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Mat Jenner
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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What would you do at the end of the world? For the third part of our collaboration with *The Couch, we are thrilled to share David Blandy’s work, The End of The World, a 13 minute audio piece, originating from a larger video installation made in 2017. Revisiting this work, we explore the ends of multiple worlds; family illness, the foundations of a political system shattering and the end of a 17 year old magical gaming world, Asheron’s Call. When reflected in the present moment, we hear from Blandy about collective grief, and where places of solidarity, like that in Asheron’s call, can help us come to terms with the endings of multiple worlds. From online MMORPG’s to table-top role-play, together we discuss the rules that allow these games to exist by defining a space for worldbuilding or escape, parameters to enter and leave worlds, and to destroy them. The similarities of this logic to embodied magical practices further connects the community of spell making in Asheron’s Call, to the broader realities witchcraft or ritual suggest. These rules could also be a set of fictions, enabling us to review which worlds around us are ending, and what the end of one world might impose on another.
*The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.
Image credit; Images by Damian Griffiths, courtesy the artist and Seventeen Gallery
Artist Bio;
David Blandy (1976, Lives & works in Brighton) makes work that slips between performance and video, digital and analogue, investigating the stories and cultural forces that inform and influence our lives. Collaboration is central to his practice, examining communal and personal heritage and interdependence. With research spanning multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject.
Blandy’s projects involve complex installations, performance, writing, gaming and sound.
Artist: David Blandy
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss
Producer: Mat Jenner
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)
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During this festive season, we invite you to celebrate with the epic adventure mix, A Bell is Tolling, by Jan Berger. This 12 minute mix, composed of RPG* soundtracks, including selections from fantasy epics in late 90s and early 2000s, is the second work featured as part of our collaboration with the Couch**. Together we discuss what magic looks like in game worlds and the limitations of magical tropes and expectations, such as their preference for mediaeval villages, steampunk gadgetry or queer-coded villains. We question, who are the typical protagonists, how do these games enforce gendered and heterosexual stereotypes, and how can magic and fantasy enforce these rigid identities in RPGs? Collectively we consider the counter-culture found in online gaming spaces, such as Roblox, as a testing ground for different identities, constructing social orders mimicking contemporary cultural production and what kinds of subversive techniques these games can show us about the virtual and meat worlds we occupy.
*Role-Player-Games
**The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.
Jan Berger (1993) is a visual artist and platform designer based in Berlin. His practice is primarily occupied with ludic simulation, subject formation and the emergence of cultural mythologies in online spaces. He is the founder and attending curator of the Mythical Institution, a digital project space and art school. As StJennifer, he streams gameplay on twitch.tv.
Artist: Jan Berger
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss
Producer: Mat Jenner
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)
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How can rituals guide, mislead or comfort us? For the second episode of our collaboration with The Couch*, Bea Xu’s piece EsƨƎ-1 invites us to follow the leader of an anthrax death cult. Made in collaboration with Markéta Skalková and formed by Xu’s research into melting permafrost, their work imagines a post-anthropocentric future where anthrax spores have become objects of fascination and obsession, containing magical properties, transforming skeletons into talismans and forests into autonomous actors against climate devastation. Together we delve into how the occult can provide tools to process extinction beyond nihilism, a means to navigate death in organic or organised ways and how rituals can engage with technological advancements, through both individual and collective means of relating to the planet.
This episode contains themes of death and suicide.
*The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.
Bea Xu is a Chinese-British psychic worker experimenting with reality production. Using collaborative play, speculative fiction and therapeutic intervention they design and means-test integral, post-Anthropocene cosmologies with live participants and fellow accomplices. Often foregrounding blood magic, decolonized time and non-binary logic with an EcoGothic focus, their work engages with archetypal shadow and is informed by their training as an integrative, transpersonal psychotherapist.
A studio resident at London’s HQI, Bea is a member of oiioiooi collective and completed the 9th Alternative Education Programme at Rupert, Vilnius. They are the creatrix of ritual laboratory LUNARCHY 2.0 and have collaborated with Furtherfield Gallery, Omsk Social Club and Ittah Yodah – with work selected for Solo Show, Plague Space, Arts of the Working Class, amongst others, and shows in Prague, Oslo, Seyðisfjörður, Berlin, NYC and Milan.
Artist: Bea Xu
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)
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For this episode we are bringing together three special guests to introduce our new collaboration with Het HEM. We’ve brought back artists Rebeca Romero (Ep.3) and Akinsola Lawanson (Ep.7) together with curator Maia Kenney to discuss magic and technology within their works and research. Romero’s exploration of trance in The New Worshipers and Lawanson’s spirit world in Bosode each examine the intersections of these themes, how they influence each other, and how might magic in the present influence technological futures. Hear Romero, Lawanson, Kenney, and of course your hosts, examine how our relationship to talismans, phones, and worldbuilding can be more entangled than you might think. Collectively we consider the materiality of known and unknown worlds, the politics of witchcraft and what ethics might be necessary before engaging in scientific fact and mystical forces. For this extended conversation we will also be introducing Het HEM’s The Couch, a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.
Rebeca Romero is an interdisciplinary artist born in Peru and based in London.
Through a range of media that includes sculpture, ceramics, textiles, sound, performance and video, she explores concepts of diasporic identity, truth, fiction, and their relationship to the digital age. Often combining Pre-Columbian iconography with advanced scanning and printing technologies and materials ranging from clay to plastic, her works swing drastically between the past and an alternate future. Examining the story-telling potential of artefacts, Romero looks into the intervention of the digital archive as a history-making technique. Online museum archives become an excavation ground for the collection of data that she later recontextualizes, reassembles and re-presents.
Akinsola Lawanson is a British-Nigerian multidisciplinary artist living and working in London. He works in moving images, installations and video-game engines in projects that examine relational systems, digital technologies and process philosophy. Akinsola’s video works are inspired by the alt-Nollywood movement, which borrows narrative, stylistic and visual conventions of Nollywood but with politically subversive ends.
Maia Kenney is an art historian, curator and critic specialised in the feminist underpinnings of modernist art movements (and a proponent of the destruction of Modernism as a Eurocentric storytelling device). She is the curator and editor of The Couch, Het HEM's digital artistic platform, and teaches theory in the Master of Contextual Design at Design Academy Eindhoven.
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Please join us for this special episode of Future Artefacts FM with Joe Moss’ audio piece Infinite Customisation. In this 17 minute audio-book style work, we meet the ghost of J. Thaddeus Toad, transported from the 1908 novel, The Wind in the Willows, and risen in the future. Following Toad’s perceptions, the work draws contrasts between the linear perspective of industrial England in the 1910s to a far different reality of revolving subcultures, nostalgia and technological beings. With Joe, we unpack the connections between nostalgia and progress, where Toad’s opinions may come from and where the idea of modernity still haunts the present day. Together we consider Toad’s legacy, how he implies capitalistic growth, and what economic alternatives that throws up, while considering the impact these larger models have on our cultures and connections with one another. For our regular listeners, you’ve been hearing Joe’s amazing work since episode one, as he is one of our music producers on the show!
Joe Moss makes work with a vast appetite for pre-existing cultural and material references. Connected by the logic of collage, Moss’ works weave together the contemporary logics of a variety of fictions, examining cultural threads from high-fantasy to streetwear with entertaining and slightly sinister results.
Moss’ diverse output ranges from solo presentations to radio production to collaborative exhibition-making. Recent projects include Model Village at NN Contemporary, Homegrown on the Hauser & Wirth website, residencies at Eastcheap Projects UK and Stokkoyart Norway, and The London Bronze Editions Foundry Fellowship. Moss graduated with a BA from Central Saint Martins in 2015, spent three years on the Conditions Studio Programme between 2019 and 2022 and is currently enrolled on the MFA programme at the Slade.
Artist: Joe Moss
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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Nina Davies shares her work ‘Learned Friends; Piasecki vs Wade’ for episode 14 of the show. It is a fictional podcast voiced by characters Riley and Devon, who discuss legal cases that present the rising issues of using predictive technology within the justice system. Set in a world where technology documents the future just as well as in documents the past, people have begun to move in pre-programmed ways as a matter of safety, to be better detected by self-driving cars or correctly prescribed medications. In this episode we explore Nina’s research alongside guest co-presenter Jorge Poveda Yanez. Together we connect the moving body to forms of digital choreography and truth making to predictive movement technologies.
Bios;
Nina Davies is a Canadian/British artist who considers the present moment through observing dance in popular culture; how it's disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. She recently graduated from Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art where she was awarded the Almacantar Studio Award and the Goldsmiths Junior Fellowship position. Her work has recently been exhibited and shown at Transmediale, AdK, Berlin; Seventeen, London; Matt’s Gallery, Mattflix program; Circa x Dazed Class of 2022, Piccadilly Lights in London, Limes in Berlin, K-Pop Square in Seoul, Fed Square, Melbourne; Overmorrow House, Battle; and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Hawick. In 2021 She co-founded Future Artefacts FM with artist Niamh Schmidtke and was awarded an Arts Council Project Grant to produce their 2022 programme.
Jorge Poveda Yanez is a dancer, theater-maker, researcher, and scholar working with new technologies, human rights, and the arts. He is currently the editor of Ghent University's DOCUMENTA journal, which focuses on theatre and performance studies. His training as a dancer/anthropologist (UCA - France), Performer (UCE - Ecuador), and Social Scientist (UDLA - Ecuador) led him to enroll in UCR's Ph.D. program in Critical Dance Studies, where he currently works as a Teaching Assistant too.
Artist: Nina Davies
Hosts: Jorge Poveda Yanez and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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In this episode we welcome our first guest presenter, Ariane Koek, to discuss Niamh Schmidtke’s work-in-progress, The diamond’s less sexy sister. Somewhere between a radio essay and a voicenote, the 5 minute piece explores human relations to minerals, specifically with graphite. Combining scripted and organic conversation, prose and academic information, the audio slips in and out of speculation; is that a mineral speaking, or a person speaking about a mineral? Together we untangle Niamh’s current research as part of their artist in residence program at TU Berlin, with the Science Gallery Network and fully funded by Fondation Didier et Martine Primat. We collectively question the ways minerals could speak for themselves through technology, materiality and the act of holding hands.
Bio:
Niamh Schmidtke (b. 1997, Dublin) is an artist based in London with Irish/ Swedish heritage. Their work playfully sits between installation, sculpture and writing, exploring the political implications of ‘being green’. They completed their MFA at Goldsmiths, London with a First Class Honours in 2021 and hold a Fine Art Honours BA from Limerick School of Art and Design (2019). Their work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including a solo exhibition at Limerick City Gallery (2019). In 2020 they were a recipient of the European Investment Bank’s Artist Development Fund award and in 2022 they were shortlisted for the Gilchrist Fisher Award. In 2023 they will be artist in residence at TU Berlin, as part of the Earth Wind Sky residency, culminating in a new commissioned work with the Science Gallery Network and fully funded by Fondation Didier et Martine Primate. They currently co-produce Future Artefacts FM with Nina Davies, a radio show supported by the British Arts Council Lottery Fund and the Elephant Trust.
Ariane Koek is anglo-american-dutch, internationally recognised for initiating in 2009 the Arts at CERN programme – based at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland. She designed and directed the Collide, Accelerate and Guest artists programmes for the first five years until 2015.
Koek now works independently, specialising in advising on and/or designing new transdisciplinary programmes and residencies for foundations, cultural institutions, science laboratories, museums and universities around the world, including the Endowment fund of the International Red Cross Committee (FICRC), The Exploratorium, San Francisco, USA; Cavendish Physics Laboratories, Cambridge University, UK; and Science Gallery International Network.
In 2018 she initiated the Earth Water Sky environmental science and arts research, production and exhibition programme, which is fully funded by Fondation Didier et Martine Primat. It was the first artists residency programme done by the Science Gallery International network, and began at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and for its final edition is at TU Berlin where Ariane is working with Niamh in 2023.
Artist: Niamh Schmidtke
Hosts: Ariane Koek and Nina Davies
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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For this special episode we are thrilled to share Sienna Rackall’s 11 minute audio, Before the Now. Sienna’s work was developed with us over the past 4 months after being selected from worldbuilding workshops for young people (13-18) led by Future Artefacts through HVH arts in August 2022. Sienna’s work centres on the distant planet, Minerva’s, spoilt queen, Audrea, who doesn’t understand why her people are angered by her decadent lifestyle. With Sienna, we discuss secret languages, the line between conspiracy theories and myth and how dinosaurs might have arrived on earth. We’d also like to thank Debbie Clark, the founder of HvH arts, for taking time to share a few words on the show, and helping us host workshops during the summer.
Sienna Rackall was awarded this mentorship through HVH arts. HVH ARTS is a registered charity inspiring a generation of young people by offering them a gateway to the arts. By funding after and out of school classes in primary and secondary state schools in England, the Foundation provides children with the inspiration and tools to develop lifelong artistic passions.
This episode, and the workshops with HVH Arts have been kindly supported by Arts Council England National Lottery Funding.
Artist: Sienna Rackall
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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Bioturbation; Or, The Humiliation of HuMan by WRMS
In this episode we welcome Jon K Shaw to discuss his work Bioturbation; Or, The Humiliation of Human by WRMS, a 13 minute sound work. Digging through layers of jazz, poetry, news reports and Jon’s own voice, worms are the central character, an essential creature in the process of making soil, and sustaining life on earth. Together we explore how to become more worm-like, both as a necessary force in ecology, and as a metaphor for how we, as humans, metabolise life; how process and product, eating and excreting, could exist within other beings. Through the bodily movements of the worms, moving the strata of soil and remaking nutritional gradients, their acts of worldbuilding become a tangible perspective from which to speculate new narratives on waste, extraction and being with the planet.
Bio:
Jon K Shaw is a writer, editor, educator and irregular farmhand based in Orkney. He teaches in a number of universities and colleges including the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London; and in postgraduate Fine Arts at West Dean College of Arts and Conservation -- though none of these institutions support his research. With Tom Robinson he founded and edited Rattle: A Journal at the Convergence of Art and Writing, and with Theo Reeves-Evison edited and introduced the book Fiction as Method (Sternberg, 2017). He is commissioning editor of the new Zer0 Books series Zer0 Agri, which aims to reconnect real agricultural practice and progressive politics. The imprint will launch its first books in 2023. Amongst other writing projects, Jon is currently finishing a book on Antonin Artaud's ecological thought, called Lucid Materialism. His "annotated photo-essay" on the film-philosophy of Pierre Creton and the seaweed-eating sheep of North Ronaldsay will be published by SHIMA journal in early 2023.
Artist: Jon K Shaw
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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For this episode artist Yuli Serfaty shares their new work, ‘Picnic Zone’ with Future Artefacts FM. Introduced by the voice of Golem, a character from Jewish folklore, this 15 minute soundscape presents an alternate present where surveillance technology has mutated with the Yatir Forest. Set at the edge of the Israeli desert and the West Bank, together we discuss Serfaty’s current speculative research; how the desert’s inhabitants have affected the military architecture within this monocultural forest, the ‘safety’ of picnic zones in an altered Israel and a need for amorphic beings.
Yuli Serfaty (1992, Israel) is a London based multimedia artist researching natural landscapes in relation to local and global politics. Serfaty uses Speculative Fiction methodologies in order to World-build installations in textual, sonic, digital, and physical forms. Serfaty’s approach is an open-ended ecology in which each element exists in relation; more-than-human webs where landscapes are protagonists, making space for alternative power structures in which the marginalised, the unimportant and the overlooked take central stage.
Serfaty exhibited both nationally and internationally with selected exhibitions including: Cosmoses, Xxijra Hii, London (2022), London Grads Now.21, Saatchi Gallery, London (2021), Spazio Volta, ArtVerona 16, Verona (2021), Seam, Strata, Seance, Collective Ending, London (2021), and has featured work at DOCUMENTARY: Who Speaks for a Space?, London Short Film Festival, 2021. In 2021 Serfaty had a solo show at Arad Contemporary Art Centre after being an Artist in Residence for two consecutive years. Serfaty has been the June 2021 Artist in Residence at Gazelli Art House, London, and they are a recipient of the 2021 Sarabande Emerging Artist Award, as well as the 2021 Slade Prize.
Artist: Yuli Serfaty
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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In this episode, Mary Hurrell shares and discusses her eleven-minute piece Avalanche Candy, a sonic choreography which explores the idea of falling. Guided by the vibrational and embodied quality of the work, we discuss audio as a way to communicate emotional and physical knowledge and intelligence. Collaging text, synthesised voice and field recordings, Hurrell explores notions of gravity within a digital realm; the listener is choreographed through a space of organic and artificial sensations, deconstructed movements and digital physicalities, a bubblegum-industrial dance.
Bio
Mary Hurrell (b.1982 South Africa) is an artist working across sound production, live performance and sculpture as a form of expanded choreography. She is interested in forms of language and movement in relation to physical and psychological experience. She has exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally, with selected solo performances, projects and exhibitions including: BUOY, Nicoletti Contemporary, London, (2021); Movement Study 6, The Bower, London (2018); 3 (OXIORCAD), Flat Time House, London (2018); 2 (AERIAL), Kunstraum, London (2018); 1 (PITCH), Body Ecologies 1,Centro Botin, Spain (2018); StereoSkin, Herdubreid Biosal, Seydisfjordur, Iceland (2017); EROTIC MECHANICS, Martello Street, London (2016); Call/Coda, Carlos/Ishikawa, London (2012). Selected group performances, exhibitions and festivals include; RADIOPHRENIA, CCA, Glasgow (2022); Cafe OTO, London (2021); Auto-Poem, Nicoletti X London Gallery Weekend, London (2021); UNDEX, Jupiter Rising x Edinburgh Art Festival, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2019); Chou, Yamakiwa Gallery, Japan (2018); Body Echo, Nicoletti Contemporary, Paris (2018); An Evening Of Performances, The Roberts Institute of Art, London (2016); London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); My Vocabulary Did This Too Me, South London Gallery (2014)
Artist: Mary Hurrell
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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This month we listen to Erica Scourti’s twelve-minute piece "Nea Oneira", or New Dreams in English. Considering the role of Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism – when a desired future becomes an obstacle to your present – Scourti’s work dissects the dreams presented by Greek tourism and East London property developments. Fragments of audio collage Greek and English; property advertisements from London, taxi drivers in Athens and snippets from border patrol services, with 90s rave beats, elevator music and Scourti’s own narration. Together, we question the pursuit for authenticity, what ethical tourism can be, and story-telling within targeted marketing.
Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, born in Athens and based in Athens and London. She has performed, exhibited and presented talks internationally, at spaces like High Line New York, Wellcome Collection, Kunsthalle Wien, Hayward Gallery, Munich Kunstverein, ICA London and EMST Athens; she recently participated in the 7th Athens Biennale (2021). Her writing has been published in Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota Press, 2018) and Fiction as Method (2017, Sternberg) amongst others, and she was guest editor of the Happy Hypocrite- Silver Bandage journal (2019).
Artist: Erica Scourti
Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer: Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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For this episode, Akinsola Lawanson shares their work Bosode, a 12 minute audio narrative, which follows the tale of Bosode, a girl who is transported to the spirit world and sent on a quest. Combining deities, Orumila and Eshu, from Ifa religion with binary mathematics, Lawanson’s influences of Nollywood horror and early 2000s game aesthetics reveal Yoruba culture outside of contemporary binaries. Through discussing fantasy narratives, divination systems and their relationship with determinism, Bosode acts as a parable, warning us about how we can decide our own fate when more powerful beings are around.
Akinsola Lawanson is a British-Nigerian multi-disciplinary artist based in London. Through different mediums such as moving image, video game engines and motorised sculptures; their practice examines a variety of themes including relational systems, digital technologies and process philosophy.
WEBSITE
Artist Akinsola Lawanson
Hosts Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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In this episode, our co-host Nina Davies gets into the artist’s seat, sharing her work ‘Bionic Step’, a twelve-minute fictional conversation with an academic whose research explores techno-faith, a new form of spirituality which attempts to understand human’s changing relationship with technology. In the episode Nina and Niamh discuss how this fictional dance called Bionic Step acts as a future version of the 1518 Dancing Plague in Strasbourg. Together they examine the changing functions of dance in the aftermath of TikTok and how technological advancements affect the creation and attention towards faith.
Coming from an extensive dance and performance background, Nina Davies (b. 1991, Canada) now situates her work within the Fine Arts; questioning choreography beyond its performative state. Using moving image, sound, text and fiction her practice aims to further critical discussion around dance by observing how it intersects with language and where it begins to take on commodified or material forms. Her work has been exhibited at SEAGER Gallery, London; Robota - Center for Advanced Studies, Bratislava; Museum Tijdschrift Cultuurcentrum, Brugge; and Strangelove Time Based Media Festival, London. She has performed at Lilian Baylis Studios, London; The Ailey Citigroup Theatre, NYC; and The Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver. Nina co-hosts the bi-monthly radio show called Future Artefacts alongside artist Niamh Schmidtke. Together Nina and Niamh present audio works by artists that use fiction as a way of exploring the world at present.
Image: Clara Atkinson
Artist Nina Davies
Host Niamh Schmidtke
Music Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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In the fifth episode, alongside Nikolai Azariah, we share and discuss his work ‘Visions in the Crucible’, a twelve-minute audio narrative. By following the protagonist through an alternate world in which people become crystallised in salt, Azariah invites us to consider the multiple interpretations of salt. Made in tandem with his real-life observations of salt as a material, the work blends the study of alchemy with fiction. Together we discuss the links between female mystics and medieval alchemists through gendered knowledge and their varying relationships with science and spirituality.
Nikolai Azariah is a Finnish-British video and installation artist whose practice delves into memory, place and poetry, navigating myth to make sense of the world. His recent work investigates salt as material and manifestation of poetic meaning. As a juncture of opposites and the essence of corporeality, salt is taken as both subject and framework for his practice. This is viewed through the lens of alchemy, a deeply material and profoundly spiritual practice, combining thoughts on the human soul with experimentation in the laboratory. Restructuring, possibility and transformation are inherent in the alchemical processes he uses to uncover salt’s hidden virtues.
Artist Nikolai Azariah
Hosts Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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For our fourth episode, Future Artefacts FM presents MH Sarkis’ work ‘Endoplexed’, a sixteen minute soundscape. Collaging audio snippets from Blade Runner to classical piano, we hear a conversation about a spider laying an egg in the middle of her web, soon after the egg hatches, 100s of baby spiders and released and consume their mother. The brutally brief description of motherhood sets the tone for this soundscape, which uses sensory experience, the wailing of a woman and pitch of a sonogram, to provoke an open-narrative about the technological futures of fertility, and reproductive technologies.
Through a blend of mediums including textiles, CGI, film, responsive robotics, and machine learning, MH Sarkis's work explores relational dynamics, female experience and soft power within frameworks of potential posthumanisms and techno-protopias. Sarkis is a recent Goldsmiths MFA graduate and winner of the 2021 Almacantar Award and currently showing in the London Grads Now show at the Saatchi Gallery.
WEBSITE
Artist MH Sarkis
Hosts Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke
Music Joe Moss and John Trevaskis
Producer Flo Lines
Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead
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