Technecast

This is the first episode in a series on Practice. Artist Victoria Burgher explores how practice can engage with political issues such as colonialism, imperial legacy and racism. Victoria uses various materials –- for example sugar, bagass, rubber, which are all linked to colonial crimes -- to challenge symbolic values. Her current project, funded by Techne, focuses on porcelain's associations with whiteness and how subverting porcelain's material properties like 'purity', as well as its more traditional uses for fragile, nimble pieces displayed in vitrines can critique notions of white supremacy and structural racism.In short, this episode is about Victoria's attempt, through her practice, to reflect the times we're living in and to work from an actively anti-racist position, focusing in her new research on exposing whiteness.---Contributor BioVictoria Burgher is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in East London. Her politically engaged practice ranges from sculptural installations and site-specific interventions to collaborative community projects. She is interested in art’s ability to challenge histories and a fascination with materials and process inform her approach to making. Current work uses colonial commodities in an attempt to challenge the nostalgic narrative of Empire. She exhibits regularly in the UK and Europe and was recently awarded a techne PhD studentship at Westminster University for her research project "Crafting counter-hegemony: using porcelain to interrogate constructed ideologies of whiteness and empire".Website: www.victoriaburgher.comTwitter: www.twitter.com/VictoriaBurgherInsta: www.instagram.com/victoriaburgher===Presented by Julien Clin.Royalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.comThe Technecast is run by Julien Clin and Polly Hember. Please email technecaster@gmail.com if you would like to be featured on the podcast, or if you have any questions.

Most of us have heard about Beethoven or Evelyn Glennie's deafness. But all musicians' hearing, just like everyone else's, deteriorates over time, with age and especially because of noise. So how do you keep performing as a musician when your hearing deteriorates? What techniques do musicians develop to cope with it? And what do cocktail parties have to do with it?CONTRIBUTOR BIORuth Hansford is getting closer to finishing her PhD in the Music and Media Department at Surrey. She has a background in languages and literature and a long-standing interest in listening and storytelling. Her PhD journey, which started off over a decade ago with a project on noise, music and hearing with the BBC Performing Groups, has involved a series of interviews with musicians who have been talking about their changing relationship with their ears. Ruth is a classically trained singer and freelance opera surtitler, and manages digitisation projects at the British Library. She has been learning about sound editing – and trying to put it into practice.Here she is interviewed by the founder of the Technecast, Jo Langton, who finished her PhD last year.Twitter: www.twitter.com/ruthhansford=====Interviewed by Jo Langton.Presented by Julien Clin.Royalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.comThe Technecast is run by Julien Clin and Polly Hember. Please email technecaster@gmail.com if you would like to be featured on the podcast, or if you have any questions.

Welcome back to the Technecast! We’re kicking off August with our new theme of music and we are delighted to welcome Cian O’Farrell onto the podcast. This episode looks at the ecological materials that digital music technologies consist of. Often, digital music is thought of as immaterial and completely divorced from the ecology of the planet. Yet, as Cian explores, the materiality of digital technology is very much an ecological one. This episode looks at how music can activate contingency and connections with the world beyond the Anthropocene.Listen to Cian’s compositions, ‘From the Core to the Mine’ and ‘Hydraulic Labour’: https://cianofarrellcomposer.bandcamp.com/album/from-the-core-to-the-mineCian’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loners__official/Cian O’Farrell is a digital composer and researcher based in London. In 2018, Cian released his debut album entitled “Be Happy!!!” on all streaming platforms. In 2018, Cian began to compose instrumental music for theatre. Cian is currently completing his second album Interior Castle to be released in Autumn of this year. After completing his degree in English literature and film studies at UCD, Cian went on to study a Masters in Music and Technology at the Cork School of Music. There, Cian conducted research on the materiality of digital music utilising the vitalist philosophies of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Cian will begin a techne funded research project at Kingston University under the supervision of Professor Isabella Van Elferen. Cian will observe and study music produced at the Visctoni studio at Kingston University. This research will focus on the non-human actors of digital music production and their creative role in music production. Royalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.comThe technecast is run by Julien Clin (@ClinJulien) & Polly Hember (@pollyhember). Please email technecaster@gmail.com if you would like to be featured on the podcast. Follow us on twitter @technecast to keep an eye out for the latest themed call for papers.

Continuing our theme of ‘futures’, we are delighted to share a conversation between artist and writer Diann Bauer with writer and theoretician Suhail Malik about time. The focus of Diann’s research is time outside of human experience and how it impacts how we live in relation to the anthropocene. With this in mind the conversation begins with an quote from a 2016 article by Malik and Armen Avanessian about the idea of ‘The Speculative Time Complex’ where Suhail says:'The main reason for the speculative reorganisation of time is the complexity and scale of social organisation today. Systems, infrastructures and networks are now the leading conditions of complex societies rather than individual human agents. Correspondingly, human experience loses its primacy, as do the semantics and politics based on it. The present as the primary category of human experience, which has been the basis for both the understanding of time and of what time is, also loses its priority in favor of what we could call a speculative time-complex. Complex societies — which means more-than-human societies at scales of sociotechnical organization that surpass phenomenological determination — are those in which the past, the present and the future enter into an economy where maybe none of these modes is primary, or where the future replaces the present as the lead structuring aspect of time.'Using this as a starting point, they speak about finance, insurance, risk, scale, climate collapse and our relationship to an unknown future that is none-the-less the conditioning force of our present.Read ‘The Speculative Time Complex’: http://dismagazine.com/blog/81218/the-speculative-time-complex-armen-avanessian-suhail-malik/Watch 'Rumsfeld Epistimology of Climate Change': https://vimeo.com/579819571Diann Bauer is an artist & writer based in London. She is currently a researcher at Westminster University working on questions regarding the discrepancy between time at extra-human scale & the linear persistence of temporality focusing on what this discrepancy means for how we understand ourselves as a species in relation to the anthropocene. Much of her practice is collaborative & interdisciplinary with projects including Laboria Cuboniks, with whom she collaboratively wrote and published Xenofeminism, A Politics for Alienation in 2015. (laboriacuboniks.net) & A.S.T. (the Alliance of the Southern Triangle), a working group of artists, architects & curators who's focus is urbanism & climate change. Bauer has screened and exhibited independently at Tate Britain, The ICA, The Showroom & FACT Liverpool, Deste Foundation, Athens, The New Museum, & Socrates sculpture park, New York. She has done projects with Arts at CERN & recently worked as part of a team on the German Pavilion for the 2021 Architecture Biennale in Venice. She has taught & lectured widely at universities & cultural institutions including: Cornell University, Yale University, the New School and Cooper Union (US), HKW (Germany), ETH (Switzerland), DAI (Netherlands), Ashkal Alwan (Lebanon), The Tate & the ICA London.Suhail Malik is Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, London, where he holds a Readership in Critical Studies. Recent & forthcoming publications include, as author, ContraContemporary: Modernity's Unknown Future (Urbanomic) & 'The Ontology of Finance' in Collapse 8: Casino Real (2014). Malik is co-editor of The Flood of Rights (2017), a Special Issue of the journal Finance and Society on 'Art and Finance' (2016), Genealogies of Speculation (2016), The Time-Complex. Postcontemporary (2016), & Realism Materialism Art (2015).Royalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.comThe technecast is run by Julien Clin (@ClinJulien) & Polly Hember (@pollyhember). Please email technecaster@gmail.com if you would like to be featured on the podcast. Follow us on twitter @technecast to keep an eye out for the latest themed call for papers.

*Re-released to include the live panel discussion from the Techne Congress*---This special episode is part of a two-part series we are releasing as part of techne's annual congress, which is this year hosted by Loughborough University around the theme of 'Back to the Future'. We invite you to step away from your screens at the congress for a reflection on how mindfulness, research and creativity work in tandem, and how we can learn from the past to move forward and shape the future. We are delighted to welcome Dr Allan Kilner-Johnson to the podcast who shares his important work on mindfulness, a ten minute guided meditation and recorded live question and answer session which is chaired by Dr Emma Brodzinski, where we will discuss the intersection of research and wellbeing.Allan Kilner-Johnson is Associate Dean (Doctoral College) and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, where his research focuses on modernism and contemplative studies. He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and the forthcoming The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021). In addition, he is an accredited mindfulness meditation teacher registered on the UK Mindfulness Teachers Register and a psychosynthesis coach.You can see more of Allan's work here: https://allankilnerjohnson.com/work-with-me/ and follow him on twitter at @thisisallan Allan is running a free online mindfulness workshop for PhD students in September, which is open for registration here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/mindful-living-for-phd-researchers-tickets-158567023235 Dr Emma Brodzinski is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama, Dance and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is also a registered therapist and a qualified coach. In 2020 she launched The PhD Life Raft Podcast to support doctoral students through their PhD journey. She lives in Berkshire with her 11 year old triplets, two guinea pigs and a cat!Royalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.comThanks so much to Allan for being so generous with his time and for joining us on the technecast, and to Emma for chairing the conversation at the congress. Thanks also to techne for their ongoing support and to Emma Molyneux at techne, and to Ben Cole and Grace Baird at Loughborough for the opportunity to be a part of the congress.We'll be back at the end of the month continuing with our theme of futures.The technecast is run by Julien Clin (@ClinJulien) and Polly Hember (@pollyhember). Please email technecaster@gmail.com if you would like to be featured on the podcast, or if you have any questions.

*Re-released to include the live panel discussion from the Techne Congress*---This is the first of two special episodes of the Technecast in conjunction with the Techne Congress, held this summer at Loughborough University. The Congress theme was "Back to the Future" and how looking back can help us move forward. In this episode, we discuss utopia – or utopias – and the commons, and how these notions fit into the contemporary, post-postmodern moment. The first part of the podcast comprises a chat between Robin van den Akker and Tamara de Groot, who historicise utopia in society, education and the arts. They also discuss how utopian vision and process interrelate.In the second part, Raphael Kabo juxtaposes an analysis of commons utopias in literature (what he calls narratives of disaster communism) with our very current crisis: the covid-19 pandemic.A live panel discussion with our speakers took place at the Congress on 6 July. The third part of the podcast is a recording of that conversation.Our speakers are:* Robin van den Akker is a senior lecturer in continental philosophy and cultural studies at Eramus University College in Rotterdam. He is a co-editor of "Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth" (Rowan & Littlefield, 2017) and, with Timotheus Vermeulen, co-founder of the research platform "Notes on Metamodernism" (www.metamodernism.com), which analyses the aesthetics and culture of the post-postmodern moment.* Tamara de Groot is involved in the development of experimental, transdisciplinary education at the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab. She is currently writing her PhD dissertation at Erasmus UC Rotterdam on this collaborative design process, with a focus on spacetime relations in critical pedagogical practices. In her educational practice, she works with non-mainstream science fiction and the notion of worldmaking to encourage students to question how we construct the narratives of the future, past and present.* Raphael Kabo completed his thesis at Birkbeck College, University of London, in late 2019. In it, he explored the representation of utopian spaces as a form of opposition to capitalism in post-2008 literature and poetry. He is a co-founder of the Utopian Acts research network and the Beyond Gender Research Collective. Outside of academia, he works on coding utopian online social networks. (raphaelkabo.com)=====Royalty free music generously shared by Steve Oxen. FesliyanStudios.comThe Technecast is run by Julien Clin and Polly Hember. Please email technecaster@gmail.com if you would like to be featured on the podcast, or if you have any questions.

Continuing our theme of materials, in this episode we welcome Ella Muir (@ellabrookmuir) to the technecast! She shares her research on the study of history through clothing as a form of material culture, the commonality of clothing as a form of communication and how, in the face of historic sumptuary laws and modern-day restrictions, clothing was and remains the single most powerful way in which we materially express ourselves to the world. Clothing in the early modern period was inherently bound up in ideas around status: access to the most sumptuous of materials and richest of hues was controlled by strict legislation, limiting what could and could not be worn by the lower echelons of society. Amidst the vigorous, global economic expansion of the sixteenth century, ideas of nationhood and foreignness began, for the first time, to be attributed to the production, selling and wearing of clothing. This was a world in which a person’s worth could ostensibly be gleaned from what they wore.Ella considers the garments created for, worn by, and observed on the queens of England and France between 1515–1547, at a pivotal point in the history of the two warring nations. Most female consorts came from foreign lands to be wed, and with them they brought the customs, cultures, and communities of their homelands. These women occupied a unique space within the paradigm of the period, and nowhere was this duality more conspicuous than in their attire. Notions of nationhood, inherently bound up in clothing, demonstrably differed for these queens, who had close personal ties to their motherlands and allegiances to allies scattered across the continent. Subsumed and yet segregated by nature of their position, how—if at all—did these royal women intersect and interact with one another, and how did they use material culture to “speak” on their behalf?Who, in essence, clothed a 16th-century queen? This work seeks to illuminate the varying ways in which royal clothing was observed and understood throughout society, and the practical challenges inherent in locating, gathering, and elucidating a cohesive record of those whose voices elude the written record. Ella demonstrates how dependent perceptions of sartorial symbolism were upon the lived experience of the beholder, thus expanding our understanding of queenly clothing beyond the constructions, creations and confines of the royal court and its discerning eye.Ella Brook Muir is a postdoctoral candidate at the University of Roehampton, researching queenly clothing in England and France during the 16th century. Her work explores the creation and construction of royal image through dress and other forms of material culture at a pivotal point in Anglo-French relations, focussing particularly on the various ways that sartorial symbolism was observed and interpreted throughout society. This research is funded by a scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s techne programme.Our image features a close-up on the blackwork embroidery featured in Hans Holbein’s portrait of Jane Seymour, c.1536-37, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Royalty free music from www.FesliyanStudios.comThanks very much to Ella for speaking with us and sharing her research, and to techne for their ongoing support! We'd love to hear what you think of this episode - you can tweet us at @technecast. Please consider rating, reviewing and sharing this podcast so we can continue to share the incredible research that our guests are doing.If you would like to submit an abstract for an episode of the technecast, please get in touch with us at technecaster@gmail.comThanks for listening! See you next time, where we'll be presenting two special episodes on the theme of 'futures' as part of techne's annual congress.The technecast is run by Julien Clin (@ClinJulien) and Polly Hember (@pollyhember).

In this episode, Rose Coffey discusses how AR filters and edited selfies posted by Generation Z onto Instagram can be seen as forms of dress of the phygital self. Whilst considering self-representation across our evolving social space, the term phygital, is here understood as phenomena existing beyond conventional notions of time and space, through the merging of societal realms. Ultimately, this form of self-representation is being facilitated by the smartphone as a technological extension of the human body, where the self is performed through repeated gestures and aesthetic practices. Finally, by offering critical insights into self-representation and broadening the understanding of dress as an embodied experience in shared social space, Rose proposes that a change of paradigm is needed if our understanding of identity is to advance in the new phygital social world.Contributor BioRose Coffey is a recent MA graduate in digital fashion media, interested in exploring new definitions of dress, alongside the human stories dress can convey. The body is central to Rose's research; having previously studied Fine Art: Sculpture with a focus on bodily adornment. The materiality of the body, its historical, political, and social meaning in the world it inhabits underpins her approach. Whilst her research primarily concentrates on the relationship between fashion, dress, and identity, she also investigates the collective element of fashion, analysing how the personal and social elements converge. Currently, she focuses on the affective dimensions of dress in a phygital world, touching especially on notions of youth culture and performativity.Twitter: @rosiecoffeyInstagram: @rose_christinahttps://rosechristina.squarespace.com/=====The Technecast is a bi-weekly podcast that showcases the varied and talented work of PGR researchers in the arts and humanities. Produced and presented by Polly Hember and Julien Clin. Kindly supported by Techne-AHRC.

Continuing our theme of technology, we welcome Rachel Hopkin (@Rakishi) to the technecast! Placed within the context of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Rachel's podcast essay examines the human instinct to anthropomorphise the technology in our lives, and through a close analysis of Human Robot Interaction in the film Silent Running (Trumbull, 1972), she explores how the narrative framing of Robots and AI on screen not only reflect and encourage this instinct, but also foster a cyclical conversation between Science Fiction, science reality and the society which produces and absorbs them both. Rachel Hopkin is a first year, full-time, TECHNĒ funded PhD in Screenwriting in the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway. Her project explores screened representations of love between humans and robots within the context of the socio-ethical impact of Human Robot Interaction.Original art by Hannah Desai.Royalty free music from https://www.FesliyanStudios.comThanks very much to Rachel for speaking with us and sharing her research, and to techne for their ongoing support! We'd love to hear what you think of this episode - you can tweet us at @technecast. Please consider rating, reviewing and sharing this podcast so we can continue to share the incredible research that our guests are doing.If you would like to submit an abstract for an episode of the technecast, please get in touch with us at technecaster@gmail.comThanks for listening! See you next time, where we embark on our new theme of 'materials'.

The smart city is an urban environment that uses technology to collect data and then uses those data to manage, monitor and ‘improve’ its systems and infrastructure. This, supposedly, makes life easier for its citizens and radically transforms the city. There are, however, significant social, political and cultural implications.Our guest in this episode — the first of two on the theme of Technology — is creative writer Kim Clarke, whose research argues that, far from being anything inherently positive, such data-driven technologies work to ingrain capitalist ideology at an often-unconscious level. The term ‘surveillance capitalism’ comes to mind.Kim also reads an extract from her science fiction novella, 'The Walkers,' which engages with these tensions of smart city. Using the well-known trope of teleportation, the novella explores what the individual relinquishes in order to live in an ‘improved’ environment. 'The Walkers' follows Hazel living in an alternative Hong Kong in which teleportation is the only method of transportation. Unknown to citizens, in the process of being ‘downloaded’ from one location and ‘uploaded’ to another, radical and revolutionary tendencies are removed from the individual’s personality…–––Kim Clarke is a practice-based PhD student at Royal Holloway. Her research and creative writing focus on the relationship between urban space and technology. She has had academic essays appear in Politactics: Conversations from Everyday Analysis (Zero Books, 2016) and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.–––The Technecast is supported by Techne-AHRC. Every two weeks, we invite a researcher in the Humanities to introduce their own work – be it academic, artistic or anything in between. If you like this episode, please share it with your friends. You can also subscribe to the Technecast via your podcast app.This episode is produced and presented by Julien Clin.The Technecast team is made up of Polly Hember and Julien Clin.Contact us at technecaster@gmail.com or via Twitter @technecast