Episodes
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In this episode, we speak with artist Sarah Al-Sarraj about her new speculative audio work The Mandjet. Framed as a fictional radio phone-in and set in a near future reshaped by rising waters and contested borders, the work uses humour, satire and political tension to explore how environmental crisis transforms our relationship to land, water and community. We discuss the process of building this imagined world, the use of radio as a storytelling device, and the complex figures who inhabit it.
Our conversation also explores the histories that underpin the work. Using one of the main protagonists, the leader of a radical water-autonomy movement, as a starting reference, we talk through the drainage of the English Fens and the resistance of the Fen Tigers as well as touching on contemporary debates around water privatisation, environmental justice and political dissent. Finally, we consider how folkloric actors, whether real or imagined, collective memory and ideas of borderlessness shape both the narrative and Sarah's wider artistic practice.
This mini-series is commissioned by Henry Moore Institute as part of the programme for their exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15 May - 30 August 2026.
Actors:
Rosemary Moss
ELLC
Raza Tariq
Ashirbad Roy
Yasmin Alrabiei
Special thanks:
Siegrun Salmanian
Angelina Radakovic
Davis Galvin
The opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of the Henry Moore Foundation, its trustees, employees or associates
Bios;
Sarah Al-Sarraj (b. 1997) is a visual artist and cultural worker based between Pittsburgh (US) and London (UK). Her work centers on worldbuilding as a creative and critical process, where painting and immersive technologies are understood as portals to other worlds. Predicated on the belief that our world was designed in service of imperial violence, she builds new lifeworlds rooted in land, spirit, and ancestry. Currently working with game engines, she is interested in appropriating military simulation technologies to build uncolonisable realms inspired by Global Majority knowledge systems and emerging quantum thought.
Her creative practice is informed by working in movements, at organisations such as Forensic Architecture, the Inclusive Mosque Initiative and Healing Justice London. She is inspired by the tangible material potential of visionary practice in global liberation movements and she occasionally lends her hands to illustration and graphic design for various groups.
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
Artist @ssaarraahj
Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
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In this episode we talk to Mumbai-based artist and UCLA assistant professor Sahej Rahal, whose practice spans sculpture, video games, AI simulations, film, and painting. Starting from three excerpts of Rahal's text Hallucination Stream we discuss how the micro-fictions of Simulation, Story and Rumour explore caste as a mythology sustained through narrative, hallucination, and political performance. Across the conversation, Rahal reflects on ghosts, digital folklore, cooperative gaming, and the role of art in confronting systems of power.
This mini-series is commissioned by the Henry Moore Institute @henrymooreinstitute as a part of their program for their exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15th May - 30th August 2026.
Bio;
Sahej Rahal (born 1988, Mumbai, India) is an artist and assistant professor of Design Media Arts at, UCLA. Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He creates counter-mythologies that interrogate narrations of the present. This myth world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, video games, and AI simulation programs. Drawing upon folklore, prophecies, archaeological conspiracies, hidden histories, and occult manuscripts, he renders scenarios where the fictive and the real begin to converse, at the borderlines of myth and memory.
Voice actor Nivedita Nair
Sound designer John Trevaskis
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
Artist @sahejrahal
Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
www.futureartefactsfm.com
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Missing episodes?
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We’re so excited to launch a new mini series commissioned by Henry Moore Institute @henrymooreinstitute as a part of their new exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age.
In the first episode we talk to the exhibition curator Sean Ketteringham. Moving between folk art histories, sculptural practices, affect theory, hauntology, horror, and memetic culture, we discuss what functions as contemporary folklore, questioning what sculpture becomes when it exists through circulation and interaction rather than static objects.
This mini-series is commissioned by the Henry Moore Institute @henrymooreinstitute as a part of their program for their exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15th May - 30th August 2026.
Bios;
Sean Ketteringham is Assistant Curator of Exhibitions at Henry Moore Institute and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. His first book, Architectures of Identity: Imperial Decline and the Homes of English Modernism, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2027. From May 2026, he will join the University of Birmingham as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow on a new project titled 'Postwar Folk'.
Henry Moore Institute's Galleries, Research Library and Archive of Sculptors' Papers are free to access and open to all. As part of the Henry Moore Foundation, they are a hub for sculpture, connecting a global network of artists and scholars to ensure the art form is accessible and celebrated by a wide audience. Discover their changing programme of historical, modern and contemporary exhibitions and events in Leeds city centre, where Henry Moore (1898-1986) began his training as a sculptor.
Guest Sean Ketteringham
Hosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
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For this episode, we recap our As A Chorus mini-series, revisiting conversations with artists Niamh Schmidtke, Dane Sutherland, Rhys Morgan, and Emily Roderick. The discussion expands from ideas around choirs and group singing into broader questions about authorship, infrastructure, collaboration, and collective survival within the contemporary art landscape.
We reflect on how artistic work is rarely created in isolation, touching on socially engaged practice, artist collectives, digital production, labour, and the emotional infrastructures that sustain creative communities. Collaboration isn’t just a working method, but a form of resistance and mutual support in increasingly precarious cultural and economic conditions.
Hosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
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What does it mean to amplify a collective voice through collective performance? How do traditions like bell ringing persist, evolve, or disappear, and what do strange histories reveal about their cultural significance?
Emily Roderick is the fourth and final guest of our ‘as a chorus’ mini series, sharing personal anecdotes, recordings, and sounds inside bell towers from her ongoing project Can You Call A Touch.
In this episode, we focus on her research around bell ringing, a deeply social, intergenerational practice that sits somewhere between music, ritual and public communication.
Interwoven with familial conversation, and sounds of the ascent of bells being rung up, and the resonant unwinding of ringing down, the conversation considers broader questions around collective expression using bell ringing as both a personal inheritance and a collective language. We hear how the practice functions as a “village voice,” marking time, signalling events, and shaping a shared sense of place, while also operating as a close-knit, sometimes opaque community.
Bell ringers:
Steve Roderick
Sue Roderick
Lynsey Roderick
Dave Peacock
Emily Roderick
With thanks to Martin and Louise Green at St Michael's Church, Bishops Itchington. This work was made with support via DYCP from Arts Council England.
Bio:
Emily Roderick is an artist, producer, and facilitator, teetering between 'the serious' and 'the silly'. Based in Berlin, her creative and often collaborative outputs include performance, film, workshops, walks and writing. Curiosity and questions drive her practice across its different lines of enquiry, exploring social space and interaction with non-art audiences and community contexts, using art to create conversation and exchange. Removing barriers to the arts is also a big part of her production work, with a focus on developing accessible and inclusive projects.
Artist @emilyhrodders
Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
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How can the rhythms of songs incite a crew, family or collective solidarity?
Rhys Morgan is the 3rd guest of our ‘as a chorus’ mini series, sharing 3 queer sea shanties from the project and choir, Seaweed in the Fruit Locker. Using Polari, a gay slang used to declare and protect gay people historically, the choir rewrites and performs historic sea shanties to describe queer lived experiences and histories. Founded in 2022, we speak about Morgan’s role in the choir, how queering shanties is a return to their origins,
Credits (in order of appearance);
Lion’s Den; Written by Rhys Morgan, performed by Seaweed in the Fruit Locker
Hell Cats; Written by Sef Penrose, performed by Seaweed in the Fruit Locker
I’ve My Own Suggestions Too; Written by Ben Doney, performed by Seaweed in the Fruit Locker
Bio;
Rhys Morgan is a queer interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Plymouth, UK. His work explores queerness as an operative in everyday experience and the expectations, possibilities, and limitations of how this is expressed. Being based in the South West of England, Morgan’s work often reflects on the heritage and experience of queer people on the peninsula.
In 2023 he completed the MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London, being selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries the same year. He recently worked for the National Gallery with conceptual artist Jeremy Deller, as one of four national Assistant Curators to deliver Deller’s 2025 work The Triumph of Art.
Artist @rhys__m
Hosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
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What conditions do we gather in? Can this exist without hierarchy, or even a physical space?
Most Dismal Swamp joins the second episode of our mini series ‘as a chorus’, sharing audio extracts from the recent film, The Bastard Fields. A mixtape of 3 sketches, each audio builds on the language of historical preachers, reddit forums and social media commentary. They weave a world which asks about the violence or nightmares that instills our need to come together.
With Most Dismal Swamp, we discuss the mechanics of making shared spaces, how an art practice can parody this by collaging the works of multiple authors into longer ‘playlists’ that become complex and inconsistent worlds (such as the ones we all live through), and a self-cannibalising process built on pattern recognition, outliers in data sets, and the impact of regional specificities in AI models.
We ask how art practices traverse creative production, curation and production to open up space outside of traditional systems and build artistic community both within and around the works being shown.
Bio:
Most Dismal Swamp is a mixed-reality biome; a place and a practice where a dank miasma of fictions, artists, model worlds, adversarial realisms, external hard drives, camera-tracking data, campfires, opaque rituals, game engines, amateur heresies, visual effects plug-ins, and other animals come together.
Emerging from the curation, artwork, and research of Dane Sutherland, Most Dismal Swamp’s multimedia projects involve collaboration and convivial speculation with many other artists. These projects are modular and densely populated, presented across various immersive and bespoke installations and online; Multi-User Shared Hallucinations dredged from the slumgullion swamp of adversarial digital, platform, and neural media.
A rigorous ‘acid pessimism’ inspirits the work of Most Dismal Swamp: an acerbic yet playful immersion into the composite hallucinatory lifeworlds, gamespaces, and protocols that make up the hostile architecture of our shared platform-mediated crises.
Artist @most_dismal_swamp
Hosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
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Can choirs be a form of protest, and what kinds of resistance could they provide in the midst of climate crises?
Our mini-series, ‘as a chorus’ begins with Niamh Schmidtke’s work, CHANTER (Aughinish). Their 15 minute audio introduces us to an aluminium refinery and it’s impact on the local population. Combining song and audio description, the work brings together its own chorus, inviting us to join their melodies, building from the individual to the collective as our awareness of their injustice intensifies. Together we discuss how the work incites forms of direct action, and the need for collective making.
This work was made through the Welcome to the Neighbourhood residency in summer 2025 at Askeaton Contemporary Arts. Askeaton Contemporary Arts is an artist-led organisation based in the west of Ireland since 2006. An ongoing residency programme creates critical cultural encounters in the midst of the Irish countryside each summer, while public programmes and exhibitions in Askeaton and elsewhere over two decades have found innovative public contexts and resilient relationships for new forms of artmaking to emerge.
Further resources about Aughinish can be found through https://www.stigmadamages.com/
Voices (in order of appearance); Bernadette Hayes, Inbher Glenn Community Choir, Monya Riachi, Christopher Clery, Grainne Hassett and Akinsola Lawanson.
Bio:
Niamh Schmidtke (b. Dublin 1997, they/she) is an artist, lecturer and arts facilitator based across London and Limerick. They explore the politics of green washing, economic jargon and the language of democracy through speculation, audio, ceramics and installations, centring intimacy as a form of decolonial praxis. 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. They currently lecture in the School of Architecture, Limerick, with an MFA from Goldsmiths, London and BA from LSAD. Awards include; Agility Award, Material Futures Residency at Cove Park Scotland and the European Investment Bank’s (EIB) Artist Development fund. They have exhibited across Ireland and internationally including TULCA; Salvage Agency, Galway (2024), Pulling Blood from a Stone (solo), Science Gallery Berlin (2024), DARE 2019, Orpheus Institute, Belgium and PULSE, Limerick City Gallery (2022). Their work is held in public and private collections, including the EIB’s permanent collection. They are a member of Lewisham Arthouse artists’ co-op where they co-organise the Graduate Award with Sara Willet.
Artist @niamhschmidtke
Hosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
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For episode 29, we listen to the second half of Black Holes Act 1. This 40-minute radio play by Suley, which holds a mirror up to the UK after last year’s race riots. A re-imagining of Derrick Bell’s 1992 novella ‘Space Traders’, Black Holes is a satirical work of speculative fiction in which aliens offer the UK vast riches in exchange for its Black citizens and a referendum is called on the trade. An Afrofuturistic exploration of critical race theory, this two-part episode asks if progress for racial justice happens only when it aligns with the interests of a White majority.
Drawing inspiration from political satires like The Thick Of It, surrealist dramas such as Atlanta and the contemporary Black British storytelling of I May Destroy You, Black Holes employs worldbuilding as a radical tool to deliberately instigate positive change. In this episode we discuss how the work is an attempt to critically reflect on the familiar with which are inextricably bound – and how to change the world, we first must imagine one drastically different to the one we have.
Bio:
Suley is a playwright, painter, lawyer and lecturer, Suley uses worldbuilding as a radical tool to deliberately instigate change. His latest body of work is an attempt to critically reflect on the familiar with which are inextricably bound. Fusing sculpture, ceramics, print media, film, and sound, Suley continues the Afrofuturist tradition of generating a multiplicity of futures with which to positively affect the present.
Artist @suley.art
Hosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
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Black Holes Act 1 is a 40-minute radio play by Suley, which holds a mirror up to the UK after last year’s race riots. A re-imagining of Derrick Bell’s 1992 novella ‘Space Traders’, Black Holes is a satirical work of speculative fiction in which aliens offer the UK vast riches in exchange for its Black citizens and a referendum is called on the trade. An Afrofuturistic exploration of critical race theory, this two-part episode asks if progress for racial justice happens only when it aligns with the interests of a White majority.
Drawing inspiration from political satires like The Thick Of It, surrealist dramas such as Atlanta and the contemporary Black British storytelling of I May Destroy You, Black Holes employs worldbuilding as a radical tool to deliberately instigate positive change. In this episode we discuss how the work is an attempt to critically reflect on the familiar with which are inextricably bound – and how to change the world, we first must imagine one drastically different to the one we have.
Bio:
Suley is a playwright, painter, lawyer and lecturer, Suley uses worldbuilding as a radical tool to deliberately instigate change. His latest body of work is an attempt to critically reflect on the familiar with which are inextricably bound. Fusing sculpture, ceramics, print media, film, and sound, Suley continues the Afrofuturist tradition of generating a multiplicity of futures with which to positively affect the present.
Artist @suley.art
Hosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
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What is the next New Weird? How might ‘weirding’ help generate collective virtual or physical spaces to resist cultural binaries, and do these amorphic, slippery forms of language provide tools to resist totalising phrases of good and evil?
For this episode, we recap the 4 artist works featured on our New Weird mini-series, revisiting questions of how the tools of this literary genre might provide emancipatory places to build new worlds from. Revisiting Philip Speakman’s use of weirding, Jelena Viskovic’s surrealism, Chris MacInnes and Chaos Theory, and Monya Riachi’s rejection of worldbuilding, your hosts thread these themes across the past episodes alongside our own research in a free flowing conversation.
Hosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
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Future Artefacts FM host artist Monya Riachi, as part of their New Weird Mini-series. Her work, Concerning Geographies: Entangled Histories, a speculative letter, addresses cartography across the Levante and the UK. Heard here as part of a live performance debuted alongside research unfolding the processes of map making, and their relationships to borders and power as imperial constructions.
Monya Riachi is an interdisciplinary artist. Her practice is material driven and research-led, and is explored through sculpture, installation, moving image, sound and writing. Her work centres matter as a site of meaning, narrative and archive, and explores themes around loss, ecological transformation, the politics of land and time.
Sound Design support: Cameron McClellan
Artists @monya.riachi
Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
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Part three of our New Weird mini series features Jelena Viskovic’s Motonation. This 9 minute extract shows us two societies, Happy Nation & The Grid, where we follow Čedo as he decides which group to join. This surrealist sci-fi examines the consequences of individual vs collective desires, referencing Yugoslav performance art from the 1980s, and tools of humour and weirding during Čedo’s journey.
Sound Composition and Design: Tamás Marquetant
Chedo: Chad (Čedo) Spence
Her Sanctuary: Marija Iva Gocić
Artists @jelovix
Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke
Music @joemoss1
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
Jelena Viskovic is an artist born in 1989 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, raised in Belgrade, Serbia, currently living and working in London. Her background is in software engineering and game development.
Her work explores the role of gesture and play in relation to the creation and preservation of techno-scientific, political and historical narratives. Her sculptures and moving image works incorporate animated, talking objects that make their way into technologically deterministic, seemingly inanimate systems. Borrowing from a playful, carnivalesque logic, these worlds become rebellious but approachable, attempting to resist the rigid environments of institutions, archives, libraries and databases.
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For the second part of our New Weird mini series Chris MacInnes shares Impotent Island, an installation that’s been adapted for audio broadcast. In the 11 minute audio we listen to MacInnes’ narration collapse time, connecting cosmology at a planetary scale to Sheffield’s historical industrialisation through the extraction of coal, the heat of steam and their impact within the Anthropocene. Together we discuss what role weird has here, reflecting on the changing labour patterns from the industrial era to contemporary neoliberalism such the restriction of workers’ movements to the efficiency of steam engines, or influencers being caught between human labour and digital technologies. Through the shifting scales of time in Google street view, altering dimensions via dioramas in MacInnes’ installation or the construction of Northern masculinity, we delve into key concepts of chaos theory to translate how we might place within a world right is rapidly transferring the skills of humans to machines.
Artists @stickyvectors
Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards
Music @joemoss1
Broadcast through @rtm.fm
Chris MacInnes is a British American artist raised in Sheffield. He uses a myriad of technologies and technical skills to unpick, poke and test the complex planetary networks that bind together universal facts and local phenomena. MacInnes has used game engines, server deployment, multiplayer environments, physical computing, web scraping and AI to tug at the mesh work of a networked world.
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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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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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