Future Artefacts FM

In this episode, we speak with artist Sarah Al-Sarraj about her new speculative audio work The Mandjet. Framed as a fictional radio phone-in and set in a near future reshaped by rising waters and contested borders, the work uses humour, satire and political tension to explore how environmental crisis transforms our relationship to land, water and community. We discuss the process of building this...

In this episode we talk to Mumbai-based artist and UCLA assistant professor Sahej Rahal, whose practice spans sculpture, video games, AI simulations, film, and painting. Starting from three excerpts of Rahal's text Hallucination Stream we discuss how the micro-fictions of Simulation, Story and Rumour explore caste as a mythology sustained through narrative, hallucination, and political performance...

We’re so excited to launch a new mini series commissioned by Henry Moore Institute @henrymooreinstitute as a part of their new exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age.   In the first episode we talk to the exhibition curator Sean Ketteringham. Moving between folk art histories, sculptural practices, affect theory, hauntology, horror, and memetic culture, we discuss...

For this episode, we recap our As A Chorus mini-series, revisiting conversations with artists Niamh Schmidtke, Dane Sutherland, Rhys Morgan, and Emily Roderick. The discussion expands from ideas around choirs and group singing into broader questions about authorship, infrastructure, collaboration, and collective survival within the contemporary art landscape. We reflect on how artistic work is rar...

What does it mean to amplify a collective voice through collective performance? How do traditions like bell ringing persist, evolve, or disappear, and what do strange histories reveal about their cultural significance? Emily Roderick is the fourth and final guest of our ‘as a chorus’ mini series, sharing personal anecdotes, recordings, and sounds inside bell towers from her ongoing project Can You...

How can the rhythms of songs incite a crew, family or collective solidarity?  Rhys Morgan is the 3rd guest of our ‘as a chorus’ mini series, sharing 3 queer sea shanties from the project and choir, Seaweed in the Fruit Locker. Using Polari, a gay slang used to declare and protect gay people historically, the choir rewrites and performs historic sea shanties to describe queer lived experiences...

What conditions do we gather in? Can this exist without hierarchy, or even a physical space?  Most Dismal Swamp joins the second episode of our mini series ‘as a chorus’, sharing audio extracts from the recent film, The Bastard Fields. A mixtape of 3 sketches, each audio builds on the language of historical preachers, reddit forums and social media commentary. They weave a world which asks ab...

Can choirs be a form of protest, and what kinds of resistance could they provide in the midst of climate crises? Our mini-series, ‘as a chorus’ begins with Niamh Schmidtke’s work, CHANTER (Aughinish). Their 15 minute audio introduces us to an aluminium refinery and it’s impact on the local population. Combining song and audio description, the work brings together its own chorus, inviting us to joi...

For episode 29, we listen to the second half of Black Holes Act 1. This 40-minute radio play by Suley, which holds a mirror up to the UK after last year’s race riots. A re-imagining of Derrick Bell’s 1992 novella ‘Space Traders’, Black Holes is a satirical work of speculative fiction in which aliens offer the UK vast riches in exchange for its Black citizens and a referendum is called on the trade...

Black Holes Act 1 is a 40-minute radio play by Suley, which holds a mirror up to the UK after last year’s race riots. A re-imagining of Derrick Bell’s 1992 novella ‘Space Traders’, Black Holes is a satirical work of speculative fiction in which aliens offer the UK vast riches in exchange for its Black citizens and a referendum is called on the trade. An Afrofuturistic exploration of critical race...

What is the next New Weird? How might ‘weirding’ help generate collective virtual or physical spaces to resist cultural binaries, and do these amorphic, slippery forms of language provide tools to resist totalising phrases of good and evil?  For this episode, we recap the 4 artist works featured on our New Weird mini-series, revisiting questions of how the tools of this literary genre might p...

Future Artefacts FM host artist Monya Riachi, as part of their New Weird Mini-series. Her work, Concerning Geographies: Entangled Histories, a speculative letter, addresses cartography across the Levante and the UK. Heard here as part of a live performance debuted alongside research unfolding the processes of map making, and their relationships to borders and power as imperial constructions. Monya...

Part three of our New Weird mini series features Jelena Viskovic’s Motonation. This 9 minute extract shows us two societies, Happy Nation & The Grid, where we follow Čedo as he decides which group to join. This surrealist sci-fi examines the consequences of individual vs collective desires, referencing Yugoslav performance art from the 1980s, and tools of humour and weirding during Čedo’s jour...

For the second part of our New Weird mini series Chris MacInnes shares Impotent Island , an installation that’s been adapted for audio broadcast. In the 11 minute audio we listen to MacInnes’ narration collapse time, connecting cosmology at a planetary scale to Sheffield’s historical industrialisation through the extraction of coal, the heat of steam and their impact within the Anthropocene. Toget...

Our latest mini-series on the New Weird begins with the premier of Philip Speakman’s, Reality Break, a 15 minute audio work, which follows the recollections of 4 facebook employee’s Dungeons & Dragons game in the summer of 2020. Set before Facebook’s Metaverse was released to the public, Reality Break explores the social conscience of these worldbuilding employees. Timed to distract from Franc...

Is it possible to decolonise mineral collections? How might our understanding of mineralogy support climate activism or anti-racist methodologies?   For the second part of our double bill with co-founder Niamh Schmidtke, we are listening to the final half of Pulling Blood from a Stone, a 35 minute radio play. Alberto Duman joins us as co-presenter, addressing key questions in act 3 and 4 abou...

If we could communicate with the minerals around us, what voices would we hear? What would they speak about? And what relationships would rocks and minerals have with one another?   For this special double bill, co-founder Niamh Schmidtke is sharing their recent audio play, Pulling Blood from a Stone, across two episodes. We have invited guest Alberto Duman to co-present the first half of thi...

Recent EU law now allows citizens to complain if they have been harmed by AI, but what if they have co-conceived your offspring without you even knowing it? For Future Artefacts 20th Episode we’re welcoming back Nina Davies with her new work SubScanners, alongside guest co-host Rebecca Edwards. This is the fourth work in a series of fictional traditional dances which loosely follow the structures...

What would you do at the end of the world? For the third part of our collaboration with *The Couch, we are thrilled to share David Blandy’s work, The End of The World, a 13 minute audio piece, originating from a larger video installation made in 2017. Revisiting this work, we explore the ends of multiple worlds; family illness, the foundations of a political system shattering and the end of a 17 y...

During this festive season, we invite you to celebrate with the epic adventure mix, A Bell is Tolling, by Jan Berger. This 12 minute mix, composed of RPG* soundtracks, including selections from fantasy epics in late 90s and early 2000s, is the second work featured as part of our collaboration with the Couch**. Together we discuss what magic looks like in game worlds and the limitations of magical...

How can rituals guide, mislead or comfort us? For the second episode of our collaboration with The Couch*, Bea Xu’s piece EsƨƎ-1 invites us to follow the leader of an anthrax death cult. Made in collaboration with Markéta Skalková and formed by Xu’s research into melting permafrost, their work imagines a post-anthropocentric future where anthrax spores have become objects of fascination and obsess...

For this episode we are bringing together three special guests to introduce our new collaboration with Het HEM. We’ve brought back artists Rebeca Romero (Ep.3) and Akinsola Lawanson (Ep.7) together with curator Maia Kenney to discuss magic and technology within their works and research. Romero’s exploration of trance in The New Worshipers and Lawanson’s spirit world in Bosode each examin...

Please join us for this special episode of Future Artefacts FM with Joe Moss’ audio piece Infinite Customisation. In this 17 minute audio-book style work, we meet the ghost of J. Thaddeus Toad, transported from the 1908 novel, The Wind in the Willows, and risen in the future. Following Toad’s perceptions, the work draws contrasts between the linear perspective of industrial England in the 1910s to...

Nina Davies shares her work ‘Learned Friends; Piasecki vs Wade’ for episode 14 of the show. It is a fictional podcast voiced by characters Riley and Devon, who discuss legal cases that present the rising issues of using predictive technology within the justice system. Set in a world where technology documents the future just as well as in documents the past, people have begun to move in pre-progra...

In this episode we welcome our first guest presenter,  Ariane Koek , to discuss Niamh Schmidtke’s work-in-progress,  The diamond’s less sexy sister . Somewhere between a radio essay and a voicenote, the 5 minute piece explores human relations to minerals, specifically with graphite. Combining scripted and organic conversation, prose and academic information, the audio slips in and out of...