Technecast

Returning to our theme of life writing, Olivia chats to Gemma Turner about her research on early modern carers. Gemma discusses how the early modern gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham reconceptualised her difficult spiritual relationship with caring after writing her autobiographical Booke of Remembrance. Gemma works for the University of Southampton within Student Disability and Inclusion. She recently...

Continuing our theme of senses, researcher and sound artist Samuel Hertz shares his work on the sound(s) of climate and environmental change. More specifically, Samuel examines the ways in which acoustic sound-capturing methods alter human perspectives on space and time. After his presentation, Samuel joins Edwin for a discussion about all things sound, exhibiting his work in the International Spa...

In our latest installment of our 'Senses' series, Isabel chats to Viveca Mellegård about her fascinating research into the practice of indigo dyeing in West Bengal. Viveca is a researcher and filmmaker and started her career making science and arts programmes at the BBC. She integrates film and photography as research methods with a particular interest in making the embodied aspects of craftsmansh...

In this episode, Morag chats to Rachel Holmes about her research to kick off our theme on senses. Rachel Holmes is a practicing artist and writer currently completing her doctorate project The Language of Birds at Kingston School of Art, supervised by Professor Scott Wilson. Influenced by the work of Georges Bataille, Silvia Federici, Eduardo Kohn and Dale Pendell, The Language of Birds is interes...

Welcome to our first episode in our new series on Life Writing. In this epsiode, Morag chats to Karen about her fascinating research. Karen’s doctoral research explores the lives of former Irish nuns, one of whom is her mother. Her work is located at the interface between a number of disciplines (history, sociology, narrative psychology and Irish Studies) and draws on narrative and life history me...

During her artist-residency at the Archive of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Anushka Tay composed a series of music inspired by 19th century plant collection in China. She created four multi-layered, textured pieces which range from an instrumental piano solo evoking Orientalism, to a spoken-word poem collaged with field recordings that she took around Kew Gardens during the summer. In this e...

Continuing our theme of archives, Rudy Loewe (researcher and artist at University of the Arts London) shares their research on the Black Power movement in the English-speaking Caribbean, and the ways in which the British government suppressed it. Rudy also discusses their experience digging into recently declassified Foreign and Commonwealth Office records at the National Archives, and translating...

In this special podcast for the Techne January Congress 2023 - which is based around the craft of writing - the Technecast team share some advice and experiences on writing for a podcast. In addition to input from Felix, Morag, Julien, Olivia and Edwin, we also hear from former contributor Mary Dawson, who gives her tips on scripting and recording an episode of Technecast. Towards the end of the e...

This is the second episode in our series on Archives. Artist-researcher Eimhin Daly discuss the entangled sites of their research to consider what constitutes an archival relation. Seeing place itself as an archive, they are concerned with practices of relation, specifically with unlearning relations to place and pasts that are produced by imperialism and nationalism in Ireland. ----Bio: Eimhin Da...

The contributor for this episode is Holly Antrum. This episode was recorded during the exhibition ‘Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Intersections in Theory, Film and Art’, at Camera Austria in Graz (11 June - 14 August 2022). Final-year techne researcher Holly Antrum staged her paper-based artist multiple from within the show, Markéta’s Notes, as a podcast for technecast. Holly Antrum’s project invo...

This special episode of Technecast was made for the Techne-funded 'Cultivate' conference, hosted at Kew Gardens, London, on November 10. The episode, 'There Are More Spaces Still to Come', is a 'Cultivate' special feature produced by Techne student Judah Attille, one of the conference organisers. In conversation with Judah, multidisciplinary artist Shenece Oretha speaks about sonic interventions a...

In our final instalment of our theme looking at genre, Sarah Richardson joins us on the Technecast to talk about inclusive satire. By examining reactive characterisations of the archetypal fantasy ‘monster’ in satirical fiction, this project aims to make the argument that these textual strategies demonstrate a broader trend of empathetic storytelling in satire, presenting a genre more optimistic o...

In the second episode of our focus on climate fiction and speculative fiction (part of our 'genre' theme), University of Surrey researchers Frances Hallam and Edwin Gilson participate in a roundtable discussion led by Technecast's Felix Clutson. Frances Hallam (they/them) is an AHRC-funded PhD researcher at the University of Surrey. Their doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Aquafuturism’, explores ocean an...

A two-parter this week. In the first part, Edwin Gilson introduces the literary label of climate fiction and investigates its usefulness, as well as the blurring of realism and science fiction, through the prism of a number of literary works set in California. Following on, Frances Hallam asks "What is cli-fi without sci-fi?". Their presentation gives us a glimpse at the interconnected histories a...

Jennifer Doveton is a postgraduate researcher in her second year at Brunel University. Her research is on middle-class subjectivity and moral value in British screen fantasy. At the moment she's looking at the Harry Potter film series and the His Dark Materials television series for markers of class in characterisation and narratives of upward mobility that reproduce neoliberal ideologies of indiv...

This is the second episode celebrating Beyond Human Symposium, which was organised by Rachel Holmes, Rachel Hopkin, Liz K. Miller, Jon Mason and Simon Aeppli. Beyond Human was a techne-funded symposium held at Royal Holloway, University of London on the 26th and 27th May 2022, with keynote speakers the writer and researcher, Gyrus, and the filmmaker and lecturer, Roz Mortimer. This episode feature...

This month we’re excited to celebrate the Beyond Human symposium, organised by Rachel Holmes, Rachel Hopkin, Liz K. Miller, Jon Mason and Simon Aeppli. Beyond Human was a techne-funded symposium held at Royal Holloway, University of London on the 26th and 27th May 2022.Leading us through the process of creating, organising and facilitating this symposium, Rachel Holmes and Rachel Hopkin reflect on...

Welcome back to the technecast! Today’s episode features a conversation between Beth Palmer, Robert Shaughnessy and Alicia Barnes reflecting on a series of seminars and workshops called ‘Imaginative Confrontations with Shakespeare: Truth, Reconciliation, Justice’. The series tackles questions such as how do we forgive the unforgivable, and who gets to say whether we should or not? They take one of...

This second of two episodes produced by Outside/rs 2022, themed around Vision, Perception and Outside/rs looks gets stuck in the watery fenlands of the East Midlands, travels through time and speculates on queer futures. Can art, and particular use of media, be a speculative mode of engaging with utopian models of queer reproduction and community? In supernatural literature and folklore there are...

In the first of two guest episodes, curated by the Outside/rs 2022 conference, we’re exploring the unseen, emotional and sometimes smelly aspects of museum collection work. In recent years, an increasing number of institutions in the heritage sector have begun to recognise their significant role in including queer history and in battling the LGBTQ+ community’s invisibility. Historically, queer per...

Today we hear from Christina Heflin for the final episode on surrealism. Eileen Agar’s wearable sculpture, The Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse , has a peculiar story that has never been acknowledged by scholars. In each of its images – from either archives, catalogs, publications or film footage – the hat appears to be a different object. Did Agar make an entire series of these hats like t...

We start a new theme this episode with Shakespeare, presented by Dr Kate O'Leary. Surrealism and Shakespeare are rarely connected in contemporary discourse, despite André Breton’ s admiring references to the Bard and interest in his plays shown by Leonora Carrington and others. This is a pity, as they are more closely linked than is often suspected. Whether he likes it or not, Shakespeare is the g...

We're delighted to be starting our March theme of Surrealism off with a talk by Daniela Georgieva on the writer and artist Leonora Carrington. A sophisticated game of table tennis in which Hummingbirds take the role of the ball, preparing a meal with vegetables that throw themselves into a cauldron filled with boiling water, a dinner table rich with wine, fruit, and caterpillars transforming into...

“Where is home for you?” The question can be laden with hidden meanings and, often, with assumptions about identity. In this episode, writer and doctoral researcher Julien Clin reflects on place as a source of community. Dismantling both identity and the nation as imagined, probing the concepts’ discourse-theoretical limitations, giving up identity in favour of embraced alterity, Julien seeks to m...

This month on the Technecast, we're exploring identities, and in this episode we're joined by Abbie Cairns. Abbie introduces her research, 'Interrogating Artist Teacher Identity (Trans)Formation in Adult Community Learning (ACL)'. An educational sector often delivered by local authority, for learners aged 19+ (Department for Education, 2019). Central to the work is the belief that ACL has differen...