Art Is Not a Thing

Has the internet always been sexy?

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:00:00 +0200

This episode kicks off a new season, produced in cooperation with Radio Ö1–Austria’s leading cultural voice. Today, radio journalist Hannah Balber from Radio Ö1 talks to American artist and technologist Mindy Seu about sex and its influence on the internet. Mindy’s work combines archival research on cyberfeminism, online communities, and the histories embedded in the web with experimental forms of publishing and lecturing, questioning how digital infrastructures shape power, identity and knowledge.

Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1.

Host: Hannah Balber
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Yazdan Zand
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica

Resources:
A Sexual History of the Internet

Quantum Uncertainty in a Capitalist Reality

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0200

In this episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea is joined by artist Libby Heaney. Libby’s work engages quantum processes as active constraints that undo linear causality, hierarchical relations, and the bounded subject. After a crash course into key concepts, they discuss the potential and limitations of quantum to challenge existing social and political paradigms by proposing new modes of knowledge production.

Host: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Yazdan Zand
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica

Resources:
https://libbyheaney.co.uk/

Succumbing to the Machine: Desire in the Age of AI

Wed, 13 May 2026 16:00:00 +0200

In this episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea is joined by artist Erin Robinson. Her work, XXX Machina, operates as an autonomous desire machine that generates an endless stream of synthetic erotic imagery. They discuss desire, eroticism, human intimacy, and corporeality from Lacan and Bataille, all the way to today's shift brought by artificial intelligence.

Host: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Yazdan Zand
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica

Resources:
Erotics of the Synthetic Self: Fragmentation, Excess, and the Automation of Desire in XXX Machina

Challenging VR's Procrustean Bed: Disability, Tactile Epistemologies, Worldbuilding

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0200

In this episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea is joined by artist Iz Paehr to talk about inherently ableist technologies. Their work Feeling Virtual: An Archive of Touch looks at how digital technologies can be used to make cultural heritage more accessible. Challenging the sensorial hierarchies and ableist assumptions built into XR technologies, Iz explores the potential of touch and disabled ways of knowing the world around.

Resources:
Tactile Descriptions: A Workbook

Anthropocene Oscillations

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0100

In this episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea is joined by researcher and lecturer Alex Damianos and architect John Palmesino of Territorial Agency. Two years after the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy's decision to reject the proposal to recognise the Anthropocene as a geological unit, they discuss where the Anthropocene is today and where the debates are heading.

Host: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica

Territorial Agency
Dr Alexander Damianos

The Politics of Seeing and Being Seen

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0100

Using both the conditions and limitations of the photographic medium, Trevor Paglen's investigations into state surveillance, military operations, and data collection raise questions about truth, deception, and imagination. In this episode, Hannah Balber talks to the American photographer, author, and geographer about UFOs, psyops, the power of manipulation, and how seeing and being seen are deeply political.

Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1.

Host: Hannah Balber
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Hannah Balber, Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica

Trevor Paglen

Computational Compost: Against the Resource Intensivity of Data Centers

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0100

In this episode, Hanna Balber talks with architect Marina Otero Verzier about the environmental cost of data centres. Challenging the image of the 'cloud' as an immaterial entity, her project, Computational Compost, uses heat from computer servers to power a vermi-composting machine, thus imagining a potential symbiotic relationship between digital technology and nature.

Marina Otero Verzier

System Vulnerability

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0100

In this episode, Hannah talks to German media artist Simon Weckert about the societal impacts of digitalisation and his artistic strategies to disrupt, redirect, or reduce the logic of systems to absurdity. His work points to the vulnerability of allegedly infallible digital systems and the risks of relying on them.

Simon Weckert

Post-truth Museums and Their Post-colonial Directors

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0100

In this episode, Hannah Balber talks to German-Iraqi artist Nora Al-Badri about the colonial inscriptions borne by Europe’s cultural heritage. Her work, The Post-truth Museum, reignites seemingly irresolvable debates about restitution. In glitchy deepfakes, the artist puts postcolonial theory in the mouths of former museum directors (rather than institutional discourse), in an attempt to signal where discussions of restitution need to start.

Nora Al-Badri
The Post-truth Museum

Imaginative Futuring for Social Change

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0200

In this episode, Hannah talks to members of the Kairos Futura collective from Nairobi, Ajax Axe, Abdul Rop and Willie Ng'ang'a. Their project, The Wild Future Lab, won this year's S+T+ARTS Prize Africa, an initiative of the European Commission, recognising pioneering projects in Africa that catalyse social change by blending science, technology, and art. The Wild Future Lab not only creates a blueprint for the future but tries to build that future with resources available in the present.

Kairos Futura
https://www.thefutureisonearth.org/

Robotic Journeys through the Andes

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0200

In this episode, Hannah talks to Golden Nica winner Paula Gaetano Adi about Guanaquerx, the first robot in history to cross the Andes Mountains. More than a technical object, Guanaquerx is a poetic, political, and collective operation that was two years in the making, involved a transdisciplinary team and fused ancestral knowledge with contemporary robotic technologies. Its symbolic crossing of the Andes hints at a new kind of revolution, one that brings about alternative technological futures.

Paula Gaetano Adi
https://www.paulagaetanoadi.com/

Outsourcing Ethics: A Robot Speaks Our Violence

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0200

In the podcast episode, Hannah talks to artists Thomas Kvam and Frode Oldereid about their installation Requiem for an Exit - a piece featuring a towering robot delivering a haunting monologue about the darker side of humanity. The piece confronts audiences with the enduring legacy of human violence and the ethical responsibilities humans outsource to bureaucratic and technological structures.

Web of AI: Linking Homes and Battlefields

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 17:00:00 +0200

In today's episode, we talk to Sarah Ciston about their award-winning project, AI War Cloud Database. The project visualises the links between everyday life technologies and military infrastructure, and reflects on the increasing automation of war.

Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1.

Host: Hannah Balber
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Hannah Balber, Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica

Sarah Ciston:
https://sarahciston.com/
https://www.instagram.com/sarahciston/

Making Kin: Cells, Software, Synthetic Selves

Sat, 31 May 2025 12:00:00 +0200

In today’s episode, we are joined by artists Charlotte Jarvis and Zoran Srdić Janežič, and writer, educator, and curator Rick Dolphijn to discuss entities at the intersection of wetware, software, and hardware, and how they challenge our definitions of life, reproduction, parenthood, or care.

Resources:

Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family by Sophie Lewis
Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism by Silvia Federici
Testo Junkie by Paul Preciado
Humanistic Narratives by Michel Serres
Thumbelina: the culture and technology of millennials by Michel Serres
The Posthuman by Rosi Braidotti
Posthuman Feminism by Rosi Braidotti
Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway
The Philosophy of Matter: A Meditation by Rick Dolphijn

Revivification (Exhibition) by Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Gingold
Ani Liu
Ai Hasegawa
Errorarium by Adam Zaretsky

(later edits, suggested by Zoran Srdić Janežič)
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Dune by Frank Herbert
Southern Reach Series by Jeff VanderMeer
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

Touching Memories

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200

In this episode, host Ana Carabelea talks to Yulia Sion, Nuno Correia, and Michael Banissy about the power of haptics and sound in recreating and conveying memories, as a way to build empathy and bridge generational gaps in the digital age.

Resources:

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen by Michel Chion
Multisensory Experiences: Where the senses meet technology by Carlos Velasco and Marianna Obrist
When We Touch by Michael Banissy
Digital Touch by Carey Jewitt and Sara Price

Virtually Real: Writing Transmedia Spaces

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0200

In this episode we talk to Lara Lesmes + Fredrik Hellberg of Space Popular, Pierre Christophe Gam, and Brooklyn J. Pakathi about spaces - private, public, real, virtual, but most importantly transmedia spaces that confuse these definitions and open us to different ways of inhabiting spaces, interacting with one another, performing rituals, or building communities.

Resources:

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space and Time by Rasheedah Phillips
The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres

Labour in the Greenhouse: Reaping the Fruits of Automation

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 17:00:00 +0100

Greenhouses are sites of encounter between humans, plants, and machines, as well as socio-economic and geopolitical regimes. Within them, intricate stories of our day-to-day food production are weaved out of both visible and invisible threads. In this episode, we talk to artists Špela Petrič and Penelope Cain, and doctoral researcher Carolien Lubberhuizen about the intricacies these spaces hold.

Resources:

Seasonal Matters Rural Relations — Seasonal Neighbours
Ways of Being by James Bridle
Living Labour (documentary) by Renzo Sgolacchia
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States by Seth Holmes
Awkward Intimacies by Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko & Špela Petrič

Computation, Improvisation, Narration

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 17:00:00 +0100

The stories we tell about, with, or for technologies matter. Can we demystify misnomers such as artificial intelligence through storytelling, role-playing, and improvisation? In this episode, we talk to dmstfctn (Francesco Tacchini and Oliver Smith) and Lawrence Lek about how they build narratives around complex computational systems.

Resources:

The Tricks of the Trade by Dario Fo
Dadda by Brood Ma
Role-play with large language models by M. Shanahan, K. McDonell & L. Reynolds

Love and the City

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0100

What happens when our public behaviour is constantly monitored? Do we still hug, kiss, or allow ourselves to be vulnerable in public, does it stop us from being at our worst? In this episode, we talk to artist Noemi Iglesias Barrios and Guggenheim curator Noam Segal about surveillance systems in the public space and why we might want to 'measure' cities in terms of emotionality by training algorithms to search for signs of love on the streets.

Resources:

The Radicality of Love by Srećko Horvat
The Shadow (1981) by Sophie Calle
Noise by C. R. Sunstein, D. Kahneman, and O. Sibony
The Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford
Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin
Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

Operational Hoaxes

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0200

It’s easy to discard fakes and hoaxes as misinformation. But that might be too abrupt an ending to a discussion about the aesthetics of non-fact and the role of synthetic images in our visual landscape. In this episode, we talk to Martyna Marciniak and Jussi Parikka about synthetic images and their relationship to the material realities that (re-)/produce.

Resources:

The Eye of the Master by Matteo Pasquinelli
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
Material Witness by Susan Schuppli
Into the White by Chris P. Heuer
Operational Images by Jussi Parikka
Living Surfaces by A. Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka

There's Hope at the Edges of Power

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 19:00:00 +0200

In today's episode, we talk to Meredith Whittaker of Signal and artist Calin Segal about what surveillance and the concentration of power in the hands of a few tech companies mean for society. We discuss the context that made it possible for these companies to capture data without regard for privacy and use it to produce new social, cultural, and political dynamics. At the edges of what looks like an inescapable panopticon society, we find hope in the role of art, research, critical thinking, and organisations that prove “none of this is natural or inevitable”, in levelling the playing field.

Resources:
Selling the American People by Lee McGuigan
Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet by Matthew Crain
The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World by Ajay Singh Chaudhary
When the Clock Broke by John Ganz
Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization by Andrey Mir

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

Regendering Technology

Fri, 31 May 2024 01:00:00 +0200

In this episode, we look at the historical entanglements of technology and gender. Made in the image of their (often male) designers, technologies end up serving and reproducing patriarchal systems. How can technology finally "undergo a sex change" to overcome its current gender inscriptions? What political imaginaries make that possible, or become possible through feminist approaches to technology? Host Ana-Maria Carabelea tries to answer these questions in conversation with Professor Judy Wajcman and visual and multimedia artist Silvia Binda.

Resources:
Baltan Laboratories, Technology Otherwise
Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
OffDAC

Books by our guests:
Feminism Confronts Technology by Judy Wajcman
TechnoFeminism by Judy Wajcman
Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism by Judy Wajcman

Truth Preachers

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 21:00:00 +0100

The changes in how information is collected, produced, and disseminated leave their mark on the way information is consumed. This episode unpacks the qualitative shifts the algorithmic dissemination of information has brought to the media landscape and how in turn that affects citizens and their engagement with the democratic processes. We talk to Marta Peirano, Nina Jankowicz & Fabian Scheidler about how mis- and disinformation alter the societal fabric and what the future of journalism holds.

Resources:
The Social Dilemma
The Facebook Dilemma
Joy Buolamwini - Algorithmic Justice League
Bad News - Play the fake news game!

Books by our guests:
Against the Future. Citizen Resistance in the Face of Climate by Marta Peirano
The Enemy Knows the System by Marta Peirano
How to Be a Woman Online by Nina Jankowicz
How to Lose the Information War by Nina Jankowicz
The End of the Megamachine - A Brief History of a Failing Civilization by Fabian Scheidler
The Stuff We Are Made of - Rethinking Nature and Society by Fabian Scheidler

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

Truth Makers (Part II)

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 17:00:00 +0100

In this episode, we discuss how the data sets used in machine learning adopt hegemonic discourse and existing biases and, what’s more, amplify them, and we talk to some of the people out there who are fighting back. Our guest is Angie Abdilla - a palawa woman, founder, and director of Old Ways, New, whose methodology Country Centred Design, utilises Indigenous knowledges in the design of places, experiences, and critical technologies.

Resources:
Atlas of AI but Kate Crawford
Out of the Black Box: Indigenous Protocols for AI by Angie Abdilla, Megan Kelleher, Rick Shaw, Tyson Yunkaporta
Beyond Imperial Tools: Future-Proofing Technology through Indigenous Governance and Traditional Knowledge Systems by Angie Abdilla

Truth Makers (Part I)

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 17:00:00 +0100

In this episode, we discuss how machine learning and artificial intelligence adopt hegemonic discourse and existing biases and, what’s more, amplify them, and we talk to some of the people out there who are fighting back. Our guests are Kasia Chmielinski (they/them) - Co-Founder of the Data Nutrition Project, an initiative that builds tools to mitigate bias in artificial intelligence - and Ndapewa Onyothi Wilhelmina Nekoto - an independent researcher & community builder, part of Masakhane.

Resources:
QT.bot - Sitting here with you in the future by Lucas LaRochelle (CA)
Ceux sans qui la terre ne serait pas la terre by David Shongo (CD)

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

Data Lords

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 16:00:00 +0100

In this episode, we unpack the ownership and production of data that feeds today's hungry algorithms. What has thus far been described as a process of extraction reveals itself more and more as production. We talk to artist, filmmaker, and writer Hito Steyerl and award-winning journalist Karen Hao about the hidden labour behind the so-called data 'extraction', its appropriation through practices reminiscent of colonialism, and what needs to change for the AI industry to stop perpetuating harmful practices in which data is yet another commons turned into a commodity.

Resources:
AI Colonialism Series by Karen Hao, Heidi Swart, Andrea Paola Hernández, Nadine Freischlad
Power and Progress - Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) was part of European Digital Deal, a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

Intro Episode

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0100

In this short episode, host Ana-Maria Carabelea introduces The Digital Deal Podcast (currently Art Is Not a Thing) and the reasons and visions that drive it.

The Digital Deal Podcast is part of the European Digital Deal a three-year investigation into the accelerated and often unconsidered adoption of new technologies and their impact on society. The Digital Deal Podcast, invites artists, cultural critics and theorists, and AI experts to discuss how new technologies reshape our democracies and help us make sense of these changes.

Host & Producer: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Editing: Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

The European Digital Deal is a project co-funded by Creative Europe and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport. Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) can be held responsible for them.

If you want to find out more about the European Digital Deal, check out our website www.ars.electronica.art/eudigitaldeal/en/.