Technoculture

Did you know that your writing style can give away your identity? Mike Kestemont is an expert in authorship attribution, a field of study that applies artificial intelligence algorithms to linguistics and text analysis. A self-declared enthusiast of the Deep Learning movement, Mike explains very complex concepts very easily. Worth a listen! I've learnt a lot. Including about a shocking spinoff of...

Giovanna Fossati is Chief Curator at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and Professor of Film Heritage and Digital Film Culture at the University of Amsterdam. I asked her about film preservation and restoration: how it is done, how much of the process is digital, what are the main challenges. On the Youtube channel of Eye, you can see some detailed demonstrations of the process.

Margaret Schedel is Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University in NY, and a creative force of nature. I've recently nominated her my Woman Hero in MusicTech and when I grow up I want to be like her! Meet a brilliant mind and let her lead you into her synaesthetic world of sounds.

Everything has its consequences, including digitality. But what are they? Are they positive or negative? Robin Boast is Professor of Cultural Information Science at the University of Amsterdam, and author of the book "The Machine in the Ghost: Digitality and its Consequences". He certainly has something to say about our society, media, and their history.

As both a popular mass medium and a platform for underrepresented voice, podcasts have cultural significance and scholarly value. But will they endure? Mary Kidd works at the New York Public Library and is involved in "Preserve This Podcast!", a grant-funded project that will help podcasters make sure their work doesn’t disappear.

Chris Salter is an artist, Concordia University Research Chair in New Media and the Senses, Co-Director of the Hexagram Network and of the Milieux Institute, and Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. He moves between high profile cultural venues, high profile scholarship, and a range of academic disciplines that bridge Science and Technology Studies, An...

Jürgen Hagler is the head of the research group "Playful interactive environments" at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. He studies Virtual and Augmented Reality installations, and is involved with Ars Electronica and expanded animation.

Richard Romaniello is a Grammy® award-winning audio engineer and producer, with numerous nominations for engineering and producingRichard Romaniello is a Grammy® award-winning audio engineer and producer, with numerous nominations for engineering and producing audiobooks. Richard talks about the "behind the scenes" of audiobooks, with anecdotes of his recording sessions with Christopher Plummer, M...

Brent Lee is first and foremost a Canadian musician and an art maker. He has some of the most fascinating - and useful, which is important - theories on the boundary between installations and performances, the use of technology in music/multimedia.

Bruno Jehle is the embodiment of an extraordinary range of talents: trained as a photo lithographer, he embraced and mastered the revolution in digital imaging, never losing a clear vision on where we should stand concerning cultural heritage and human values in the digital age.

Steven Laureays leads the Coma Science Group at the GIGA Consciouness Centre of the University of Liège in Belgium. He applies the scientific method to problems that historically have been prerogative of religion and philosophy: what is consciousness? Are near death experiences just fantastic stories, or there's something more to them? Can patients in a coma recover and how? How do you measure con...

Hans Tammen's music performance has been called "a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage". I asked him why, and the response is a summary of why I like Hans: clever, honest, and engaging at intellectual as well as practical level. The interview covers Hans work, the concepts behind his experimentation with science data and difference music genres, his own "hybrid" profile of musici...

Sabina Leonelli is an expert in Open Science, a movement that promotes 'openness', transparency, participation, and innovation in science. She is professor of philosophy and history of science at the university of Exeter in the UK, and her research focuses on big data for discovery, the challenges involved in the extraction of knowledge from digital infrastructure, and the role of the open science...

Dr. Frederick Baker is Research Associate at the Centre for Film Studies at Cambridge University. But he is also the author of the Virtual Reality Experience "Klimit's Magic Garden", created on the centenary of the death of G. Klimt. I interviewed Dr. Baker at the opening of the exhibition "Beyond Klimt" at BOZAR in Brussels, asking him about the vision behind the installation, his ideas about VR,...

Zoltan Istvan is the "global leader of the transhumanist movement" (The Mirror). The "embodiment of the Californian, libertarian, start-up culture tech-utopian dream" (BBC), Zoltan talks about what transhumanism stands for today and what awaits us in the near future if the right money is put in the right place.

Richard Hess is a walking encyclopedia on everything related to sound and audio, from live recording to the restoration of historical collections of magnetic tapes. He is the author of the number one repository of knowledge on magnetic tape restoration, a reference for the audio community worldwide. During this interview, following our first meeting face to face at the Library of Congress in Summe...

Europeana is the largest digital repository of cultural data in the world. Listen to Harry Verwayen, Executive Director of the Europeana Foundation, talk about the vision behind Europeana, its services and initiatives, during the celebrations for Europeana's first 10th anniversary.

A giant of computational linguistics, Mark Liberman has participated in the evolution of research in this field towards a model of quantitative, replicable studies based on published datasets. I asked Mark how the marriage between linguistics and computer science works today, what skills are young students equipped with, and what applications computational linguistics has today. More info at: www....

Technoculture celebrates the legendary Madame Curie on her birthday (Nov. 7th, 1867) with a special episode on her life and her legacy in conversation with Brigitte Van Tiggelen, historian of science with a specific training in physics and chemistry.

Godfried-Willem Raes is a polymath of our times. He is the founder of the Logos Foundation based in Ghent, Belgium, which celebrate 50 years of activity this year. Logos is a unique research and production centre for experimental musics, musical robotics and sound art. Learn more at: http://technoculture-podcast.com/

Thorsten Ries is a Marie Sklodowska Curie program fellow at the Sussex Humanities Lab / HAHP at the University of Sussex, UK, and a senior postdoctoral researcher (FWO) at the Institute of Modern German Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. He is especially interested in born-digital philology, digital forensics and preservation of personal digital archives.

Ray Edmondson is a pioneer of film and sound archiving, and an international leader in preserving, restoring, interpreting and presenting audiovisual media. I have had the pleasure to have a conversation with him just a few days before the 2018 World Day of Audiovisual Heritage promoted by UNESCO. More info at: http://technoculture-podcast.com/

Angelo Vermeulen is a space systems researcher, biologist, artist, and keynote speaker. In 2009 he co-founded SEAD (Space Ecologies Art and Design), an international transdisciplinary collective of artists, scientists, engineers, and activists. Its goal is to reshape the future through critical inquiry and hands-on experimentation. Biomodd is one of their most well-known art projects and consists...

2018 is the European Year of Cultural Heritage (EYCH). Lorena Aldana is part of the task force in charge of the implementation of the Year. Lorena tells us about the behind the scenes of the Year, the massive organization, the selection process, the Year in figures and anecdotes of some of the most interesting initatives she has witnessed. More details at: http://technoculture-podcast.com/

Welcome to the first episode of Technoculture!  My first guest is Michael Matlosz, Distinguished Professor of chemical engineering at the University of Lorraine and a member of the National Academy of Technologies of France. We discussed EuroScience, its mission and impact on the lives of every researcher and citizen in Europe, why it's important to join and to let your voice be heard. Check out m...