Technecast

We follow on from last week's episode, in which Rosalind Holgate-Smith and Jon Mason explored re-enchantment through their dance and storytelling practices respectively. This episode brings you a recording of the conversation Rosalind and Jon had at the Congress on 10 January 2022. Answering questions from the Technecast's Felix Clutson and the audience, they talked about the role of magic, about...

As part of the Techne January Congress hosted by Kingston University, we are delighted to share this special episode of the Technecast! Centred around the congress’s theme of Re-Enchantment, two techne researchers join us to share their work while we reflect on the power and potential of imagination, fantasy, touch, movement and connections to enact real-world magic and change. Jon Mason’s piece e...

In this, our second episode on Affect, queer theorist and cultural geographer Joe Jukes asks, "What is ‘rural’?" Joe notes how the British countryside can be thought of, and has been produced, in multiple different ways and in many different forms. They suggest that ‘rural’ is an affect, or feeling, that is aligned with a queer mode inquiry. This can be a surprising ‘use’ of rural, especially as t...

Welcome back to the Technecast! Our theme for this month is ‘Affect’, thinking about feelings, forces, and in-between states. Since the affective turn in the early 1990s, the humanities and social sciences have witnessed a profound and renewed interest in how feelings function, how they move, stick to, and shape bodies (both human and non-human) and worlds. We are delighted to welcome Mary Dawson...

Technecast is hosting the Invitations Series: four conversations by Judah Attille, Therese Henningsen, Mark Aerial Waller and Astrid Korporaal. Each episode is based on a research encounter with a creative practitioner connected to the field of sound & moving image. Together, the episodes question the relationships between audience, screen, maker & subject. This final episode features Ther...

Throughout November, Technecast is hosting the Invitations Series, which is made up of four conversations by Judah Attille, Therese Henningsen, Mark Aerial Waller and Astrid Korporaal. Each episode is based on a research encounter with a creative practitioner connected to the field of sound and moving image. Together, the episodes question the relationships between audience, screen, maker and subj...

Throughout November, Technecast is hosting the Invitations Series, which is made up of four conversations by Judah Attille, Therese Henningsen, Mark Aerial Waller and Astrid Korporaal. Each episode is based on a research encounter with a creative practitioner connected to the field of sound and moving image. This week, Mark Aerial Waller is in conversation with Donald Kunze, talking about Kunze's...

In November, the Technecast is hosting the Invitations Series, a series of four conversations by Techne PhD students Judah Attille, Therese Henningsen, Mark Aerial Waller and Astrid Korporaal. Each episode is based on a research encounter with a creative practitioner connected to the field of sound and moving image. Together, the episodes question the relationships between audience, screen, maker...

Shortly before his arrival in London in 1704, composer and conductor Johann Sigismund Cousser recorded some important advice in his notebook. Under the heading ‘What a virtuoso should observe upon arriving in London’, Cousser wrote down thirty-three tips given to him by fellow German and musician Jakob Greber. While some instructions are clearly aimed specifically at visiting virtuosi like Cousser...

This is the first episode in a series on Practice. Artist Victoria Burgher explores how practice can engage with political issues such as colonialism, imperial legacy and racism. Victoria uses various materials –- for example sugar, bagass, rubber, which are all linked to colonial crimes -- to challenge symbolic values. Her current project, funded by Techne, focuses on porcelain's associations wit...

Most of us have heard about Beethoven or Evelyn Glennie's deafness. But all musicians' hearing, just like everyone else's, deteriorates over time, with age and especially because of noise. So how do you keep performing as a musician when your hearing deteriorates? What techniques do musicians develop to cope with it? And what do cocktail parties have to do with it? CONTRIBUTOR BIORuth Hansford is...

Welcome back to the Technecast! We’re kicking off August with our new theme of music and we are delighted to welcome Cian O’Farrell onto the podcast. This episode looks at the ecological materials that digital music technologies consist of. Often, digital music is thought of as immaterial and completely divorced from the ecology of the planet. Yet, as Cian explores, the materiality of digital tech...

Continuing our theme of ‘futures’, we are delighted to share a conversation between artist and writer Diann Bauer with writer and theoretician Suhail Malik about time. The focus of Diann’s research is time outside of human experience and how it impacts how we live in relation to the anthropocene. With this in mind the conversation begins with an quote from a 2016 article by Malik and Armen Avaness...

*Re-released to include the live panel discussion from the Techne Congress*---This special episode is part of a two-part series we are releasing as part of techne's annual congress, which is this year hosted by Loughborough University around the theme of 'Back to the Future'. We invite you to step away from your screens at the congress for a reflection on how mindfulness, research and creativity w...

*Re-released to include the live panel discussion from the Techne Congress*---This is the first of two special episodes of the Technecast in conjunction with the Techne Congress, held this summer at Loughborough University. The Congress theme was "Back to the Future" and how looking back can help us move forward. In this episode, we discuss utopia – or utopias – and the commons, and how these noti...

Continuing our theme of materials, in this episode we welcome Ella Muir (@ellabrookmuir) to the technecast! She shares her research on the study of history through clothing as a form of material culture, the commonality of clothing as a form of communication and how, in the face of historic sumptuary laws and modern-day restrictions, clothing was and remains the single most powerful way in which w...

In this episode, Rose Coffey discusses how AR filters and edited selfies posted by Generation Z onto Instagram can be seen as forms of dress of the phygital self. Whilst considering self-representation across our evolving social space, the term phygital, is here understood as phenomena existing beyond conventional notions of time and space, through the merging of societal realms. Ultimately, this...

Continuing our theme of technology, we welcome Rachel Hopkin (@Rakishi) to the technecast! Placed within the context of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Rachel's podcast essay examines the human instinct to anthropomorphise the technology in our lives, and through a close analysis of Human Robot Interaction in the film Silent Running (Trumbull, 1972), she explores how the narrative framing of Robo...

The smart city is an urban environment that uses technology to collect data and then uses those data to manage, monitor and ‘improve’ its systems and infrastructure. This, supposedly, makes life easier for its citizens and radically transforms the city. There are, however, significant social, political and cultural implications. Our guest in this episode — the first of two on the theme of Technolo...

Continuing the Technecast’s miniseries on Nature, we hear from the poet, composer, sound artist and techne PhD researcher Rowan Evans. He introduces a recording of a poetic performance that recounts an instructional sequence about translating bird calls through Old English, which was recording running through Leigh Woods in Bristol. We then spoke to Rowan about the methodology of absurdity, magic...

I am Summer Phillips and my work is a symbiosis of art and science, utilising a multi-disciplinary approach to ask key environmental questions arising from human perceptions and subsequent behaviours. My current writing is a series of short, interlinked science fiction stories based on perceptions and creations of world: exploring the topics of speciesism, altered ecologies and parallel universe t...

This Technē Cast episode addresses the theme of ‘touch’ and the different ways of thinking the tactile sense is subjected to in Western culture. Whilst touch is central to our aesthetic experiences of food, sex, music, art and design, it is also shrouded in taboo and loaded with negative associations. This episode touches on all these debates – the perceived neglect of touch, touch hunger, and the...

From sensory experience to emotions, from the crossing over of tactility and aurality to the crossing over of love and grief. This itinerary is explored through lonely train journeys that encounter Susan Sontag’s 'In America', Pablo Picasso’s 'Science and Charity'; Connie Palmen’s 'Logbook of a Merciless Year', Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree Live Tour and the philosophy of tactility of Maurice Merleau-...

Edwin Gilson is a first year doctoral researcher at the University of Surrey, studying representations of the Anthropocene and regional mythology in the contemporary fiction of California. A BA and MA graduate in American literature, Edwin is particularly interested in modern environmental US fiction. In this podcast, he presents a summary of his initial PhD research into the relationship between...

In this episode Selin Genc collaborates with Orestis Lepine to interweave prose and music to explore the feeling of vertigo she suffers during her artistic process. Drawing on various creative traditions such as Land art, Colour Field Painting, speculative fiction, and cartography, she attempts to chart her predicament and find traces of analogous experiences in the works of others. The literary r...