Octopus Podcast Season 1, Season 2

‘Octopus’ is a Black Mirror Institute production, created and moderated by Sam Hopkins, Liz Haas aka lizvlx and Hans Bernhard and recorded at KHM, the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.

For the inaugural podcast session of ‘Octopus’, Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard discuss the often invisible infrastructural networks of our contemporary world. The cables, the railways, the roads, the freeports, the free-trade zones and the export-processing zones (EPZ) that trace an often indiscernible architecture of power.Using Extrastatecraft, the illuminating text by Keller Easterling, as a launchpad, our discussion roams from the idiosyncratic marketplaces being exploited in the slums of Nairobi to the mesmerising physicality of the cable networks that snake around the globe. We tentatively conclude that the only thing that knows the system is the system itself.Links:https://www.versobooks.com/books/2163-extrastatecrafthttps://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglasshttps://redlines.network

In the second episode of ‘Octopus’, lizvlx aka Liz Haas, Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard talk broadly and widely about the art market. With a focus on new technologies and potential new distribution strategies they discuss how the murky and opaque world of art dealing negotiates visions and techniques of transparency such as Blockchain? On a further level, they reflect and report on how artists like UBERMORGEN experiment with the surveillance capitalist tools of the Internet and how do they explore new models of producing and thinking about art. Links:https://cutt.ly/ge5UcO5https://redlines.network

Our third podcast engages with some of the ideas, and fears, regarding computer-led cognition, as proposed by James Bridle in his book New Dark Age. Our discussion flows, and meanders over a contemporary landscape populated with notions of code/spaces, hyperobjects and computational thinking. We discuss the enmeshing of the digital and the physical environments that we live in, the limitations of computer science and modelling, and the shadow of the male ego in the tech landscape of today. We mull over the significance of Deep Blue and AlphaGo, and the singular obsession with speed in the financial sector. Finally, we end up by opening our imaginations to the explosive contemporary folk culture of conspiracy theories. Links: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3002-new-dark-agehttps://mitpress.mit.edu/books/codespacehttps://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hyperobjectshttps://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace

In this podcast we talk to the artist Sophia Bauer about her research into the soundscapes of Kenyan Forests. Sophia uses sound to inquire into the presence of the past in today’s world. Inspired by the research of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, who reframes Forests as social networks in which trees help one another to survive, Sophia frames sound as a relational medium. Sounding entity produces pressure waves which move through space, penetrating everything in their way and affecting all of us, human and non-human. We talk about the fungal networks which distribute nutrients from mother trees to weaker specimens, and how sound can be a forensic tool to deconstruct notions of landscape and the hierarchies embedded in them. Links:https://www.ted.com/speakers/suzanne_simardhttp://www.soundofnairobi.net

Today's guest is Julia Scher, Professor of Surveillance Architecture at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM). We approach the tech landscape from an embodied perspective. What happens to the body when the self is digitised? How are we reckoning with the infiltrative Internet of today? How do we continue to empathise and connect with one another? Professor Scher revels in these questions, opting for tech seduction in lieu of tech pessimism. She draws a genealogy of tech from the endlessness of Californian life; the infinite highway and endless hamburger. And she relishes to the soft rounded corners of our safe contemporary devicesLinks:http://www.juliascher.comhttp://cyborganthropology.com/Steve_Mannhttps://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520280069/the-gentrification-of-the-mind

Our guest on today’s podcast is the researcher and curator Mi You (Doc. Diss) who expands and extends our understanding of the Silk Road. Drawing on personal travels in Central Asia, and affiliated research by historians, Mi You speculates that the networks of the Silk Road were far more distributed and decentralised than traditional historiography accounts for. She examines paintings which evidence the smuggling of silkworms, deconstructs the contemporary Chinese state hagiography of Admiral Zheng He, and reframes the infamous tributary system of the Chinese Empire as exchange rather than donation. We end by hearing a bit about fermentation as a metaphor for cultural practices in Eurasia. Links:https://www.academia.edu/37890380/Silk_Roads_Tributary_Networks_and_Old_and_New_Imperialism_in_Extra_States_Nations_in_Liquidation_Cahier_4https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/the-silk-road-9780190208929?https://casco.art/en/studylines/unmapping-eurasia

Today's podcast delves into the mind-bending world of Deep Fakes. Deep Fakes are AI-based machine learning technologies which can seamlessly map 'source' moving-image onto 'target' moving-image, typically used to map one persons face onto another persons body, often used in news, politics, pornography and art. Artist Max Mauro Schmid, discusses how this is done technically, and debates some of the epistemological ramifications of this with Professor Hans Bernhard. What happens when we experience these generated clips? Are we able to perceive their uncanny nature? Are notions of fake and real really useful in trying to parse these moving-images? Are the critical faculties required to live in a world in which binary constructions have broken down a cognitive burden?Links:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/23/to-fix-the-problem-of-deepfakes-we-must-treat-the-cause-not-the-symptomshttps://www.creativebloq.com/features/deepfake-examples

This double-bill episode compares two image recognition projects. German artist and academic Christian Sievers talks about his art project ‘World Instance’, based on ImageNet resources and Kenyan coder and neural network expert Brian Muhia discusses his application ‘Shambabot’ which identifies plant illnesses. These two image-based projects are contrasted with the work of Stefanie Glauber, an artist who employs neural networks to experiment with the world of odors and scents. Our discussion floats along and peacefully orbits the different layers of recognizing, understanding and interpreting of sources and data through machines and different senses. The podcast covers, in quite detailed technical discussions, how image interpretation and neuronal networks work. Links: https://worldinstance.nethttps://twitter.com/negamuhia?lang=enhttp://www.stefaniglauber.com/odormirror.html

We discuss The Alt Right with Ivan Knapp from the University College London and Zenker, an artist and game designer from Leipzig. This verbal exchange includes metaphorical and practical analysis of games and game-ecologies such as Warhammer and World of Warcraft, and stretches over phenomenons such as the Alt Right, New Fascism, the Manosphere, Incels, White Supremacists and libertarian Silicon Valley Transhumanism, but also Gamergate, Cuck Memes and Elliot Rodgers. One focus is the nostalgia of 1980s aesthetics in Alt Right music and graphics (Vaporwave becomes Fashwave), both an unimaginative vision of the future based on the past, and the effective adaptation strategies of leftist protest techniques by this new right movement. Ivan Knapp looks at all these developments from the angle of the social dynamics of adolescent male groups, talks about Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land and the dangers of Marvel comics, Zenker talks about current experiences of New Right movements in Eastern Germany, the reconstruction of fantasy worlds and his 4 years of research in the global Alt Right. Links:https://incels.nethttps://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwavehttps://worldofwarcraft.comhttps://www.warhammer-community.comhttps://spectator.us/mencius-moldbug-momenthttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-inhttps://vimeo.com/137939689

We kick off Season 2 of the Octopus with a bang - an interview with Jean Peters from the Peng! Collective. Jean takes us inside some of the projects of the collective, from Zero Trollerance (2015), the development of an army of anti-misogny bots to Mask. ID (2015) a tool for morphing different passport photos together to googlenest (2014) a prescient spoof google product based on data extraction. In this wide-roaming discussion we explore big questions about what it means to be politically active, where the border between art and activism lies and how we can ""battle the barbarism of our time"". https://pen.gg

Hans Bernhard im Gespräch mit Fatima Kastner über Ethik der Roboter, Verantwortung und Handlungsträgerschaft Künstlicher Intelligenz, der Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Globalisierung und Digitalisierung und Menschenrechten in der Weltgesellschaft.

In the third episode of the second season of the Octopus, Diana McCarty and Hans Bernhard dive into collective work, the struggle of artists, techno/cyberfeminism, net culture, radio, white supremacists and much more!

In the fourth episode of the second season of the Octopus, Lars Wehringer from Capulcu Collective and Sam Hopkins talking about platform capitalism, how we are surveilled and consequences of that, thinking about digital resistance and giving advice how to protect your privacy (if this is even possible).

In the fifth episode of the second season of the Octopus, Tina Sauerländer and Liz Haas are talking about AI art, the consequences of AI in real life and if AIs are actually t h a t smart.(sorry for the sound issues, the recording got a bit messed up and I did my best to fix it - the editor)

In the sixth episode of the second season of the Octopus, Leo Impett and Hans Bernhard are talking about the possibilities of AIs dealing with art history, the advantages and disadvantages of AIs dealing with art and everything else and an upcoming project by them about an AI as a curator. https://biennial.ai/