Disintegrator

E. Elias Merhige is the experimental filmmaker behind Begotten (1989) and its sequels Din of Celestial Birds (2006) and Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022), as well as Shadow of the Vampire and Suspect Zero. Gavin Gamboa is a composer, pianist, and video artist who wrote the music for Polia & Blastema and works in local-first "digital gardens" and the piano repertoire. What began as th...

We're joined by Yancey Strickler: writer, cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and the person behind a string of projects that try to give creative life a workable economic form: Bentoism, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, the Dark Forest Collective, and now Artist Corporations and the Dark Forest Operating System. The episode is timely. We recorded in late May, days before Governor Jared P...

Disintegrator's spring tour lecture, love to watch this continue to unfold in real life. Thanks to Index, Montez Radio, Hugh, Elie, the Disintegrator team and especially Dena Yago for joining us. For the visually hxc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xbWCcHbtWY (good slides).

Marek solo ep. To be released on Nuda Mag <3 later this year in text form. Piece starts like 17 minutes in hahaha.

This episode is entirely in Spanish. English translation is here: https://marekpoliks.com/noinvestigues_transcript .  We are delighted to be joined by the algorithmically contagious memetic research project no.investigues. If you are chronically online, especially if you are familiar with the Spanish-speaking corners of the internet, you must have already interacted with one of the echoes of no.in...

Molly Taft, Senior Writer at Wired, joins us to talk datacenters, AI, US power infrastructure, and big energy. You've almost definitely read her work, especially if you live in the US. This episode absolutely ROCKS and is maybe the most grounded and realistic assessment of the role that all of those above forces play together in our social and political moment.  A couple really relevant pieces, in...

We're joined by Laura Tripaldi: material scientist, writer, and researcher at the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai. You probably know her from Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), an essay in book form that became a phenomenon in theory and art circles.  Tripaldi's work challenges one of the strongest contentions within the philosophy computation: t...

Salesforce Child is our favorite artist. More  here and on her instagram @salesforcechild. We're on TOUR see us: NY Sat 3/7: https://luma.com/k3ffx3ze YALE Sun 3/8: https://exocapitalismthedatacentr.rsvpify.com MIT Mon 3/9: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf4Jh4UAS4ZehWgZWHhlEWyMZNBvzcML-vWdBHOkcxHaA9Bhw/viewform?usp=header

We're joined by Rosi Braidotti, Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities, for a wide-ranging conversation on posthumanism as both a philosophical project and a political orientation. Braidotti's work has constructed one of the most sustained and consequential accounts of what comes after the collapse of Eurocentric 'hum...

We're joined by N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor in English at UCLA, to think through  cognition in the broadest and most scaled sense.  Hayles is among the foundational thinkers of posthumanism in its Anglophone register, and this conversation tracks her intellectual trajectory from the question of how we became posthuman to her most recent project: an integrated cognitive fr...

We're joined by the four authors of *Digital Theory* — M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander R. Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby — for a roundtable on their new collaborative work. Digital Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) makes a deceptively simple but far-reaching claim: the digital is theoretical. Not in the sense that we theorize about it, but that digitality itself — mediation...

This episode continues our collaboration with Hothouse: The Future of Demonstration, a renegade lab for democracy convened in Vienna, and extends our ongoing inquiry into artificial intelligence, power, and what it means to be human under algorithmic governance. Recorded last autumn and released amid a so-called ceasefire in Gaza, this conversation confronts the accelerating use of AI in contempor...

We're joined by Bogna Konior, one of the most incisive thinkers of AI on the planet. Konior is a media theorist, scholar of emerging technologies, and author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet . Bogna is Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the AI & Culture Research Center, and co-editor of the forthcoming Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the...

We're joined by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, composer, philosopher, and force behind Liturgy, whose concept of transcendental black metal has redrawn the boundaries between underground music and systematic thought. Her work operates in parallel registers: an experimental music practice that stands on its own terms, and a body of theory moving through theology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.   This episod...

We're so so so honored to be joined by McKenzie Wark, the writer, theorist, and unmissable figure in the development of critical thought around information, class, and embodiment. Her work barely needs an introduction, but it has shaped how we think about technology, identity, and shifting relations of power, all while questioning the conventions of theory and public writing itself. Her concept of...

Two of the most important artists of the 21st century help us tease through the implications of our book. 

A transmission from Becoming Press' Πάμε Βενετία! conference in Venice this past September. Contributions in order from: Palais Sinclaire Lucas Ferraço Nassif Alessandro Sbordoni Ezili-i Sabbah Maks Valenčič Rhea Documented by Polymnia

Welcome to the first episode of Hothouse, a limited series exploring experimental forms of demonstration, resistance, and civic imagination. Produced in collaboration with Future of Demonstration: HOTHOUSE,a renegade lab for democracy against technocapitalist authoritarianism, this series invites selected guests to expand upon their methods and perspectives. We joined the festival in Vienna this a...

We’re joined by Leif Weatherby, associate professor at NYU, founding director of the Digital Theory Lab, and author of the new Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism , to think with us about AI, structure, and what happens when computation meets language on their own shared turf. Language Machines is easily the best book about AI written this year and is just a killer ant...

We're joined by Mohammad Salemy, organizer and facilitator of the New Centre for Research and Practice, fierce critic, social media (@inhumansofberlin) hyperstitionist, artist, personality, and force. This episode provides a lot of background into how the New Centre came to be. If you're unfamiliar with TNC, it's one of the main places  where theory happens today. Check out their website here , an...

We’re joined by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney — co-conspirators of The Undercommons — to think with us about AI, study, and brutality, and the long histories that place these concepts into relation. In a lot of ways neither Moten nor Harney require an introduction, they are the sources of major touchstone references made throughout this podcast — from last week’s guest Ramon Amaro to one of our fi...

We’re joined by Ramon Amaro, Creative Director of Design Academy Eindhoven — an engineer, philosopher, writer, curator, and altogether critical-force-to-be-reckoned-with on the subject of computation as it intersects with concepts like culture, race, and being. We were drawn to his tour-de-force “The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being” (2023), which is an...

We couldn't be more honored to have Catherine Malabou on the pod, a serious inspiration for all of us. This episode covers so much, moving from AI to education to anarchism to feminism, but all grounded within a focus on automony -- the autonomy of language from us, the autonomy of an anarchic subject or an anarchic collective, the autonomy of the clitoris from gender, the autonomy of the plastic...

Charles Mudede & Claire from Becoming Press sit down to discuss Exocapitalism: Economies w/ Absolutely No Limits ! Charles Mudede is an author, critic, filmmaker, and thinker whose work is everywhere. Watch Zoo , it's absolutely nuts. We were honored to have him write the prologue to Exocapitalism. You will almost never get a chance to watch a master get to work like this in this interview, ab...

We're back to our regularly-scheduled Disintegrator programming! We've been hard at work on our book ( buy it, wtf!) but have a number of killer episodes queued up for release. Émile P. Torres is a philosopher of the end times. You'll most likely associate their name (and that of collaborator Timnit Gebru) with developing the acronym TESCREAL, a grab-bag of ideologies that undergird the romance be...