Ultradilute Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Today's conversation is with Zachary Small, staff reporter for the NY Times. I have been following their arts journalism since they wrote for Hyperallergic years ago. They're often the first to identify new, consequential developments in a field that thrives on change.

A little less than a year ago, they became a staff reporter at the Times – a well deserved and enlightened hire. In particular, they have been hot on the trail of the NFT "situation" (remember that) and I suspect we'll be hearing much more about art and digital tokenization over the months and years ahead.

Zach’s first book, “Token Supremacy: The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022,” will be published by Knopf in spring of this year.

So it was a pleasure to be able to speak to them for Informer. 

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.

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All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

Today's conversation is with Prem Krishnamurthy, designer, author, and educator. His multifaceted work explores the role of art as an agent of transformation at an individual, collective, and structural level. This manifests itself in books, exhibitions, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts, and workshops.

He is one of those thinkers and makers whose brain is spinning out ideas and reflections as fast as you can absorb them. And I appreciate so much his emphasis on the importance of embracing juxtaposition as a prerequisite not only for artistic creativity but also as a key ingredient for healthy civic life. He argues that there is no singular America, but instead a multiplicity of Americas just as there is no singular individual: we are all collections of paradox and competing interests. 

We also talk about the ways in which the world will forever be hybrid, there's no going back to the old technologies. And how do we take what we learned from the "zoomacene" (his word) and build that into the ways in which we come together now.

This conversation, and it was very much a conversation more an interview, was a joy. And I hope you find it to be inspiring and nourishing as well. 

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.

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All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

I first heard about K when they were active in the electronic music scene of the bay area in the early 2000's. I've enjoyed following their work from that time into becoming a force for thoughtful engagement with AI, thinking about it in very expansive way, involving anthropology and cosmology.

I find that their work unites the abstract with the personal in an elegant way, spotlighting the weird and unexplained in the technological. It was an absolute joy to connect on today's episode.

K Allado-McDowell

Amor Cringe (K's new book)

Google Art and Machine Intelligence

Weird AI Reading List by K Allado-McDowell

Dale Pendell

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.

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All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

I really enjoyed this chance to catch up with her and hear what she's seeing as being exciting developments in the fields of art, technology, and science. And we had a great time discussing what an intra-institutional approach to building a new tech-art infrastructure could be, as a counterpoint to the dominance to the dominance of a few tech. companies. We get into the weeds on potential funding structures that would allow non-profits to collaborate to build a more humane and human version of the metaverse. 

Shownotes and links: https://www.informerpodcast.com/episodes/15/index.html

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.

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All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

"As an artist I am trying to see the hidden connections between things and trying to understand things that I feel as a person that thinks in slightly different ways." - Angelo Plessas

In early February of 2020, I was invited to an impromptu lunch at the lovely and large home of artist Chrysanne Stathacos in the Kolonaki neighborhood of Athens, the day before my return to New York.

We all have moments that stand out as markers of the time before covid and all that has been left in its wake. That afternoon with friends in Athens stands for me as one of those poles representing the time before. It would have been memorably enjoyable on its own, without all the fear, change and upheaval that followed. But due to its pivot-like quality, the gathering takes on a sort of weightiness. It seems appropriate that this was also the occasion in which I met Angelo Plessas, an artist whose work is focused on technology’s relationship to spiritual growth. I remember him discussing with me his plans for the Gwangju Biennial and how his work was going to explore the topic of healing and technology. In retrospect, his practice couldn’t be more profoundly in-sync with the world that emerged.

Angelo is someone who, from the beginning, has been and remains deeply invested in understanding the internet not only as a tool but also how it exists inside each of us, deep in our interiority. When speaking again, after more than two years of the whole world moving almost fully online, he remains an optimist. It is a welcome change whenever I speak with Angelo, someone who feels that the internet remains queer and is capable of bringing people together in a positive way. Who’d believe it, given the doom and gloom prophesied by seemingly everyone else.

I enjoyed this conversation with Angelo a lot. I think we need more people thinking like he is, finding moments of healing in our relationships with technology. We talk about a number of things, including his recent collaboration with Acne Studios in producing a fashion line from his singular style of quilting, made from materials that protect our bodies from electro-magnetic fields being generated by the devices that surround us.

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.

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All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

It's always a pleasure to be in conversation with Mendi and Keith Obadike. The sound art duo have been working together for 25 years, which gives them perspective to be able to identify trends, changes, and ongoing challenges in the field. Their sound work is beautifully designed, often utilizing the human voice as an instrument, and typically they take on issues often ignored in sound art, like race relations in the United States or the country's histories of exclusion. In this conversation, we covered a lot of ground, including their recent refusal to accept an award from ZKM, a media arts center in Germany, due to that organization's public disclosure of their difficulties in adjudicating within an offensive and false dichotomy of quality vs diversity.

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.

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All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

I had the privilege of visiting an insightful and rich exhibition at Albright-Knox, Buffalo, last month. Co-curated by curator and art historian Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan and artist Paul Vanouse, it focused on the impact of "difference machines" AKA computers in shifting our notions of identity. Featuring many artists that I have been fans of for years, I hope that this ground exhibition continues to make waves. You can dig into their ideas on this, the latest episode of Informer.

"You can not talk about contemporary life without talking about technology."

Photo: Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan and Paul Vanouse standing in front of Saya Woolfalk's Landscape of Anticipation 2.0, 2021. 

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.

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All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

There are so many fascinating stories to be told about the present and future of technology in the arts, especially in this moment of a profound, digital turn. Tamiko Thiel, a truly singular artist, tells a numbers a number of them. As a very early innovator in the field of VR, along with a side career as product designer which includes creating the visual design of the The Connection Machine, the world's first AI computer and now in the permanent collection of MoMA, her work has been and continues to be groundbreaking. It's motivated by a deep curiosity about what it means for humans to make technology and how we might do so in a way that doesn't sacrifice our planet in the process.

Any one component of Tamiko's life and career seems rich enough to launch its own spin-off podcast, with Tamiko right at the center of some unwritten but influential history. Whether it's about her father being the first to patent shipping containers, then shockingly losing the patent, to Steve Jobs in the 80's asking his marketing manager to hire Tamiko after seeing her visual design of the Connection Machine and then being told that it's too late, Tamiko's gone off to Europe to be an artist!

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.

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All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

Zach Lieberman is one of the leading creative coders and digital artists in the world. And what I love about the way Zach works is that he is equally dedicated to thoughtful and open pedagogy as he is to creating poetic digital works. This wide-ranging conversation reveals the motivations in his co-founding of the School for Poetic Computation as well as his continuing fascination with the human, machine dialogue that results in the creation of new worlds. 

For those listeners who may not know, DOS was an operating system that was fully text-based and was marketed as being an accessible for home users to access programs and software and also opened the door to people like Zach to start to create by typing in words and then seeing them magically transform into activities on the screen. He begins by recounting one of those early experiences. Zach begins by describing one of those early, magical moments.

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.

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All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.

I’m excited to share this fascinating conversation with LA-based artist Lauren Lee McCarthy. She reminds us that, actually, creating technology is one of the most human of activities. Her work is largely about trying to get us to take responsibility for the machines we are building. She suggests, that we need to get “out of our dorm room” in how we approach machine learning and the way it’s changing the world. She states, “the difference between machines and humans is that humans can reflect on their values to make decisions about the future. Machines can’t.” I hope you’ll enjoy learning about this emerging artist who is poised to make a big impact.

The idea that we need to get “out of our dorm room” in how we approach machine learning and the way it’s changing the world feels right to me. I hope you enjoyed this conversation and you’ll check us out online at informerpodcast.com.

Ultradilute Podcast is the companion show to Ultradilute Homeopathy where we clear new paths to health through homeopathic care.

Discover how personalized homeopathic care can help, learn more at ultradilute.com.

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All content, including music, photography, sound recordings, and video, is created by Ultradilute and licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Learn more: ultradilute.com | Contact: info@ultradilute.com

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding personal health concerns.