Octopus Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Discussion Day 1 of the Symposium TIMES OF HANDS – GAMIFICATION VS PLAY with Cynthia Chepkemoi, Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn, Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard.

A talk with Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn and Sam Hopkins, followed by a video essay by Nestor Siré and Steffen Köhn about the (lack of) internet in Cuba and the offline sharing alternative to it: El Paquete Semanal, a country-wide offline data sharing network. With online access heavily restricted, Cuba has one of the lowest inter#net penetration rates in the world. Yet, Cuban citizens have found a way to distribute all kinds of media content in the form of El Paquete Semanal, a one terabyte collection of data that is compiled by a network of people with various forms of privileged internet access and then circulated nationwide on USB sticks and external hard drives via an elaborate network of deliverymen. In this presentation we want to describe how El Paquete has come to constitute a nested media ecosystem that facili#tates the publication of independent local media content such as video games or pdf magazines, hosts several digital marketplaces, and offers an otherwise non-existing space for advertisement. NESTOR SIRÉ (b. 1988) lives and works between Havana and Camagüey, Cuba. Siré’s artistic practice intervenes directly in specific contexts in order to analyze social and cultural phenomena. His artistic methodology consists in expanding social structures so as to find more effective ways through which art can intervene in the complex relationships between official and informal networks. His works have been shown in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana), Queens Museum (New York), Rhizome (New York), New Museum (New York), Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City), and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santa Fe (Argentina), among other places. STEFFEN KÖHN (b. 1980) lives and works in Berlin. He is a filmmaker, anthropologist and video artist who uses ethnography to understand contemporary sociotechnical landscapes. For his video and installation works he engages in local collaborations with artists, software developers and science fiction writers to explore viable alternatives to current distributions of technological access and arrangements of power. His works have been shown at the Academy of the Arts Berlin, Kunsthaus Graz, Vienna Art Week, Hong Gah Museum Taipei, Lulea Biennial and the ethnographic museums of Copenhagen and Dresden. His films have been screened at the Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Word Film Festival Montreal, among others.

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 and much more!

Fatima Kastner: Haben Roboter Rechte? 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.

Battling the barbarism of our time Jean Peters from the Peng! Collective 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

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.net https://www.reddit.com/r/Vaporwave https://worldofwarcraft.com https://www.warhammer-community.com https://spectator.us/mencius-moldbug-moment https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in https://vimeo.com/137939689

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.net https://twitter.com/negamuhia?lang=en http://www.stefaniglauber.com/odormirror.html

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-symptoms https://www.creativebloq.com/features/deepfake-examples

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_4 https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/the-silk-road-9780190208929? https://casco.art/en/studylines/unmapping-eurasia

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 devices. Links: http://www.juliascher.com http://cyborganthropology.com/Steve_Mann https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520280069/the-gentrification-of-the-mind