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MTF Labs Podcast

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by Andrew Dubber

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MTF Labs is a growing global community of over 8000 brilliant innovators established and developed over a decade. These innovators come from a wide range of backgrounds, disciplines and skill sets. Many are academics – doctoral, postdoctoral and professorial; others are professional artists and musicians; some are industry experts, and many are scientists. MTF includes producers, curators, media professionals, policymakers and more. They come together from fields as diverse as medicine, agriculture, oceanography, theoretical physics, automotive, aviation, policy, product design, social sciences, robotics and AI, music composition and performance, arts management, cryptography, business incubation, traditional and Indigenous crafts, neuroscience, ecology and economics – and they pool their expertise in collaborations that could happen in no other context.<hr> Hosted on Acast. See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://acast.com/privacy'>acast.com/privacy</a> for more information.

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June 27, 2021

118. Robertina Šebjanič – Aquatocene

<div class="et_pb_section et_pb_section_0 et_section_regular" ><div class="et_pb_row et_pb_row_0"><div class="et_pb_column et_pb_column_4_4 et_pb_column_0 et_pb_css_mix_blend_mode_passthrough et-last-child"><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_image et_pb_image_0"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="795" height="500" src="https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/16205520/Robertina.jpg" alt="Robertina underwater" title="Robertina" srcset="https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/16205520/Robertina.jpg 795w, https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/16205520/Robertina-480x302.jpg 480w" sizes="(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) 795px, 100vw" class="wp-image-216517" /></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_audio_0 et_clickable et_pb_audio_module clearfix et_pb_bg_layout_light et_pb_text_color_dark et_pb_audio_no_image"><div class="et_pb_audio_module_content et_audio_container"><h2 class="et_pb_module_header">Robertina Šebjanič - Aquatocene</h2>by MTF Labs | MTF Podcast<audio class="wp-audio-shortcode" id="audio-216515-1" preload="none" style="width: 100%;" controls="controls"><source type="audio/mpeg" src="https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/118-robertina-sebjanic.mp3?_=1" /><a href="https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/118-robertina-sebjanic.mp3">https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/118-robertina-sebjanic.mp3</a></audio></div></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_text et_pb_text_0 et_pb_text_align_left et_pb_bg_layout_light"><div class="et_pb_text_inner"><div>Robertina Šebjanič is an internationally awarded artist, whose work revolves around the biological, chemical, political and cultural realities of aquatic environments, and explores humankind’s impact on other species and on the rights of non-human entities. </div><div> </div><div>Based in Ljubljana, her research into the sound worlds and everyday realities of aquatic environments serves as a starting point to investigate and tackle the philosophical questions on the intersection of art, technology and science, and the role of humans not only in damaging the environment but also potentially helping to repair it. </div><div> </div><div><a href="https://robertina.net">Robertina Šebjanič</a></div><div><a href="https://twitter.com/roiiroiiro">@roiiroiiro on Twitter</a></div></div></div><div class="et_pb_button_module_wrapper et_pb_button_0_wrapper et_pb_button_alignment_right et_pb_module "><a class="et_pb_button et_pb_button_0 et_pb_bg_layout_light" href="https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/118-robertina-sebjanic.mp3" target="_blank">Download episode</a></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_post_nav_0 transcript et_pb_posts_nav nav-single"><a href="https://mtflabs.net/podcast117/" rel="prev">← Previous episode</a></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_text et_pb_text_1 transcript et_pb_text_align_left et_pb_bg_layout_light"><div class="et_pb_text_inner"><h3>Transcript</h3>Dubber Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. You’ll be familiar by now that one of the main interests that brings this amazing global MTF community together is the intersection of science and art. But it’s not just that it’s cool or interesting to bridge those worlds in new ways, although, of course, it is that too. It’s also becoming central to our understanding of how the grand challenges of our world – not the least of which involves our stewardship of the earth, its ecosystems, and diverse species – can be urgently addressed.With that in mind, over the course of this podcast we’ve explored the built environment, new ways of mapping the world, new ways of understanding biological lifeforms, and new knowledge through the perspective gained with the view from space, but perhaps one of the richest seams of seldom explored potential for the kinds of new knowledge we need to ensure our ongoing existence is to be found in something that there is more of than pretty much anything else in this world: ocean. And someone who doesn’t just bridge but blends oceanic science and art is MTFer Robertina Šebjanič. Robertina is an internationally awarded artist whose work revolves around the biological, chemical, political, and cultural realities of aquatic environments and explores humankind’s impact on other species and on the rights of non-human entities.Dubber Robertina, it’s really great to have you on the MTF Podcast. Of course, you were involved in MTF Aveiro in Portugal last year, but I remember we first met at MTF Central in Ljubljana back in 2015. Do you want to start by telling us a little about how you connected with MTF in the first place?Robertina It’s true. It’s quite some while ago that we met and all this started to happen. So I was at that time working on a performance together with a colleague. It’s an audiovisual performance together with colleague Aleš Hieng Zergon, and we had been doing different experimental stages, I would say, with ferrofluidic structures, which we went into showing the micro and macro situations real-time with the sonic interpretation of it also.And, actually, Miha Ciglar organised IRZU Festival at that time, also in Ljubljana. And he was the one who connected with Michela and with you and with the Music Tech Festival and with organising the Music Tech Lab also in Ljubljana, and he invited me and Aleš to encourage us to be part of it, and he was very happy to introduce us also to Michela Magas and you. This was how we started to meet. And then when you spend time together physically at the event, when you exchange a lot of thoughts… Especially with Michela. We had quite nice conversation flow. And then since then, I’m following what is happening, and I think it’s great to have this kind of base hub to follow how the communities are developing also.Dubber Because IRZU was a long-running Slovenian sound art festival. Had you done a lot with Miha at that before?Robertina Yeah. With IRZU, I was collaborating with different hats, I would say, because I was also for some while in the beginning of 2010/2012 and so on working in the media lab in Ljubljana as a producer. So with Miha, we organised together events also many times. So it wasn’t only me as an artist, but also me as an active member of the bigger organisation structures, also sometimes collaborating with Miha inside of that. And it was great because his festival… Was that it was very boutique. It was small, but it was very interesting. The people he managed to bring to Slovenia also. And I have to say, at that time, I didn’t travel yet so much. For me, it was great opportunity to really get to know different branches of experimental improvisation and sound art in general, so it was really good platform to be involved with.Dubber And you say sound art. You’re an artist and you’re a researcher, but it’s mostly underwater related things, isn’t it? It’s sound from beneath the sea. It’s sound from aquatic animals. Why? Why is that interesting?Robertina It started very organically. 2012, when I stopped working as a producer and started to be much more involved as an artist, an independent working in different projects, I was invited to take part in Triennial of Contemporary Art in Turkey in Izmir, and there… Actually, they invited me specific with the idea of combining the knowledge of the local scientists and local artists. So I was in the same way working as a mediator between these two different communities. And at the same time, I was also developing some conceptual frame for a new research which I was… Looking into it, and then spending lots of time in the Izmir Bay at the marine station there. And first, it was more on the shores, and then also sometimes with boats and so on. I started to be more interested what is happening.And sound-wise, I have to say that first time I put the hydrophone into the water, it was… Getting just immersed into something which I didn’t heard before, and this effect is still, even though I work on this now since several years, it’s still very, very engaging and it’s very interesting because it’s the sound of something which we don’t hear on the daily basis. It’s quite foreign. It’s sometimes quite hard to understand what it is, which animal it is. It’s full of different kinds of structures. And also physicality of the sound by itself in the water, it’s like having absolutely different shape, if I call it like that, because it travels wider, it’s stronger, it’s…Dubber It’s a very different medium, isn’t it?Robertina Yes.Dubber I’ve got a couple of hydrophones myself. Hydrophones – if you haven’t come across the term, if you’re listening – it’s basically a microphone that you can stick in the water. But one of the things that you notice the first time you use a hydrophone is when you record sound underwater, mostly what you hear is people. You hear motors. You hear boats. You hear those sorts of… How big a problem is that? Is that having a particular effect, or should I just try and block that out?Robertina That’s a very good question because, actually, this is something which I came across in the beginnings a lot. I was trying to block out all the human imprint. And then after some while, I realised more than I will try to delete and clean that sound from the boats and ships and everything else what is around, I realised that then I would be just showing half of the soundscape, which is us being there and our presence. The noisy presence is something which I really started to point out on the end of the day. And then from this, I’ve started to develop body of work of the sound artwork which is called ‘Aquatocene’ where I’m mixing together bioacoustics and the sounds of all these different sounds and songs from fish and shrimps and everything which is… All the creatures of the sea, I would say, and then also us humans, from the boats and similar. And it happens many times that I go out on field trip to record and most what I get is us humans with different technological imprints being there.Dubber Is aquatocene your word, or is there a literature of that?Robertina Aquatocene is actually my word. I was playing around with the Anthropocene defining how the human is actually imprinting everything. And in my conceptual frame about my work, I started to develop also… I call it aquaformations. It’s the way how we are changing the water from inside out. Then in this kind of play of words…Dubber You mean like terraforming but underwater?Robertina Yes, exactly.Dubber Okay. I’m with you.Robertina This is happening a lot, and this is something I think in next few years, the topic will be much stronger because I see already the pace… I remember, when I started to work on this in 2012 and when I started to do compositions in 2016 and so on, there was not such a big interest into this. People have been always asking me “Why this? It sounds very esoteric.”, or there had been different ideas because if you don’t know it, we apply something to it and not always say something, but it’s actually there. I was quite persistent with this because I really wanted to bring this out. And in my work, I try to invite also scientists, which they’re working on daily basis with this, to also give them the platform which we artists have and share it with them because I think it’s very important to have this mergence of different knowledge coming together.Dubber Sure. But you are an artist in a very scientific domain. To what extent are you a scientist?Robertina Well, I always joke with scientists that I’m scientist until they let me go. No, but it’s a tricky question because, yes, I’m actually trained as an artist. I finished sculpturing. But since ten years, I’m working very in-depth and very interested into marine… I’m specifically interested into marine science. So, of course, marine science has many different layers, and it’s not only one or another. Oceanography is… It’s a combination of biology and so on. What I see is people working in this kind of scientifical field, they’re used to have different combinations of people working together, so I’m then not such a disturbance then anymore, I would say, as an artist. I would say that I am very interested into it. I try not to be just fascinated with it, but understand also the context and then work with that further.Dubber Okay. Well, as someone who may not be a marine biologist but works near them, I have what might be a really stupid question. Do fish have ears?Robertina I would say first, Andrew, there is no stupid questions.Dubber Okay. That’s very kind of you.Robertina No, no. But it’s a very important question, actually, because we are not aware how very loud and talkative the underwater world is in the sense of, yeah, there’s dolphins, whales, everything what is big and has some…Dubber Yeah. Those are mammals. I know enough about marine biology to know that those aren’t fish, so my question stands. Do fish have ears? Because I know whales have songs and I know dolphins chatter and all the rest of it. I’m not aware of fish talking, if that’s the right word. Do they, and…Robertina It’s the right word, yeah. They like to talk, and they’re very chatty, especially smaller fish like clownfish and so on. They’re very talkative. They really exchange lots of information between each other when they communicate. And how much I was reading and listening into it and also talking with different marine scientists, especially the ones working on this kind of topic of bioacoustics, they all say that they also have their own social structures, and they debate them also while they’re happening, so it’s quite interesting to observe that. Definitely, they have ears. And what is the annoying thing with us humans being so loud there with boats and ships and all this is that they cannot close these ears, so they…Dubber Well, nor can we. We have eyelids but not earlids.Robertina Exactly.Dubber Do these different species communicate with each other? The dolphins and whales example. Do dolphins talk to whales, or are they completely oblivious or unaware of what each other is saying?Robertina I would say it like this. First of all, there should be more extensive research about this. But how much I know and how much I came across and how much I spoke with different marine biologists, it’s definitely… There have been occasions that there have been interactions between different species. And this interspecies communication, it’s happening there because it’s either there’s the same danger or they go for the same hunt, like towards the smaller fishes and schools of fish and so on. So I do believe that they also exchange somehow between not only…Because there are very interesting thing I came across of an excellent scientist who is working with whales, and she’s observing when and how they are, as families, moving from one part to another and why this is happening. And, of course, there is different parameters because there is never only one why something is moving somewhere, but one of very interesting things is she told me that they know which kind of family it is because they have different dialects. So they figure it out that “Huh, this is the same species, but a bit different dialect than the other ones.”.Dubber I like that it’s a dialect and not a language or an accent. It’s that in the middle thing.Robertina Yes, exactly, because… I think that’s quite interesting and engaging, I think. I was quite interested in it, and I did read a lot about this kind of stuff because I think it’s important, even though that in my projects, I do speak mostly about these kind of underwater noise pollutants and our presence there. But also, I try to explain why our presence is so disturbing, and this is exactly because of this. How and what is happening with all the life.Dubber It’s interesting because noise pollution, as bad as it is, it’s the one kind of pollution where you can just turn it off. If it was air pollution or chemicals in the water or anything like that, there’s a real problem long term, but for noise pollution, you just flick a switch and it’s gone. Is that something that we can actually have some control over and make an impact?Robertina Definitely. That’s absolutely true, but the problem is that most of our goods and our… Whatever we consume and whatever we use on daily basis and buy in shops and so on is coming from the transport on cargo ships, and transport on cargo ships was inflating in the last fifty years. It was like 150 percent more boats. And as we speak, just last week there was the Suez Canal Evergreen boat stuck, and I think you also… Everybody was following that.Dubber Sure. But now I’m thinking did it get quiet in the Suez Canal?Robertina Definitely, but it was just less traffic. But most of the boats, they could be still running because they could have been waiting that they will drive through, so it didn’t help. And what it showed, how something like this can break everything and which kind of panic is started to happen. And mostly, what I was finding quite odd in this media frenzy was that it was constantly reporting about the billions of dollars of…Dubber Global trade.Robertina Exactly. And this shows you how very fragile it is and how very important it is also at the same time. Important because the global economy is relying on it. So this means that, in this case, it’s really hard to just switch the motors down.Two years ago, I was on one very interesting boat, Celtic Explorer. It’s research boat from the Irish government. I was there as an artist in residency through Galway 2020 and the Aerial/Sparks project, and it was great to experience that because that was a silent boat. This means that the machinery, the technology, how the boat was put together and where the main machinery, main propellors, they had been stationed, it was done differently than other boats. And if we would even drive slower, it’s already impacting the levels of the noise pollution which is present. I think there is a long road.And definitely, noise pollution is one of the most stupidest pollution, and I call it like that. It’s like I like to say, it’s very stupid pollution because, yes, we could just turn it down because, as you said, chemical pollutants or microplastics and plastic in general and so on, it’s much more harder to get rid of it because it gets interweaved into the environment on the molecular levels, which we don’t have even the knowledge how to be able to prevent that.Dubber Yeah. If you stop putting microplastics into the ocean, the microplastics that are there are still there, but you stop putting sound into the ocean, it’s all gone. That’s really interesting. Do we have any clue how damaging the sound is?Robertina I think the clue will be soon much more present because the numbers of fish is drastically disappearing. This means that fisher industry is having lots of problems. And then, of course, they go with bigger boats with bigger nets, deeper, which causes many different levels of problems. But definitely, it’s changing everything.I always like to explain it that this noise pollution which is happening in the oceans, the sea, is the same like in the cities. Okay, in the time when we could sit in the cafes next to the crowded road. It’s very normal that you do start to yell towards each other because you have a coffee, but there’s lots of cars around you and you start to shout, and this is happening also in the oceans, the seas. The communication which was before on much lower decibels starts to be louder and louder, and it’s called the Lombard effect, and this is just present.Dubber So the fish are shouting at each other?Robertina Exactly. Fish are the same like us. We just like to communicate.Dubber Yeah. It’s interesting. When you say, for instance, the impact of COVID, which has made cities quieter, at least to a certain extent, I guess it’s the same with waterways. We were invited to come and do something with Venice Biennale about the sound in the canals. Because of COVID, the assumption was the canals had become very, very quiet because there were no boats going up and down. But, of course, we couldn’t go to Venice because of the COVID pandemic. So we never, unfortunately, got to do that, but it’s really interesting to me that there is this impact that can be had that can go away so quickly. And do the fish continue to shout when the sound goes away, or has it become naturalised?Robertina This I don’t know, and this is something which I would like to research further on. In my prediction, I think that with generations, of course, this changes. And then depending how long the lifespan of which organism is quicker, generational gaps can be longer or quicker depending on that, so definitely would be interesting to explore that and…Because waterways, yes, maybe on the beginning of COVID they have been a bit less, but the routes are still happening. There is so many boats out there, and especially because… I will go back to Suez because that’s just the recent thing which happened, but it was just interesting to… I was just quite amazed to explore how much we don’t know about these kind of logistics and how something is coming from somewhere to somewhere else, because I think we are quite unaware of how much we abuse and use the water traffics, because it’s not only oceans and rivers, it’s also rivers and…Dubber And, of course, different species depend on different senses. I know dogs are really big on smell and etc., but it’s quite dark underwater, especially when you go down deep. I assume that sound becomes very important.Robertina Definitely, yeah. After two hundred meters, we come to this more twilight-y area. You can see something, but it’s really hard. And then very quickly you are in darkness, so sound is one of the main orientations. As humans, I like to say that we are visual animals, and in water, this changes. So the aquatic organisms, they’re more or less very sound and also touch dependant, to the pressure of the environment. And then, of course, there is this world of bioluminescence, but…Dubber Well, that’s another topic entirely. And it almost connects with the thing that I’ve been fascinated about with your work, is because there are lots of fish and there are lots of aquatic creatures and all the rest of it, and you were drawn to jellyfish for some reason, and I don’t know… They’re beautiful. Particularly your installations with the jellyfish and communicating with them. Particularly when they’re lit, they’re incredibly beautiful creatures, but what was it about them that led you to want to interact with them and communicate with them, essentially?Robertina With the jellies I was actually started to work when I was also in Izmir in Turkey, and it was just… There is always few things why something starts to be happening and so on. So on one hand, I was really fascinated with one particular jellyfish species which is called immortal jellyfish. It’s a really tiny one. You can find it in the Mediterranean and near the Japanese shores. And it has this ability to just shrink back to the polyp stage when the parameters around it are not best and can go back to the full adult organism when everything is good around it, and this was very interesting.Dubber Wow.Robertina And at the same time, there was huge jellyfish blooms in February, which was really unusual because this should happen few months later, and this was full of moon jellyfish. It’s one species which is very common species, and they use it also a lot in biology as model organisms, so I could find lots of info about it. And they have also very interesting regenerative possibilities and so on. And when there was full bay of them… Just one morning we woke up and they had been there, so I started to be interested why they came, what is happening, how come. And they are very interesting as a… Jellyfish are one of the oldest organisms living in the oceans and seas. They say that they are dating back to 500 million years, which is unimaginable.Dubber Wow, yeah.Robertina It’s really hard to grasp this kind of long geological information.Dubber And more or less unchanged in that state.Robertina Yes, exactly. This is very interesting. And then also depending how they move, what is happening, and how they are done, because they’re so foreign to us. They have totally different system of being. So here was something that I was quite intrigued.So one was this immortal jellyfish which is quite a myth. It goes into this theoretical biological immortality which is something which I like to explore in my art. And then, on the other hand, these creatures which, yeah, they can be fragile, but they are very, very robust also at the same time. It’s quite interesting. In the ecological sense, they predict. They are quite interesting bioindicators. The bigger the numbers, more of them, then you know that there is some bigger changes also happening.Dubber Describe your art. What do people encounter? What do they experience when they come across your work?Robertina It’s depending. We speak about the work which we mentioned now which is referring to the jellyfish. It’s immersive installations, but they try to give you also visual guidance into the bigger research which is done in the backbone also. And through the years, I see that people do follow that. Of course, it’s hard to say how others are perceiving my art.What I try to bring to the public is to present this in-depth interest of mine which I have for these interspecies relationships. This means between us and the others, but not only between us and the others but also what is happening between other species by themselves and how all of us are coexisting and coliving in the same world and how we are still quite failing in sharing that in the quality ways, I would say.Dubber So are you communicating science? Are you interpreting it? Are you asking questions about it? Are you creating meaning from it? What is the thing that you do to science when you present it to people through art?Robertina What I try to do is, first of all, to ask questions and to communicate it in the sense of interpretation of the knowledge which I’m able to grasp, together with all the collaborators, of course, because in the bigger projects, you’re never alone. There is always lots of quite big team of people which we’re all working together towards the presentations and showing the projects.And I also try to bring it also to some other levels because science has its own limitations also as art sometimes. And when I combine it together, I try to bring also some other questions in which they wouldn’t be raised because of economy, politics, or some other issues, which… It can happen in scientifical research also because there are some restrictions also which they can be put out, and I think that with artistical kind of approaches we can open up the discussions which they sometimes wouldn’t be perceived as something that is important.And in my art, I combine it many times also with citizen science. So next to projects, I’m many times also developing different, more workshop-y debate platforms because I think that installations, especially earth science… It’s a field which is very fascinating for me, and I think it’s a field that I’d be very comfortable in because I’m very curious also about it.Dubber When you say citizen science, do you mean groups of people coming together to contribute to the research?Robertina Yes, exactly, and also to develop different modalities. In 2019, I was working together with team of Matadero in Madrid, and we had been doing group workshop with five hundred people at the river Manzanares, and what I developed was the methodology how to bring five hundred people to the river without damaging the river at the same time.Dubber Wow.Robertina How to navigate that. So it’s always a bit of dramaturgy also, how you perceive the knowledge of somebody. And with citizen science, what I try to bring out is also to share the knowledge in sense of opening up the science to the wider public so that we can all understand why something is happening. And now especially, I think, in the time post-corona or in between corona or… We’re not post yet. We’re quite deep inside of it. So I think it’s very important to be able to understand what is the scientifical levels, like “Why do we need to understand?”, “What does it mean, biodiversity?”. I think that this was a lesson in the last year which we all got to understand. This interconnection. So what does it mean if we cut the forest out and why these animals are coming to us and why these kinds of viruses are jumping, and that this was always the case, which was that we started to be too comfortable.Dubber Sure. And that relates to climate change. I was going to ask “Does climate change affect underwater communication?”, but it affects everything. So I guess my question is, how does climate change affect underwater communication?Robertina It definitely affects it. More traffic there is in the aquatic areas, more changes are happening at the same time. I was just recently reading into this deep-sea mining, which is quite scary prospect.Dubber Because that can’t be quiet, can it?Robertina They can’t be quiet, and they manage to damage huge areas. Especially this kind of fishing which when they throw huge fish nets into the sea and drag them. These can be huge. This is like… I don’t know. Twenty football fields big. One net.Dubber Wow.Robertina So this kind of deep-sea mining, of course, this machinery and everything what they plan to use, it’s like this. Massive.Dubber And are things like ocean acidity a problem? Does pH level affect sound travel or anything like that?Robertina Absolutely. The more acid it is, the more pitchy the sound starts to be, so the sound starts to change. So in the long term, I think this could also happen that fish or animals would not understand each other anymore.When I started to research this underwater pollution and when I started to read about it, I came across Douglas Adams’ lecture about it. He is great writer, but he was actually also working a lot on the biodiversity and understanding that. So he was with a biologist…Dubber Was it Mark Carwardine was the writer he was with? They did ‘Last Chance to See’, I remember, about endangered species.Robertina Exactly. I was really struck by when he was explaining why the Yangtze river dolphins disappeared, because these had been dolphins which they didn’t saw nothing. They were river dolphins, so they had been quite blind because the Yangtze river is such a dense river. But then because it was also so noisy, they couldn’t meet each other anymore because they just couldn’t hear each other. So you don’t see and you don’t hear…Dubber Right. If you don’t see and you don’t hear, you don’t breed.Robertina Yes. And then you don’t have kids anymore and so on. I think that you can explain in two sentences what is the danger and why this is not good. And, yes, acidity, as you mentioned before. That the changes in the pH are influencing sound very much. It starts to be really pitchy and uncomfortable, and it starts to travel differently. And all these changes, of course, are interconnected into bigger system.Dubber I’m really curious, do you eat fish? It must be strange to consume something that you can have a conversation with.Robertina I kind of don’t consume so much. I’m more a plant eater because it starts to be weird after some while, especially when you start to develop these kinds of different relationships with different species. When we’re at the sea, we do… It’s a bit different, I would say. It’s depending from the environment. And definitely, what I’m encouraging everybody to avoid is this kind of buying stuff from these aquatic farms or farming in general. Industrialisation of the meat in general. I think it’s something which can be very dangerous also because the amount of antibiotics which are used and different stuff. We don’t want to have this inside of our body, I think.Dubber Sure. So that’s from a health perspective. I just was wondering about once you start thinking about creatures that are having conversations with each other, you start to think about the sentience behind that and those sorts of things, so, yeah. No, it was just interesting to me because you talk about trawler fishing and all these sorts of things, but I guess from an ecosystem perspective, balance is the ambition for this. It’s not that you want all ships to suddenly go away, but that we should treat this environment a little bit more carefully. Would that be fair?Robertina Definitely. I think the sustainable way of thinking – if the sustainable way of thinking would be actually sustainable – I think it will be very fair and also ecologically produce meat, or farms which they’re not big and so on. I don’t believe in any extremes are good. I’m just a bit afraid that we went quite far, we as consumers. People using this planet in different ways. That the ways which we went, they are quite scary. And health is one of the ways how to explain it because I think, okay, maybe I’m also under the influence of corona, but it’s definitely something where we can see how this kind of stuff is changing and how something like a small virus can change the common reality of everybody.Dubber Yeah, absolutely. Are you a diver? If you go underwater, does it sound the same as dropping some microphones down? Because I haven’t been down deep. I’ve snorkelled. I haven’t done deeper diving than that. Does it sound like what you hear when you put microphones down?Robertina With diving, I just went few times because I’m having some of my own personal health issues that I can’t do it for the long term and so on. But definitely, the sound is different because also as a diver or also when you snorkel, you produce the bubbles. You produce the sound. You can hear something, but with hydrophone, it’s like… Hydrophones are having this kind of passive receiving of the sounds which are there around them, so it is a bit different. But when I perform and when I show this, especially this work ‘Aquatocene' which is dealing with this underwater noise pollution and stuff, lots of divers, they tell me that it’s exactly how they hear it also. That they perceive it. Especially people which stay longer down. They can tell us how that is perceived.Dubber I guess after a while you would stop hearing yourself and start hearing other things, and that would probably put the twist on it. Tell me about the ‘Adriatic Garden’. That is something that I came across and I think requires a little bit of explanation.Robertina So the ‘Adriatic Garden’ was one of the reactions of last year situations, I would say. So together with Gjino Šutić from UR Institute in Dubrovnik, we had been… It has a bit of a history.Dubber As most things do.Robertina Most things do have that, yeah. So when me and Gjino in 2008… And we had been artists in residence at Ars Electronica. And in our project, which is called ‘aqua_forensic’, we had been looking a lot especially on the chemical pollutants and presence of them in the oceans and seas and the rivers, and we did also some quite interesting researches with in vitro experiments with microorganisms and microalgae to see what is happening on that level. And so with the project, we developed an installation where the public can get this information but also perceive this in quite poetic way to understand that these chemicals, like the pills and everything what we digest… Because our bodies are quite wasteful, I would say, in this sense. They produce lots of waste. Not wasteful. So when you take the pill, only twenty percent stays inside of your body. Eighty percent of the pill is going to the dark water sewage and to the rivers and, of course, ends up in the oceans and seas. So, of course, this is through the microorganisms then going back to the bigger organisms, and sooner or later comes to us back with the…Dubber Wait, wait. So what you’re saying is if I take an ibuprofen, twenty percent of it does its job and eighty percent of it ends up in the ocean somewhere and affects fish, for instance.Robertina Something, yes.Dubber Wow.Robertina It’s of course different percentage depending on the different pharmaceuticals, and it’s also depending which kind of absorption our body is able to be done, but this was research we came across with Gjino when we had been doing this ‘aqua_forensic' project.So the project is actually a combination of… There is installation. We developed also workshops so people could see direct impact of chemicals on things, and also scientifical paper which Gjino and his colleagues are publishing I think in two years time because it takes time that this goes through. But then last year, especially in beginning of the year – I think it was something like this time – the guys from Ars Electronica, Martin Honzik and Christl Baur, contacted me and Gjino, and we started to talk how they planned to do their programme because they had been starting to prepare for online presence because it was quite logical that in September it would be really hard to…Dubber Not everyone is going to Linz.Robertina No. Especially, what I have to say that Ars team did very good when they had been thinking was, yes, not everybody is able even to come there, and if you do international festival which tries to involve people not only from the same continent but different continents, it’s really hard to push people to travel in this kind of very hard, harsh, and unknown situations, so they started to develop these online gardens, how they called them. Like different points. And with Gjino, we proposed at that moment to start to work on this kind of ‘Adriatic Garden’ because I live in Ljubljana, but I am one hour drive away from the Slovenian coast, Koper, and I collaborate there with PiNA organisation a lot, and Gjino is living and working mostly in Dobrovnik. So we decided to have two points at the Adriatic coast and start to open these discussions of what is happening with these kind of water bodies, how we can prevent them.There had been exhibitions. In Dobrovnik, Gjino organised group exhibition which was part of this Ars Electronica event. On the both points, we had workshops. We organised also round-table debate with different organisations, institutions, like with the aquariums and with the institutes and so on and also artist to debate how to connect what would be needed to be done and which kind of organisation or ways we would need. And then, of course, because I’m working as a sound artist, I invited also other sound artists to present, and it was some kind of podcast-y version of it, of a sound exhibition, of under and above water of Adriatic. And I think those examined works which they had been presented because I think it’s quite a challenge to rethink also all these kind of new ways how we can show things online, but then because there is lots of stuff also happening, I think that especially podcasts and with listening you can also be a bit less involved on… I think that visual is sometimes overrated.Dubber I’m one hundred percent with you there. As someone who is short-sighted and colour blind and loves a microphone, I know exactly what you’re talking about. You record a lot of sound underwater, and you don’t just use that sound recording. You make compositions out of it. What does that sound like? How do you do it, and where can people hear it?Robertina Yes and yes. I do record it a lot, and I do work on compositions. So I try to record on… I would say it like I come to some locations and I do different levels of recordings depending on the length of my hydrophone, is the limitation here. But because the water is such an interesting material and sound travels so wide and far, it’s quite good. You can get quite a lot from specific locations. So then I condense these compositions when I’m…One thing is, as a field recording, when you listen from the beginning to the end is one situation. But in compositions, I try to mix these different vibes of different day, and my intent is always to present what was present but then also to bring out all these anxieties which we are also bringing towards the animals. So in some compositions, this is stronger, and some less strong, and then it’s always a bit mixture also with bioacoustics. It gives this idea about how we perceive and what we perceive there, but also to help the public to understand that there is so many vivid and different sounds there that it sounds sometimes… Especially some reefs where there’s lots of corals and so on, there’s also lots of other organisms mostly, and these are areas which they’re very talkative, very chatty, I would say. There is lots of chit chat happening. Shrimps, for instance. Shrimps are very loud.Dubber Yeah. Making the snapping sounds, right?Robertina Yes.Dubber Do you have to see that they’re there before you drop the mic down, or do you just drop and hope?Robertina Sometimes I drop and hope, and if I’m lucky and if I have good local guides, they can tell you where there is some more animals which you can encounter or not. So it’s always combination. Because this is quite artistic research, I call it, it’s not scientific in that sense, and that’s why I like to invite always different scientists to talk with me because they can present what they find on their daily basis, and this is more like sound imprint of the environment, I would say.Dubber Okay. Well, this is a very self-interested question. I have two nine-meter hydrophones, some lakes, the Gulf of Bothnia – which leads, obviously, into the Baltic Sea – a big river, and a small river. What would you do first?Robertina What I would go first to record?Dubber Yeah. What would you do?Robertina Definitely I would be interested… There is a lake also, you said.Dubber Yeah. There’s multiple lakes.Robertina Lakes can be interesting, especially where the water comes into the lake and goes out, but then also the middle of the lake. I would go to try to get that on different levels. And then also to… Because the streams, the rivers, mostly they have some flow, and when there is a movement, you can hear that. So definitely I would try out lakes, record some of the rivers, of course, also, but then go to the sea and try to record it near to the rivers, by the deltas of the rivers, and then also go a bit further down to see how this is mixing. Because for me, it’s always interesting to figure it out which kind of animals are living where and what is there because… Which kind of species is around.Dubber Interesting. Fantastic. Robertina, it’s been really fascinating. I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for doing this.Robertina Yeah, the same. And thank you for inviting me, and hope to see you soon.Dubber Yeah, I look forward to it.Dubber That’s Robertina Šebjanič, and that’s the MTF Podcast. You can find Robertina’s work at <a href="http://www.robertina.net">www.robertina.net</a>. I’m Dubber, @dubber on Twitter, and MTF Labs is @mtflabs and on the web at <a href="http://www.mtflabs.net">www.mtflabs.net</a>. Thanks as always to the team – Sergio Castillo, Mars Startin, Jen Kukucka, and Run Dreamer – and to airtone and cellist Romi Kopelman for the music. Thanks to you all for listening. You have a great week, and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.</div></div></div></div><div class="et_pb_row et_pb_row_1 transcript"><div class="et_pb_column et_pb_column_4_4 et_pb_column_1 et_pb_css_mix_blend_mode_passthrough et-last-child"><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_code et_pb_code_0 et_pb_text_align_center"><div class="et_pb_code_inner"><a href="http://subscribeonandroid.com/mtflabs.net/feed/podcast" title="Subscribe on Android"><img decoding="async" src="https://assets.blubrry.com/soa/BadgeLarge.png" alt="Subscribe on Android" style="border:0;" /></a> <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/se/podcast/id1439245154"><img decoding="async" src="https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/16210150/Apple-Podcast-Listen.jpg"></a> </div></div></div></div></div>The post <a href="https://mtflabs.net/podcast118/">118. Robertina Šebjanič – Aquatocene</a> appeared first on <a href="https://mtflabs.net">MTF Labs</a>.<hr> Hosted on Acast. 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May 30, 2021

117. Caspar Melville – It’s A London Thing

<div class="et_pb_section et_pb_section_1 et_section_regular" ><div class="et_pb_row et_pb_row_2"><div class="et_pb_column et_pb_column_4_4 et_pb_column_2 et_pb_css_mix_blend_mode_passthrough et-last-child"><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_image et_pb_image_1"><img decoding="async" width="795" height="500" src="https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/16205521/caspar.jpg" alt="Sofia Crespo" title="caspar" srcset="https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/16205521/caspar.jpg 795w, https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/16205521/caspar-480x302.jpg 480w" sizes="(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) 795px, 100vw" class="wp-image-216494" /></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_audio_1 et_clickable et_pb_audio_module clearfix et_pb_bg_layout_light et_pb_text_color_dark et_pb_audio_no_image"><div class="et_pb_audio_module_content et_audio_container"><h2 class="et_pb_module_header">Caspar Melville - It's A London Thing</h2>by MTF Labs | MTF Podcast<audio class="wp-audio-shortcode" id="audio-216488-2" preload="none" style="width: 100%;" controls="controls"><source type="audio/mpeg" src="https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/117-caspar-melville.mp3?_=2" /><a href="https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/117-caspar-melville.mp3">https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/117-caspar-melville.mp3</a></audio></div></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_text et_pb_text_2 et_pb_text_align_left et_pb_bg_layout_light"><div class="et_pb_text_inner"><div>Dr Caspar Melville is a Senior Lecturer in Global Creative & Cultural Industries at SOAS. He's an educator, journalist, editor and author of the book It's A London Thing: How rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city.</div><div> </div><div>Caspar believes that dance culture has been ignored in academic treatment of history and cultural theory and that it should be thought of as a powerful and internationally significant form of popular art. His work bridges decades and genres of dance music but ties them together into a single narrative of Black musical scenes of the city, from ska, reggae and soul in the 1970s, to rare groove and rave in the 1980s and jungle and its offshoots in the 1990s, and on to dubstep and grime.</div><div> </div><div><a href="https://twitter.com/casparmelville">@</a><a href="https://twitter.com/casparmelville">casparmelville</a> on Twitter <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49920498-it-s-a-london-thing">It's A London Thing</a></div></div></div><div class="et_pb_button_module_wrapper et_pb_button_1_wrapper et_pb_button_alignment_right et_pb_module "><a class="et_pb_button et_pb_button_1 et_pb_bg_layout_light" href="https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/117-caspar-melville.mp3" target="_blank">Download episode</a></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_post_nav_1 transcript et_pb_posts_nav nav-single"><a href="https://mtflabs.net/podcast116/" rel="prev">← Previous episode</a><a href="https://mtflabs.net/podcast118/" rel="next">Next episode →</a></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_text et_pb_text_3 transcript et_pb_text_align_left et_pb_bg_layout_light"><div class="et_pb_text_inner"><h3>Transcript</h3>Dubber Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. Now, some years ago, I was a professor in a media and cultural studies department at a UK university, teaching, among other things, on a music industries degree course. And when that’s your focus, you tend to cross paths with other professors in media and cultural studies departments at UK universities who teach, among other things, on music industries degree courses. It’s not an enormous subset of the academic world. And so as a result of this selective professional socialising and collaboration, I know and work with Caspar Melville. Caspar’s a senior lecturer in Global Creative and Cultural Studies at SOAS, which we’ll talk about and unpack, but what I really want to discuss with him is his recent book, ‘It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City’.Dubber So, Caspar Melville, thank you so much for joining us for the MTF Podcast today. So you are, as I mentioned, a senior lecturer at SOAS. Let’s start with that. What’s SOAS?Caspar Well, SOAS is a part of the University of London. The acronym SOAS stands for School of Oriental and African Studies. Now, we call ourselves SOAS now because we’re all very uncomfortable with the term oriental. And, of course, there’s an inbuilt discomfort with the whole thing about SOAS because SOAS, which originates in the early twentieth century, was a school for training civil servants of the empire, or sometimes known as a school for spies. It was the place where the British government sent their civil servants to learn local languages of the places that they were going to go out and administer in Africa and in the Far East and the Near East and Malaya and Singapore. Places like that. So that’s the history of the institution.It has been affiliated with the University of London for I’m not quite sure how long, and now it’s a university. It’s in Bloomsbury, right near the UCL and the Institute of Education, which has actually been absorbed into UCL now. So it’s in the university intellectual part of London, around Russell Square, Bloomsbury area.Dubber Right. But you’re not teaching spies how to speak Mandarin.Caspar I don’t think I am, no. I’m in the School of Arts. I’m a slightly square peg in a round hole in the sense that the School of Arts at SOAS… It wasn’t originally an arts and humanities based institution. So the core of it, after it had been training imperial civil servants, was politics, development. Those kinds of questions. Specialists in water. Languages, very important. Out of this developed an art stream. So people who were particularly… They were ‘Africanists’ – African specialists, but they had a particular interest in music. There were people in Korean studies, in what they call area studies. This is not a discipline, but you study a particular area. They banded together and they set up a music department, and then there was a history of art department. Similarly, local area expertise. China, Korea, Africa. Usually older forms. Traditions, you might call it. And this banded together in the School of Arts, which was formed maybe ten years ago.I’ve been at SOAS for about eight years, and I came in to teach something called Creative and Cultural Industries. So this was SOAS recognising that while the ethnomusicology and the history of art were really important, there was a missing link, partly to do with media and cultural studies and partly to do with recognising that all of this is caught up within a set of industrial systems and processes. Obviously, the internet and the digitisation of culture which came in the 2010s was happening all around, and there was a sense that they wanted to recognise that. So they brought me in – it was partly under pressure, I think – to think more about careers.As you know, having been an academic, this idea of “Well, what am I going to do when I finish my course? What job does it lead to?” is quite a big component of the academic market, and they wanted to answer that question a little bit more straightforwardly by suggesting that the kind of course that I teach, which is actually called Global Creative and Cultural Industries, is for postgraduate students, many of whom are already working somewhere in the arts – maybe in arts management, in arts policy, or they are a musician or an artist of some kind – and they want to think about how they can build a career, and that’s part of the kind of thing that I teach. And there’s certain skills components. So I teach a class in podcasting. I do a work internship programme which allows students either to go and work for a short period of time, do a placement somewhere, or develop their own entrepreneurial project – a website, an event, record an album – and think reflectively about themselves as a cultural worker. So it’s that kind of element.I’m part of something now called the Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies, which is a slightly expanded unit. I work with a professor who is a professor of film studies, but who has similarly moved from thinking about film only as an aesthetic object – she’s an African film expert – to thinking about film as part of a global information market. How is it distributed? How does it get made? How can you make a living doing it? Can you make a living doing it? All of these kinds of questions. So that’s where I sit, rather… I quite like being uncomfortable. Having been trained in cultural studies, it’s built in that you’re always going to be somewhat not fully within one discipline. You’re going to work in an interdisciplinary way, which is both exciting but can also feel somewhat unanchored.Dubber Yeah. There’s always a long answer to “What is it that you do?”, I find…Caspar Well, it’s like “The long or the short one? I’m not sure. Probably the long one.”.Dubber Well, yeah. It’s not a one-word job description like lawyer or a doctor, is it?Caspar No. Or a sociologist or a… Hence these incredibly long titles for these classes and a lot of students writing in saying “That sounds really interesting. Can you explain what it actually is? What will I be? What will be on my certificate when I come out of here?”. And these are all slightly difficult to answer questions, which I think indicate a big change in the university sector but also in the job sector, which is there is no one job you’re going to go and get.Dubber Exactly.Caspar It’s not about applying for one job. It’s really, as you know very well, given the nature of your career – what do they call it? Portfolio, career – with precarity somewhere in the background but also with the freedom to follow your interests.Dubber Yeah. I think it’s actually more foreground, generally speaking.Caspar Well, yeah.Dubber But the entrepreneurial aspect of this is interesting because I used to say to my students “Anybody who aspires to a job in the music industry lacks ambition.”. It’s one of those things where most people who do these sorts of courses, they go out and start things for themselves. They don’t tend to end up in the mailroom sending out CDs to newspapers. They start projects that are important to them. Like you say, they record albums. They start podcasts. They build websites. They make things that are very self-starting. To what extent is that sustainable, do you think?Caspar Oh, well, to go alongside your advice about “You’re lacking ambition if you just want to work in the music industry.”, I tend to fall back on telling my story. And I wanted to encourage students who realise that this is not the first time in history where it’s been difficult to get a job coming out of university. I’m a child of the eighties. Margaret Thatcher, what she did to Britain… There were no jobs in the early eighties when I was coming out of school. But also, similarly, we didn’t aspire to have jobs. There was a very strong sense that you could go and make your own culture. Obviously, I was surrounded by club culture, which was a paradigm of the idea of young people doing things for themselves, managing to make a living.Is it sustainable? What I say to the students and what I actually believe is that you need to be realistic about your desire to make money doing exactly what you want and balance that with… I know these days they call it a side hustle or something like that, but I waited tables for fifteen years while I was a music journalist. I never made money as a music journalist or a radio DJ or even a club DJ. Not proper money, enough to pay the rent, so I waited tables. I worked as a barman.Not only do I think that’s a wise thing to do, is to have a job which pays you like that, I think it’s good for you. I think it’s a good thing to do. And in the life that I’ve led in the media – I’ve been a magazine editor. I’ve been on boards. I’ve been in the upper-class/middle-class world. In academia, as well – you can really tell the difference between people who’ve had those kinds of jobs and people who haven’t. The kind of things that you learn from doing a job you don’t particularly like, particularly in the service industries or – I don’t know – delivery driver, whatever it is, it puts you on a level par with everyone else in the world who have to work for a living, teaches you some really important things, and keeps you humble. No matter how creative you are, how brilliant you think you are, the world does not owe you a living and nor does it have to pay you to be an artist. You have to earn that.Dubber But the end of the lesson is “But you can end up being a respectable professor in a…”.Caspar Well, I’m very lucky to have a full-time job, a permanent job, in academia, and it is quite rare and getting rarer. Academia has done a good job of turning out people with lots of skills but not providing the infrastructure. It’s not provided the support, the jobs for those people. And academia is increasingly reliant on temporary, precarious work. SOAS as an institution and I think many others are trying to address that. It’s really moved quite high up the agenda not to rely on temporary teachers and non-permanent staff to do a lot of the teaching load, but there are economic reasons why that’s the case.So I am lucky in that way, and I should connect this to some of the great work which is being done on the creative industries at the moment by people like Dave O'Brien. There’s a book that’s just come out called ‘Culture is Bad for You’ which is based on some research with hundreds of workers in the cultural sector, and one of the narratives that comes out from the generally white, middle-class men who run the show is “Oh, I’ve been so lucky. Look at me. I’ve just been so lucky. I’ve never been that ambitious, but look where I am.”, and I have to acknowledge that that’s also true of myself in that sense.It’s not just luck. It’s structural luck that I could blag myself into… I didn’t come out of academia. I got this job at SOAS having been a magazine editor and a journalist. I had done a PhD fifteen years prior. Didn’t have any teaching experience. Didn’t have any publications. So in some ways, it was a bit of a punt that I applied for the job, and there are elements of why I got it that I fit. And SOAS, no matter its aspirations to be very, very multicultural and forward-looking, is still… There’s a high concentration of white, middle-class people teaching there, just like me. So that’s something I’m aware of and I recognise.Dubber The white, middle-class, middle-age male thing aside for a moment, do you think that academia benefits from employing people like us in the sense of non-traditional academics? People who have been out in the world and experienced things that can be directly passed on to students.Caspar Oh, yeah. I do. I really do. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve hung onto my job. We’ve gone through various painful restructurings and things like that. The simple fact is, the courses I teach – and it’s not just down to me being a brilliant teacher – are popular among students. They want that kind of information. They want that kind of advice. They want to see people who have worked outside the academy, and I think the academy could do a much better job of being more flexible and allowing people who aren’t lifetime academics into the institution. This would also mean those people who are lifetime academics being prepared to step out of that space and do other things. And there’s not as much fluidity there as I think there should be or could be because I’m very keen to break that clear distinction between what is often called the ivory tower and the real world. What academics call the real world as if they’re not part of it. So, yeah, I think it’s of huge value to the institution.However, there are built-in processes of publication, of track record, of having become institutionalised, all the way from undergraduate to MA to PhD to postdoc, where you haven’t had a chance to be outside in the world. And if you did that, it’s a bit like the way women get punished for taking time off to have children and other things like that. You’ve got a break in your CV, and you have to account for it in some way. It’s not deliberate, but just the way that things are set up tends to replicate the system, which I think is not a great system.Dubber One of the things that the system encourages is, as you say, publication, and you’ve managed to tick that box a little bit by putting out a book quite recently. Is it the kind of book that universities are quite happy to have you tick that box with, or have you gone off-piste a little bit?Caspar Well, that’s a really good question. I don’t know. But REF, the Research Excellence Framework, which is this six yearly spasm that the universities go through where everyone has to submit work which goes to a committee, which is then adjudicated on, and then that decides how much money flows to the university – so it’s very serious – my book has just gone into that process. So I’ve no idea what people think of it at that level, and there’s something about it… It doesn’t sound like an academic book. ‘It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City’. I’ve got references in it. I did publish it as an academic book, but it’s about things which might not be considered to be legitimate subjects, I suppose, by some people.Dubber Well, worse than that, you committed the same crime that I committed with my ‘Radio in the Digital Age’ book, which also went through the REF process last time around, which was it’s readable.Caspar I know. It’s funny that. I was trained as an academic, doing a PhD. And in doing a PhD, I did that typical thing where I arrived at the university and I thought “Okay. I’ve got to read everything.”. And I tried to read everything. And it was the high point of post-structuralism. It was Foucault. It was Baudrillard. There was postmodernism. It was Fredric Jameson. It was Spivak, and it was Homi Bhabha. And it was some very exciting theoretical work, some of which is incredibly difficult and some of which is very poorly written. And I then churned out a PhD which was – surprise, surprise – poorly written, incoherent in places, and was actually a lot worse of a piece of work that I might have produced outside the academy. It didn’t really fit either way. I had very nice examiners. I scraped through with changes and whatnot.I then went a did something else. I did online journalism, and I became an editor for openDemocracy, which was this online discussion forum/newspaper thing, and then became a magazine editor, and that’s when I learned to write properly. Editing other people’s work. Thinking about an audience. Thinking about a readership.And having come back into academia, one of the first things I did was write a book review of a book which was called… Oh, god. I can’t remember who wrote it now. But it was a book about why sociologists write so badly, basically. And his argument, which absolutely I think I agreed with, was that it’s not a coincidence. It’s that they’re trained to write badly. There’s something about the process, particularly journal articles and that whole… What you will know as well, Andrew, which is basically a scam where academics don’t get paid to write things which they don’t really want to write because they have to put all their credentials into this piece of work and spend ages getting to the point, which are then published in journals that basically very, very few people read, which cost universities a vast amount of money. A total scam, but, anyway. I wrote that piece…Dubber Well, not only that, but it’s peer reviewed. So the people who have to review it, which also contributes to their CV, in inverted commas, is also unpaid labour.Caspar Exactly, which is something I found out recently. I think most people in the world… Well, the people I’ve told can’t believe it. “What? You put that amount of effort…”. To write an academic journal article might take you three, six, eight months. A year. It’s that level of labour, and it goes through lots of iterations as well. And it can be very painful, and it can be rejected and all of that, and there’s no money in it. And for the reviewers, there’s no money in it. There’s prestige and reputation. Or, if you’re a really great academic like my friend Les Back at Goldsmiths who is so much my academic model, he does it out of the love of ideas, out of care, out of concern for the truth and for parity and things like that. It’s not just people bigging themselves up in that process. But there’s something fundamentally broken about it, which is partly why – not partly – I wrote the book.I’ve only got one academic article to my name at the moment. I’ve got some book chapters, which are sniffed at in academia. REF apparently don’t like book chapters. I don’t know why. So I’ve got the one academic article, and then I thought “Well, I could sit down and write three or four more articles, but maybe what I should do is write a book, and then at least it goes to REF.”. So I’ve ticked the box which says it’s gone, and I don’t know what they’re going to do with it.But, actually, the whole reason I got into academia or I went back to academia… I did my undergraduate degree, and then I went to America, and I lived in America for seven or eight years. I was a DJ. I did radio. I was a magazine journalist. Steeped in music, which is what is my love. But I went back to university to do an MA with the aim that I wanted to write a book, but it’s taken me twenty years to complete that cycle and to get the confidence and, I think, the writing skills that I felt I needed to write something that is clear and explicable and isn’t indigestible so that it can be read by people who aren’t academics.And even though I wanted to publish it as an academic book… Not just for REF, but also because I want academia to know this stuff as well. I want to force them to reckon with the importance of popular art and popular culture as a valid thing to write about and a valid thing to have on the shelf. It was a dangerous dance, potentially, and some people have raised their eyebrow at me or suggested… Particularly the bits… In the book, I do throw in a few first-person stories – slightly disguised as ethnographic notes, but really they’re my memories of particular music scenes that I have experienced – as a way to try and bring it to life a little bit.Dubber Yeah. It’s interesting how much of a parallel there is. In my radio book that I wrote, I did exactly the same thing. I did some first-person narrative recollection of listening to radio as a kid in the car with my parents and blah, blah, blah, and that sort of thing outside of ethnography is, like you say, sniffed at. But in a sense, what I was trying to do was write the book that I wanted to while still ticking the REF box a little bit. I don’t want to speak for you, but, for me, the book ended up not being the book that I wanted it to be because it wasn’t, in inverted commas, journalistic enough. It was much too academic, and it didn’t feel authentic or representative of what I wanted to communicate. Did you have the same problem, or were you just very much comfortable with one foot in both worlds?Caspar I don’t know where you were in your career or your age at that point, but it took me… I’m fifty-four now. So I am quite old, and I came back into academia quite old, so I felt less intimidated and less anxious. And as I got my foot into teaching – something I knew nothing about, really – and enjoyed it and bedded myself in, I thought “Okay. Well, now I’ve got the opportunity to do this.”. I’ve actually written a book that I do like, and I do think that it works. It is what I wanted to say.And partly, it’s because I am not only an academic, but I like theory. I like ideas. I find them exciting. My life has been formed partly by ideas that I’ve picked up from Stuart Hall or Paul Gilroy or even Foucault which I think are useful tools for helping to understand the world. Power/knowledge, or the nature of diaspora, or the fact that identity is a journey, not a destination, and we’re always trying to decide who we want to be and who we are, we present… Erving Goffman. The way you present yourself to the world. These, to me, are core ideas or ideas with philosophical weight that help us to peek behind the veil of the world and defamiliarize a lot of the garbage that we get thrown at us. If it’s real. Gramsci’s notion here that, basically, we’re in a struggle for the truth with ideology or with hegemonic ideas we’ve inherited. They’re so deep in our bones and our minds that we need some tools to unpick them and get behind them, and that’s what I think those academic ideas are. So I was happy writing it as an academic work.When I first talked to my publisher, they were like “Well, do you want to do a trade book, or do you want to do an academic book?”. And, first of all, I didn’t know what a trade book was. I thought “What? Is it about building or something?”. But when I figured out what he meant, I was very keen to do it as an academic book, and I wanted to do it like that, and I didn’t find it…One of the terrible reviews I got on Amazon was from someone who said “This reads like a really bad university thesis that would have got a D.”. And there is an element where you’ve got to wade through, I suppose, for some readers. There’s lots of names in brackets, and there is some conceptual ideas at the beginning when I frame it. But, actually, partly what I wanted was to give people who weren’t academics access to those ideas to see that they were relevant, because you can write about music by just saying “We’ll listen to this banging beat. We’ll tell the biographical stories of the people involved.”, and that’s important as well, but, actually, I wanted some conceptual tools like the idea of diaspora.What is happening in music in one particular place in the world is linked at a deep level to what’s happening in other places, and there are reasons why that linkage happens. This is where Paul Gilroy’s idea about the black Atlantic, this interconnected African diasporic culture where ideas and people and musical forms circulate, that’s a key idea because that stops us from thinking just within the national frame or just in a narrow sense of “Oh, well, let’s look at what’s happening in London because it’s somehow natural that it would happen there.”. There’s nothing natural about it. It comes through a series of political and social processes and movements.Dubber Right. Well, let’s talk about the content of the book to a larger sense. So we’re talking about rare groove, acid house, and jungle, primarily, and their situatedness – if you like – in London. There’s a whole lot to unpack there, obviously, and you’ve spent a whole book doing that. But what is special about London? Is it, as some people say, a different country?Caspar It’s certainly felt like that over the past few years if you think about the whole narrative of Brexit and the whole idea of Britain wanting to get great again and sever its ties with Johnny Foreigner, and it really felt like London was different. And you could tell that in the narrative because London was often put up as this elite space which gets all the funding, and the Westminster Bubble or the Islington bubble. All of that kind of stuff. And there was an element of truth to that. We’ve got a left-wing mayor. We did have Boris Johnson as mayor, but, generally, we have more left-wing politics. We have a more welcoming attitude to strangers because it’s a city full of people who aren’t from here, frankly, and that gives it a special character. So I do think there’s something quite special about the character of London.In the book, I do trace this back to empire because London was the biggest beneficiary, and you can see that all around you, of empire and has also been the place which has therefore then received migration from the empire, which has brought the empire right into the western city in a way that wasn’t the case in London in the earlier periods. Although, different waves of immigration – Huguenots and Irish and Italians and Maltese – have always characterised what’s going on in London as well.So one of the books that I quote says “London is not about Londoners, necessarily. You can become a Londoner.”. I think there’s a really interesting character of London. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in London, Andrew, but you can become a Londoner much more easily than you can become British or English. In some sense, you can never become English if you’re not from England, but you can become a Londoner after about three or four months.And the first thing you realise is it’s grim, it’s cold, it’s dirty, and people aren’t very friendly. So there’s the first set of experiences. And then you realise that, actually, under that grim surface there’s a common culture because we all have to wait for the busses together, use the same grimy tube stations and corner shops, so there’s a sort of “We’re all in it together.” thing. And then under the surface again is this incredible, slightly hidden away, slightly… You might say elitist, but it’s not quite elitist, but it’s not that easy to find. But once you do find it… You go down a grimy set of stairs and you open a door, and then you step into an amazing cultural ferment. And I’m describing club culture here, but there are all kinds of… There’s the Soho boho seedy culture. There are interesting things going on in very uninteresting looking places in a very, very large city.Dubber Interesting. So let’s just really, really quickly… So that we know what we’re talking about, what is rare groove? What is acid house? What is jungle?Caspar I think the way I should do it is tell it backwards. Jungle is a musical genre which emerges in London in the mid-1990s. It’s electronic music. It’s related to, and some people even argue an offshoot of, house music, which is this digitised, funky, soulful thing which was going on in New York and in Chicago and in Detroit and then brought over to the UK. But the distinct nature of jungle is that jungle also is strongly influenced by reggae. So it’s got these deep reggae basslines, and then it’s got these very fast breakbeats which refer to a tradition of hip-hop and then, beyond that, to funk, but they’re sped up digitally. So it’s digital music, it’s dance music, and it’s got this strange fusion of African American forms like house music and hip-hop and reggae and with some other elements to it as well. It’s got a scary horror soundtrack type of vibe to it as well. Quite intense music.I was not in London when this emerged. I was in San Francisco, and I heard this music and I thought “What the hell is going on?”. It’s really quite shocking when you hear it. It’s going so fast. It’s so intense. But on the other hand, it’s quite familiar, and the familiarity, for me, was the reggae element. Reggae is really important musically, especially in London, but had been pushed aside by house music and rave music at the end of the 1980s, but it re-emerged in jungle. So, to me, it was like “Who’s making this music? What’s going on?”, and “I really want to get back to London because I want to experience this.”. So I moved back in 1997, partly to try and figure out what jungle was all about. That pushed me back to think about acid house.Acid house was something that I had been… I was in London when it took off in London in 1987/1988. It was a profound moment of youth culture. It was a change in the music. You’ll know the music. Most people will. This very much Chicago influenced digital music, again, but which was very different from soul and funk and reggae and jazz. A new arrangement of musical elements digitally, alongside, of course, other kinds of technologies like drug technologies. Obviously, ecstasy was a huge part of that. So I wanted to tease out the relationship between reggae and acid house, and then that pushed me further back in time into rare groove.Now, rare groove was something that, again, it happened really only in London in the UK. Only in London. In the mid-1980s was a period of time when a group of DJs, most of whom were black, but not all, DJs an older generation than the audience who knew a lot about music and had great record collections which spanned from the late 1960s all the way up to the eighties, taking in soul, funk, even African influenced music and also ska and reggae and rocksteady… And during the mid-1980s when London was rapidly deindustrialising, it was the height of Thatcherism and there was high unemployment, there were a lot of empty buildings around in London. And those empty buildings were repurposed by this group of young people who not only had the records, but they had the tech, as well, because they had access to sound systems, i.e. massive hi-fis. They knew about sound systems because of the tradition of the reggae sound system which had taken root in London in 1958 and then rapidly spread. There were hundreds of sound systems. It was carried largely through black London. Jamaican influence very strong, though not everyone involved was Jamaican. Fathers, brothers, cousins all collaborating to build their own sound systems using old wardrobes and planks and whatnot and using engineering skills.Dubber It was very hackathon-y, wasn’t it?Caspar Absolutely. It was absolutely hackathon, and it was sophisticated. It was so interesting. Many people were involved in the sound systems. Some of them were trained as engineers in the army and would come and lend their skills. One of them who worked with Coxsone, which was one of the great sound systems, he was an engineer at Heathrow Airport who’d put together the air traffic control system. So it was a community-based collaborative effort, primarily because black Londoners, through the period of migration from the Caribbean which starts in 1948, so-called Windrush generation, are excluded from clubs and pubs and football and the other places and spaces and rituals of British life, and British working-class life, in particular, because these black migrants were mainly working-class or didn’t have access to the middle-class world anyway, either economically or because of structural racism.So the sound systems are really… The best way to think about them is that they’re a way of creating space and building your own mobile nightclubs. And what you then need when you’ve got a sound system, you’ve got the records, is somewhere to do them. Now, the sound systems in Jamaica in Kingston, they’re outdoors, often, because they’ve got the weather. Well, London doesn’t have that weather, so where are you going to do them? You’ll do them in all of these empty factories, old cinemas, old storehouses, old bus garages. This was the period in the mid-1980s in London where rare groove was the dominant musical form. And rare groove really isn’t a genre. It’s just a way of saying “Black music from the recent past, from the last twenty-odd years, that you probably are not familiar…”.Dubber And deep cuts, particularly.Caspar Deep cuts. That’s the rare bit, because this music often was not released in the UK. It didn’t make the charts in the UK. Had to come in via other routes – second-hand record stores – and then put them into these buildings, the so-called warehouse parties.So what it seemed to me in putting all of this story together… Because I had some familiarity with rare groove. My life started, my education happened… DJs like Norman Jay and Jazzie B from Soul II Soul, who were older than me and had the tunes, educated a whole generation of Londoners – black Londoners and white Londoners – at a point when although racialised space and the riots had happened in London in 1981 – Brixton riots – and again in 1985, there was sus going on, all of these forms of over-policing which were infuriating the black community who weren’t given their rights, at the same time, this multi-culture was emerging because we’d all been to school together.I went to a comprehensive school. Two thousand kids. Basically about half white and half black. A few Asian kids. And we had to get along, or not get along, and there was a lot of fighting and there was a lot of tension. But for those of us who wanted to seek something different or who were animated… Speaking as a white person, I was animated by a strong commitment to anti-racism. It was pick a side time in London, and I wasn’t going to pick the side of the racist skinheads at my school, obviously, and I was going to align with my black friends, and music provided a way to do that.And then the warehouse came along and said “This can be your space.”, because you couldn’t get into clubs in Soho very easily. Groups of boys couldn’t get in. Groups of black boys definitely couldn’t get in. It was always tricky negotiating the forms of regulation of those spaces. Suddenly, none of that mattered. The bouncer was your own age. If you could find the place… And London was full of this empty space. It’s not like that anymore. If you go and visit London now, if you’re at the Tate Modern and you just walk a bit east, you will pass Shakespeare’s Globe, this historic theatre. Neither of those were there. There was no lighting. They were just empty dock spaces. Nobody even knew where they were, even though it’s not that far from places you’re familiar with. It was this empty space. This is where Foucault’s idea of the heterotopia, a space which isn’t really a space… It’s not really on a map. Nobody knows who runs it. And because of that, it afforded this generation, the rare groove or warehouse party generation, a chance to really build their own culture. And that was such a clear influence on rave that I felt that was part of the story as well.And one of the reasons I included acid house in the story is because I feel very ambivalent about acid house. I went to raves. I loved raving up to a point, but I had criticisms about it. Point one – and we can get onto those – musically, aesthetically, anything that’s completely based on drug-taking is bound to end up in a bad trip. But also the priority that rave was given in the story of club culture, as if raves were the first time people got together in unlicensed space to listen to loud music, and that clearly wasn’t the case. Rave didn’t create club culture. It gave it a huge boost, and one of the obvious things it did was it got white men onto the dance floor where hitherto they had been very reluctant to go. But that is not true of black men or black women. And it was a moment, but it was a moment that I felt really needed to be connected and contextualised alongside these other musical scenes.Dubber Is there any discourse about “Well, that wasn’t a London thing. That was a Manchester thing.”, the acid house?Caspar Oh, no. There’s a massive discourse about that, and I sort of allude to it in the book. There’s a funny debate which goes on amongst ravers where… Between the Manchester… The northerners, let’s say, the mardy northerners and the Cockneys. They call us the Cockneys. And there’s this dispute about “Well, who did it first?”.I do tell and retell the story – which I call a myth, although it’s true – of these four white London geezer DJs, these working-class boys, who’d gone out to Ibiza, who went to Amnesia. DJ Alfredo hipped them to having a wider musical mix than they were used to and blending together pop music and Balearic alongside Chicago house music, and taking ecstasy all at the same time in this warm weather. And then they came back to London, and they each started a club, and it was very influential. That’s all true.Simultaneously, it’s happening in Manchester. It’s got different components. It’s much more related to a switch amongst white youth taste from indie to dance music, which was happening at the Haçienda, was happening under the influence of ecstasy. Very, very significant, but those books have been written. Dave Haslam writes about that, and many others.So I’m not trying to give London priority. What I do want to say is that there’s a context for understanding it in London. It wasn’t the first time, like I said, dancing to loud music was happening in the city. House music was coming into London in all kinds of routes before the acid house moment that I’ve just described. Often played by black sound systems where the music was put in the larger context of hip-hop, electro, and other forms of electronic black avant-garde music, which wasn’t defined by taking ecstasy and was part of the overall way in which these genres develop and change and shift, and many people were happy with that.There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s a good idea to allow popular music to change. Particularly, one of the reasons it needs to change is to evade capture by the market. Although, it’s obviously within the market as well, and we shouldn’t romanticise it as being something pristine and outside capitalism, but there is a tendency for the music industry and the market to grab hold of key genres and suck the life out of them. But that’s okay because the club genre has already shifted somewhere else.Dubber We’ve talked a fair bit about DJs and dancers and venues and spaces and not a lot about the recording artists. Were there key recording artists in these genres?Caspar Oh, god, yeah. I think it’s different with each of them, which is fascinating to me. So taking rare groove. You’ll be familiar with the idea of rockism in pop music writing, and the music industry in general, which imagines the key issue is the band, and the band who have a career, who are possibly geniuses like The Beatles. They exist over time. They do live shows. They produce albums. That’s the model. That model can be applied to rare groove, up to a point.So you’ve got figures like James Brown within rare groove, who’s absolutely pivotal. He’s a key songwriter. He’s a key producer. He’s a key band leader. He’s a key rhythmic genius who instils these ideas into his band who then go off… They go and work in lots of other genres. One generation of his band leaves because they’re pissed off not getting well paid, so he brings in Bootsy and Catfish and reinvents the J.B.'s. So there’s a story there. Stevie Wonder. A whole series of great artists.But the other thing about rare groove is what matters to rare groove is the danceability of the track, not specifically the band or the album. These units matter much less because, in the end, it’s the DJ playing something off a record to an audience. You don’t know who the band is. And a lot of the rare groove canon is music that was underrated or forgotten or generically was too… Didn’t fit easily within the way in which the American music industry is divided up racially, between soul and folk music, for example. If you mess with those generic boundaries, you might fail. And then that music was rediscovered in a new context.And I would say that if you went to a rare groove party, eighty percent of what you hear, you wouldn’t know who it was by. And when you did find out, you’d be like “Oh. That’s the African Music Machine. That’s The Mighty Ryeders.”, so it’s like you’ve… There’s just hundreds and hundreds of bands who were great that no one’s ever heard of until they start being recovered first by DJs and then by the labels who were employing DJs to put together compilations. And that whole world of the reissue and the looking back and the Awesome Tapes From Africa and that whole world emerges out of that curatorial aspect of rare groove. So in that sense, of course the producers, the…When you buy the record, you can pour over who’s playing the bass, who’s playing the drums, who produced the record. Key figures like Charles Stepney emerge or Gamble and Huff or… Some of these key… You start getting a picture of the incredible depth and creativity of the black American recording industry of that period, some of which was successful, some of which was completely forgotten and not loved in America.So when it came to acid house, a completely different set of questions emerged. The first thing is, this was not music that sounded anything like music of the past. There was no band. There wasn’t that setup of drum, bass, keys, guitar, vocalist that you would expect. You couldn’t hear any of that. It was clearly music made with machines. Possibly music made by machines. There was awareness at some level that the music was made by someone, but that someone wasn’t a musician, primarily. They were a quote-unquote producer. It was someone who had put the stuff together themselves. We became aware of this because we knew about hip-hop, and we knew that within hip-hop, the actual sound tech was made by someone playing around with digital technologies. With drum machines, samplers, and bits of other people’s music. But that wasn’t what was going on here because in hip-hop, you can recognise the reference points of the previous music, but here you couldn’t because the sounds were… Actually, what were foregrounded was the sound of the machine itself.So the most famous element of the acid house sound, of course, is the wobbly 303. The Roland 303, which is a little bass emulator, was being used in a way not to, as it can, sound like a bass line being played, but to sound like a machine. This strange, wobbly sound, which DJ Pierre, who came up with this, says is an accident. He was just playing around, not knowing how to use this bit of kit which he had got second hand. Didn’t have the manual, didn’t have any training, and just found a sound which he thought sounded cool, sounded futuristic, and that squelchy, weird, [imitating sound] sound which underpinned that particular moment of acid house, laid over thumping digital beats which don’t sound like a drummer, and they’re not meant to. They sound like machines pulsing.So this threw into disarray any kind of idea of a band or a musician. When you’re in the acid house moment in the club, you can’t tell the difference between one track and the next. They’re mixed together by DJs who are deliberately blending these things together, so you actually are not aware of even a track. The whole thing becomes some kind of large, ongoing soundscape. Plus, you’re very disoriented by dry ice, often strobe lights, and whatever you’ve taken to go along with your acid house experience. And for a very large proportion of the crowd, that was ecstasy, which deranges you in lots of other ways. So it completely broke that fandom connection. That “Oh, I love this tune.” connection. That kind of familiarity thing which drives pop clubs and often discos and things like that.And then even if you drilled into it a little bit, like maybe you sidled up to the DJ and had a look over their shoulder to have a look at the label, chances are you’d either find a white label there, which is an unreleased piece of music with something scribbled on it, or even if it was a commercial label, what would it say? Bam Bam. The Night Writers. Just a bunch of new words which didn’t seem to relate directly to any particular person or anyone. You didn’t have a sense of the person behind the music, and it’s only with investigation that I’ve done that I’ve been able to figure out there are actually real people behind this. There’s Frankie Knuckles, and there’s The Belleville Three making the techno. There are real people, but they very deliberately hid themselves. They were not involved in the global record industry in terms of marketing. You didn’t see their pictures on record sleeves. There wasn’t a great sense of who these people are. It took the media a long time to catch up with what acid house really was, and it was always treated as what mattered was what was happening on the dance floor or in the rave, not so much the person who produced the music.This is what allowed the DJ to partly intervene there and become the key mediator, and the first most famous stars of acid house and house music were the DJs. And initially, in England, it was actually the British DJs who became famous. The Danny Ramplings and the Paul Oakenfolds. And it was only latterly that the audience caught up with the fact that they were basing what they were doing on the model of people like Frankie Knuckles, Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage, or Tony Humphries or… This generation have latterly become well known and famous. Jeff Mills and all the rest of those brilliant practisers.Dubber And I guess the other part of this would be that it’s quite hard to portray this kind of music-making on something like Top of the Pops.Caspar Oh, well, absolutely right. And acid did start appearing on Top of the Pops in various guises. The first influence of acid house was the way it started to influence pop music. You’ve got bands like S'Express, Mars, who used slightly acid-y type sounds which were around in the ether but plugged them into a slightly more conventional idea of a band. S'Express weren’t really a band, but they pretended to be a band for the purposes of Top of the Pops. Or sometimes you’d get a singer, like a Kym Mazelle or one of these great Chicago vocalists would appear with a couple of dancers, but it wasn’t really clear who was the person who’d actually made the music.And that kind of anonymity I think was a productive thing in one sense because it broke this commercial relationship which has been established between the audience and the band and the catalogue and the album and allowed the scene itself a lot of space to develop. Lots of these producers put out loads of music under different names and didn’t feel that they had a problem experimenting. They weren’t sure this stuff was going to sell. It wasn’t really about that. It was about “Is it going to make the dance floor move?”.Dubber I guess 808 State would have been an outlier in this because they were very much a band, weren’t they?Caspar Personally, I don’t know if they were a band in the sense that were they people who played musical instruments and then added an electronic element to it, or were they producers? I don’t know that. Although, they did appear on Top of the Pops. I know A Guy Called Gerald was involved with them as well in the early days. And, of course, they had some big hits.What happened in Manchester which is different from London, is, as I think I referred to before, that the acid house thing fused with the indie rock thing. So then you’ve got bands like The Shamen and these other bands who’d been stalwarts of indie guitar rock who then were converted to acid house. Of course, Happy Mondays and the whole Madchester so-called baggy scene, which refers to their baggy clothing and the kind of baggy attitude that they had. And that was the moment where you got a fusing of these two different… The indie-rock tradition with the acid house tradition.That didn’t happen in London because we didn’t have an indie rock tradition in London. Even pale, skinny, white boys like myself liked black music in London, and I didn’t know anyone, and white people or black people, who liked rock music or… To such an extent that I first heard Led Zeppelin when I was in my mid-twenties in America, and the people playing it to me could not believe that I didn’t know it inside out in the way that they knew it because they were so into this idea of British music being exemplified by that kind of thing, but we were in a completely different bubble.Then, to follow the point up to jungle, obviously, the producer – in terms of the person who’s actually behind the production of the music – becomes absolutely critical in jungle as it was in acid house. That’s actually the moment which changes the relationship from band to it’s then a producer comes in to try and create a record in collaboration with a band, to the producer being the person who originates everything about the music. And oftentimes, in jungle, that person is a DJ already. So you’ve got Shy FX, or you’ve got Jumpin Jack Frost, or you’ve got Fabio and Grooverider. These guys started off as DJs and then become producers and set up labels and start knocking out music. There are some producers who were not originally DJs. Someone like Andy C or… Some of these guys who had come from the peripheral suburbs of London, been drawn into the black music world via rave, then tried their hand at producing and then came in that way.Then you get new figures that the scene are based around, and within jungle, the key presence who hasn’t been there before is the MC. The vocalist. The chatter. And that is a practice which is derived from reggae sound system culture which is very strong within the sound system, although not all sound systems have chatters. Some of them don’t, but the ones that did, like Saxon, where a British reggae vocal style was developed in the early 1980s… But when house came along, that disappeared from the club scene. And, in fact, rare groove didn’t have that either. Rare groove didn’t use MCs because it was so much about the records. The musicians and the records from that period.So early raves… If you had someone come on the mic in early rave, they’d pretty much just be saying “Get on one. Let’s get radio rental.”. That sort of thing. In ’92/’93 with the emergence of hardcore, which is a… Acid house splits into multiple sub-genres. That period is usually called hardcore, or ‘ardcore, without the H. That’s what Simon Reynolds calls it. “’Ardcore. You know the score.”.A lot of this is coming through pirate radio, and, again, the main human, the main figure in pirate radio is this person who’s on the microphone talking. And how are they talking? They’ve got a weird… Not a weird. A very beautiful experimental combination of Jamaican Patois, Cockney slang, comments about football and fashion and hip-hop references, all mashed together in this new code-switching style. The sociologists call it code-switching, don’t they? Because black Londoners traditionally have been able to speak in a number of different ways already because they can speak in proper English like their parents often spoke, as they were trained to speak like that in Jamaica, in the British schools in Jamaica, but they can also speak in extremely yardie Patois. They can do Cockney if they’ve grown up in the East End. If you listen to someone like Dennis Bovell, the great dub producer, he can do every kind of accent under the sun, plausibly. Anyway.So within the jungle scene, you’ve got the re-emergence, because of reggae sound systems, of this British vocalist, this vocal style, who was there to orchestrate the dance. To interact between the producer who’s made the music, the DJ who’s playing it, the dancing crowd, in this call and response type of activity. And those figures, like MC Det and Skibadee and Shabba and the Ragga Twins, most of whom got their initial music training in sound system culture, emerged strongly in the jungle scene.And it’s what upset a lot of ravers about jungle because they did not want their high disturbed by the re-emergence of this strong black voice which was pulling the whole thing back more towards carnival, more towards a Jamaican aesthetic which… At the same time as black crowds started coming back into rave spaces, who pretty much… Rave was kind of mixed at the end of the eighties, but then it became whiter. Just empirically, in terms of who was going to raves. A complex issue about why that happened.In the book, I talk about a number of different factors, one of which is that, contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, the taking of synthetic Class A drugs – as we call them in the UK – is not that common in black club culture. Smoking weed, yeah, but not that kind of heavy chemical thing. And as rave developed into hardcore, it did get incredibly druggy, to the point where people were well out of control. There was people lying on the dance floor. There were teenagers crouched inside the bass bins. I saw this at a club called Labyrinth in Dalston. Quite upsetting, in some ways. These young kids who are really, really out of it, taking some combination of amphetamines, LSD, ecstasy, been cut with all kinds of rat poison and other things. So that’s one aspect of it.Another aspect is the music itself became harder, more industrial, more like industrial forms of rock music influenced by Belgium and Holland and other parts of Northern Europe and moved further away from a black diaspora aesthetic, musically. And I think just as important is there were so many other musical options at that period of time. Early nineties. This is the high point of hip-hop. This is the emergence of new soul. There’s acid jazz that’s kicking off. There’s great soul clubs. There’s great dancehall. So there were lots of other options for black clubbers. Not so much for white clubbers because, really, they didn’t have access to a lot of those black underground scenes, but they did to the rave. So the rave basically went overground and became this mainstream, slightly predictable, rhythmically lacking in diversity, and the same kind of beat throughout the whole night with some peaks and troughs for people to come up and down on. And jungle just messed with that whole thing. Rhythmically blew that apart. Chucked away the 4/4 basic format by having breakbeats and these deep basslines and brought back this cadre of DJs.I focussed on one particular group in London. They weren’t the only group, but are what I call the Brixton acid mob, who were these guys who’d all grown up together – Fabio, Grooverider, Dave Angel, Colin Dale – who had gone through reggae, started with reggae. They’d all been rare groove DJs. They were funk DJs. They got converted to rave at the end of the eighties. Their black crowd were not into it. Their black crowd were conservative. Rare groovers were conservative. I was a rare groover, and I was publicly against house music. Too simplistic, too mechanical, not soulful enough. But I did sneak off to the rave clubs and found something else going on there. I went to Paul Oakenfold’s club Spectrum at Heaven. I went to some other clubs which were doing different… Like Clink Street, which was this rave which started to… It had a scruffy sound system aesthetic, and it was like a warehouse party, but it was hard acid. It was like avant-garde music. It was like avant-garde art, in a way.There were lots of different constituencies and various kinds of antagonisms, but these forward-thinking guys – Fabio and Brian G, Jumping Jack Frost – who were converted to acid at the end of the eighties became huge DJs on the out of London rave circuit. And then a few years later, jungle appears. This is not a coincidence because they brought back to the fore aesthetic ideas which were latent in what they’d always been doing. So when I asked Brian G “Where did jungle come from?”, he pointed to that period of early hardcore where a lot of the music was… It was almost infantile in its simplicity. It kept sampling the soundtrack to children’s TV programmes or Margaret Thatcher going “Ooh, have an E.” or… It was playful and childish. And he says “Well, the white producers had turned back to what they were doing when they were kids, in a way, but that wasn’t what we were doing. So for black producers, we turned back to reggae and we turned back to hip-hop. Been a few years that we hadn’t connected those things, so we brought that back into the dance, and it was another upheaval.”.But, again, this is, for me, and I think for a lot of the people who went to this stuff… The rare groove period drove a lot of people into looking for second-hand records and rediscovering bands and the great catalogues of Roy Ayers and Donald Byrd and these characters. But, for me, from then onwards in acid and jungle, I wasn’t interested in going to buy the music. Lots of people were, and went to the specialist record stores and whatnot. I didn’t really care about that. It was just the fact that I felt once you were in the dance, you were there. It wasn’t about getting the music, listening to it at home, becoming an expert on that. It was about the experience of being in that place. And the jungle MC, one of the most common things they say is “Inside the place!”. It’s about honouring and celebrating the moment that you’re all in that place together, just before the bass really drops and everyone loses their shit.Dubber Speaking of dropping the bass and so on, are there always continuities between musical sub-genres, and particularly in dance? So I’m thinking jungle to drum and bass, dubstep, or rare groove, northern soul. Are those connections and continuities always there, or does something come along and do “Okay. No. We’re going to do something completely different now.”, and “Stand by. You haven’t heard this before.”?Caspar It’s a really good question. Well, for me, I would say that I think it’s all the same thing. I use the term black music. I think you could equally use the term jazz, or you can use the sociological term Afro-diasporic music. There is something continuous, and even in terms of how it evolves and changes and brings brand new things in, which repeat patterns which have been there ever since Congo Square or even before that. Congo Square, I’m referring to in New Orleans in the nineteenth century or even earlier than that where a drum culture was allowed to emerge amongst slave and post-slave cultures on a Sunday in this place where rhythmic patterns from West Africa and other parts of Africa were remembered in some way, those that had managed to be carried in the bodies of those people who had been so painfully and violently extracted from their homes, and combined with new kinds of things.So one thing that’s always clear is that new technologies offer new options, new possibilities. Jazz is only enabled to happen – jazz as we understand it – because of the excess of musical instruments that were flopping around in that area after the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War of Independence. Armies offloaded all of their drums and pipes and snares and cornets to people who picked them up and learnt how to use them. Applied a rhythmic sensibility, which is part of the continuity, really. I don’t want to be in a position to argue that black music is only rhythmic music and doesn’t have melody and harmony, which is obviously nonsense, but there’s something about the experiment with rhythm and the playing of rhythms off against each other which is, after all, what drum and bass is. That’s the way I’ve described it. But drum and bass doesn’t invent drum and bass. Drum and bass was a term that was used to describe roots reggae. The essential nature between the drummer and the bass player in a band like The Meters or the James Brown band is what drives it forward, and that goes all the way back.So, yes, there are continuities. It’s not that those continuities… This is the key thing that I take from the arguments of the cultural studies scholars like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. It’s not carried in the blood of black people. It’s not biological. It is cultural. And it’s a set of traditions and attitudes to culture, to what’s valuable, and to technology which have defined a diasporic way of going about things in the world. Which is to say, if you haven’t been given access to formal education, to formal museums, universities, law courts, access to all of that, you have to make do with what you’ve got. And you are inclined, if you’ve suffered from a system whose rules systematically oppress you, not to necessarily follow the rules as they are supposed to be followed.This is something I took from an interview that Paul Gilroy did with Toni Morrison about the essential nature of diasporic creativity, which is to do with, on the one hand, not looking like you’re trying too hard, disavowing technique, and picking things up and doing things with them that were not necessarily anticipated by the people who designed those things or the rules set down. So when Dennis Bovell goes into a studio with trained engineers and producers in the 1970s who are used to producing rock music and he’s trying to produce reggae, and they say “Oh, look at your monitors. Everything’s up in the red. You’d better turn it down. It’s distorting.”, and he says “Well, no, it’s not. Listen. It’s not distorting. It’s just going beyond the level that you’ve been told is the appropriate level, but that’s not right. I have every reason to doubt the truths which are embedded in your system.”. This is my interpretation of what he’s saying. And I think that’s the common thread that runs through all of these things.As new technologies emerge, those new possibilities, and even the limitations… Think of the limited palette of the production in grime, for example. This strange, narrow, cold sound which comes from using cracked versions of digital audio software, inspired by video games which have been played on crappy little speakers. So something which shouldn’t sound right or be thought of as good has been turned into something highly valued and innovative, and that continues to this day.And right now, probably around here, there’s some thirteen-year-old kid sitting in the estate down the road messing around with something but applying to it the rhythmic traditions. I like to call it kinetic intelligence. I think embedded in the ability to dance or the ability to be a great footballer or the ability to make a great beat is the recognition that rhythm isn’t the lowest form of musical communication. It may indeed be the most important bit of it. And Afro-diasporic music never forgets that, whereas European art music forgot that a long time ago. And many forms of rock music and other kinds of commercial pop music either forget it, or if they remember it, they remember it because they were inspired by, for example, hip-hop, which is the blueprint of pop at the moment in the world, isn’t it?Dubber Is it as cyclical as it seems to be? For instance, broken beat was a really big thing for me, and it’s twenty years, and it’s coming back in a really big way. There’s new Kaidi Tatham stuff coming out. There’s big retrospectives. Bruk…Caspar IG Culture is all over the place.Dubber Absolutely. And trip-hop. Same thing. Twenty years, here it is again. Is that true of all of these things? Do we just go “What was happening twenty years ago? Let’s put that back on the front of the shelves.”?Caspar Well, that’s a great question, and I’m sure you’ve got as interesting an answer to this as I have, Andrew. But I think there’s a slight difference here. And I, as a lover or a consumer of, an enjoyer of, trip-hop and dubstep and broken beat, none of those genres… Those genres have been produced by a cadre of producers, really. A group of experimental producers who’ve got together, and it’s really great that they’ve done that, and they’ve worked on new musical ideas and developed a scene. And that scene did have an audience of a kind, but it wasn’t that tightly connected to an audience. It didn’t have a social being. It had a being which was in the studios, in those circuits of expertise, and therefore it wasn’t protected from the way in which fashions just move on.Dubstep came and went in London. It really did. Now, some of the key figures, Mala and many of these others, what did Mala do having developed dubstep in Mass in Brixton, amongst other things? Forward>> in these other clubs. He went on a journey himself. He went to Cuba and made an album which fused Cuban beats with dubstep, and then he did some other things. Done some African stuff as well. He’s put himself on a music journey of which dubstep arguably was the beginning rather than the end. There’s no one who’s – as far as I know – passionately engaged with dubstep, in a way.And at the same time, dubstep was part of this really strange – talking about cyclical things – the cyclical way in which black American music is sold back to white Americans via a process of it coming through Europe. Perhaps you might even call it being laundered through Europe. We know about the British Invasion bands. What they did with the blues and Muddy Waters and that. And then acid house, exactly the same thing. And it’s then delivered back to the US as EDM by who? Daft Punk. David Guetta. And then who becomes the king of dubstep? Skrillex. And that process is what would leave people – let’s call it the underground, although there’s a lot of romance tied up with that – saying “Oh well. You can have that. Take dubstep. We’ll do something else.”, so there’s no longer a need for it.Broken beat, a slightly different thing. Broken beat seems, to me, a kind of… It’s a certain slightly avant-garde take on hip-hop which was always in a tension with the dance floor because breaking… The breakbeats, yeah. But broken beat is quite tough to dance to, so it requires a certain… And if you don’t have a big dance crowd, it’s hard to maintain people’s attention and interest. And so, again, it lives in the studio. It lives in the discussion forums. And it’s great that it does, just like Japanese noise or whatever. Some of these genres just live in the minds of the creators and every now and then pop their heads up. So I think that, in that way, those musical ideas will circulate and will come back. Of course. In fact, they’re there in all of our pop music. And a lot of the people who cut their teeth on those kinds of scenes, they go on to produce Kylie Minogue and Taylor Swift albums and… I don’t even know the names of a lot of these people, but I know that’s what they’ve done, just like many of the jungle people on the more cinematic side, like Photek, went to score movies in Hollywood like, of course, they were always designed to do. So there’s a circulation there.In terms of the genres, I know there’s this whole debate we perhaps don’t want to open up about “Is the genre dead?” and whatnot. But I do think that to sustain longevity as drum and bass has done, jungle/drum and bass, is because it’s a dance floor genre and they’ve built this network of global dance floors where that still goes off. Sardinia, Dubai, Australia. An interesting group of expat enclaves, I would say, and there’s a political argument you could make there. It hasn’t got a grip or a hold over the black audience in London very much, but so what? Because that audience is doing something else.And I do think that in terms of the cyclical nature of things, the innovation does still tend to come from unexpected places, people with few options, and people who are prepared to just put energy and effort… You could tell why grime was going to happen because you saw loads and loads of black school kids spitting bars at each other on the bus, recording it into their phones, and you were like “Well, this is going to lead to something.” because that never happened in the eighties which is why UK hip-hop in the eighties was pretty rubbish, but it had happened in America.So when you see people doing that, or footwork… These people are practising their moves because they don’t have much else to do. And drill, which is a kind of controversial version of grime with supposedly violent and all about drugs and feuds and whatnot, and there is a story about that, but musically it’s cutting edge. Things are happening there which are making broken beat and dubstep look like what they are, which is middle age genres, frankly, which work very well on the internet. And that’s fine for them to live there, but whether they come back to life on the dance floor or in actual physical space… It depends whether they can either capture a dance audience for it, or what grime did was almost open up an audience for almost… It’s almost like black theatre. People standing around in playgrounds and gathering together in groups to swap lyrical flows, which keeps it alive and keeps it moving forward.Something like a trip-hop, I think we can happily feel that that was a great moment in music that doesn’t need to return. It did its work. It pulled together two hitherto separated things. Basically, a hip-hop sensibility with a folky, ethereal female vocal vibe. Loved it. I absolutely… Portishead. It’s classical music, as far as I’m concerned, and gave Bristol its moment. Of course, Bristol has loads of drum and bass and stuff as well. So we’ll see.At the moment, it’s jazz that’s running the show. But if you go to a jazz show in London, you’re going to hear broken beat, you’re going to hear dubstep influences, you’re going to hear funk, you’re going to hear ravey references, but you’re also going to hear saxophone and tuba solos. So it’s all there. It’s just put together in a slightly different format. But they found an audience. They’ve built a young audience for it, and that’s what’s going to keep it alive in a way that these other genres, as the people who love them reach middle age, just fade away a little bit. And I think we should let them fade away.Dubber Yeah. I was going to ask you to what extent are you across the most contemporary of music scenes to the extent that you can find parallels, but ‘sufficiently' is what it sounds like.Caspar Well, no. I don’t listen to a lot of pop music. I’ve spent the whole of lockdown talking about those rare groove albums. I’ve spent the whole of lockdown going back over my record collection and listening to the tracks which I’d overlooked in the past because they weren’t the dance floor track and found so much great music.One of the great convenient things that’s happened is I’m in the middle of London. And London, even under lockdown, is having an enormous outpouring of creative music at the moment. They’re calling it the jazz revival or the new jazz or whatever it is, but, in fact, what it is is a new twist on improvised instrument-led music, actually, which I’ve never seen before in London.In the old days, the great musicians were not Londoners. They were people who came through London. They were usually Americans, or they were Fela Kuti’s band. There was an Afro-jazz thing. British musicians were always lagging behind. Our institutions didn’t teach jazz properly or making non-western art forms of music on your instruments very well. But suddenly, we’ve got a generation now being led – very excitingly – by young, female, black instrumentalists who are playing trombones, trumpets, tubas, but they’re making it in the context of the history of the music which has mattered here. So you can hear the hip-hop in it. You can hear references to soul jazz, jazz-funk, spiritual jazz, the radical jazz of the sixties, Afrobeat, grime, but done in a way… It’s not just tasteful. I wouldn’t like to use that word because that sounds dismissive. But done with great taste and great respect for these traditions, some of which have been forgotten, some of which were reviled, like jazz-funk.I’m a great advocate for jazz-funk, and one of the things I love about it is the way that formal jazz and formal jazz musicians hated it so much and always conceived it as a sell-out, an aim to the market. “They’re just selling out because this is what the market wants.”. Whereas, I conceive it as a reconnection with the dance audience, which I think was a really important thing that they did in the seventies. So a Herbie Hancock, who has had the best-selling jazz album ever and should be rewarded for that because it’s absolutely fantastic – ‘Head Hunters’ – he got people dancing to jazz, and he’s a key figure in this London jazz scene alongside Fela Kuti, alongside reggae.And because of the changing racial demographics in London, which is that now the London black population is no longer a majority Afro-Caribbean – it’s African, and West Africa in particular. Nigeria. Ghana. Loads of people from Cameroon. Lots of French-speaking black African families in London as well. People from Somalia – there’s been a shift to… And African music and highlife and those influences have also come back into the music at the same time. So it’s literally happening all around me. At the moment, it’s not happening all around me, sadly, but for the past few years in jam sessions, in small places, in quite cheap venues, even in warehouse parties, again.So there’s a renaissance of the kinds of things that we saw in rare groove in terms of young people taking control of their own space and making the music, but suddenly they are technically brilliant musicians. Who can imagine seeing a group of nineteen-year-olds pogoing to a tuba solo? It’s not something I ever thought I’d see in a million years, and then it’s happening right now. Now, that level of player like Theon Cross have now gone to the next level. He famously did South by Southwest this year as a 3D avatar because he wasn’t able to go in person, and he’s selling out venues of eight/nine hundred people. Ezra Collective, Nubya Garcia, they’re going to become superstars.But the beauty is they’re in their early to mid-twenties, some a bit older, Shabaka Hutchings, but they’ve got twenty or thirty years ahead of them to make music, and they’re composing… It’s all original music. They’re composers. They’re producers. They’re making their own videos. I suspect they own their own masters. The deals they’re making with labels are informed by what grime went through in the early 2000s where record companies signed up a hundred grime artists and dropped ninety-nine of them within two years and almost killed grime as a genre, and then grime grew up and realised that they need to control their own destiny and they could use the internet and all those digital tools that you and I talk about. And even if you try to raise a note of scepticism, I actually do believe these are democratising technologies, and they’ve put a lot of power into the hands of people who make the music who want to connect to their audience. So I think we’re seeing that happening as well.Dubber And academia is a great place to respectively indulge the enthusiasms of your youth. To what extent is that why we do this?Caspar I can’t imagine a better scenario for myself, and I want to advocate to other people that academia is a good place to pursue this kind of thing if you want to because… When I decided to stop being a journalist and do academia, it was because I wanted to spend the majority of my time thinking about the same set of things and learning and researching things which fascinated me. The reason I wanted to be a music journalist was because I wanted to meet and talk to people I admired who did things I was in awe of, and that remains the case now.And teaching about it as well is exciting because… I’m teaching people who don’t know who Margaret Thatcher is. Because my students are a very international crowd – I’ve got lots of Chinese students, students from Japan, students from Angola – they don’t know what punk is, never mind knowing who Jesse Saunders is or knowing what was happening at the warehouse or knowing the backstory to things that they do like, because everything they like is… Not everything, but most of it is still within this world which has got a fascinating backstory and a fascinating context. So I found that really inspirational.I learn loads from them because they keep me hip to the music that they want to write about. And one of the great things about the internet is while I’m marking their essays, I can instantly go to YouTube and pull it up and listen to it, and I’d say the same about Spotify. Every time I hear someone mention something that sounds great, I’m onto Spotify. I’ve stuck it on a playlist. I can listen to it several times over, get to know it, and if I like it, I’ll go to Bandcamp and buy it. And that seems to me actually quite a good way of doing things.Dubber That’s a healthy relationship with contemporary music. But I’m interested in the… Because you mentioned a couple of key maybe even trigger words, which are ‘democratising’ and ‘emancipatory nature’ basically of stuff that I like, which is the cultural studies default position of…Caspar Bugbear.Dubber Yeah. Particularly in graduate and post-grad research, of “I’m now going to write a forty thousand word dissertation on what’s so great about things I like.”. But is there anything that you can look at, this body of work that you’ve examined, and go “Well, that’s not very good. That’s not right. They shouldn’t have done this.”, or “This is something I should be critical about.”, rather than just celebrating the hands across the water solidarity of it all?Caspar No, it’s a really good point. And it’s something to always bear in mind, of course. We want to be critical thinkers. The danger when you’re writing about things you love – and I say it to my students all the time – and you call it unique and you call it earth-shattering and you make all kinds of claims for it which are not substantiated… And that is a danger. I’d say two things. One is, when it comes to writing about rare groove, for example, I was taking the first baby steps. I found one other article that mentioned rare groove in academia. So in some ways, there’s a prior step to being critical, which is just to get the information out into the world. Secondly, I think the point is that these things are in motion. And there are points at which they can be emancipatory, full of possibility, and other points where they can fail to deliver on that or be captured by all kinds of other forces.I have a bit in the book about what happened to rare groove, and the point was rare groove ran its course. It relied on scarcity, and it relied on the fact that the audience were being exposed to something that they actually didn’t know anything about, and it was incredibly exciting. And, of course, when you actually scratch the surface of what that stuff is it reveals the wonderful geniuses behind that music as well. But after a few years, it becomes an enclosed system with a certain canon, just like all kinds of things do. It becomes boring. It becomes predictable. It becomes elitist. It becomes conservative. Will Straw says this about all music scenes, which I think is a really important thing to remember. They’re inherently conservative. Look at northern soul. Conservative to the point where you’ll almost get shot if you play a record which is outside of the defined limits of the canon or had been too commercially successful or has got a synthesiser in it. I talked to DJ Bob Jones about this. It’s fascinating. So there’s inherent conservatism, which I think is important to remember so it’s not just all happy-clappy.There was a key thing I wanted to argue with, and this is why I included acid house in the book. I enjoyed raving, sure. Part of it was the drugs, sure. There’s only a certain amount of that you can do without losing it, and many people did lose it. But there’s lots of it I hated in terms of the music, and also I hated the way it was historicised. Because it became such the key moment in club culture for so many people, writers that I admire – people like Simon Reynolds. People like Jeremy Gilbert. Even Tim Lawrence, up to a point. These are people who’ve written really great stuff about this – seem to treat acid house as if it was something unique and something special outside of this continuum that I’ve been talking to you about, this Afro-diasporic continuum.And there was this particular idea which Simon Reynolds came up with. The Hardcore Continuum, he called it, and he talked about this continuity which was there from the beginning of acid house all the way through late jungle, and it was… What it seemed to me was this was a misrepresentation or a reading of black music which extracted from it those elements of black music which white critics who had grown up venerating punk and experimental forms of rock music found most familiar or most attractive, and they lifted that out and separated from the bits of black music that they really don’t like. Naff jazz-funk. Soul music. Luther Vandross, right? To me, Luther Vandross is totally part of the story I’ve just told. To me, Luther Vandross is connected to acid house and lives within that world as well, even though for some people it’s boring, sell out, predictable, sappy, embarrassing. It’s not Afrofuturistic enough. And I reject that, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to put acid house in the book, and not so much reclaim it for the Afro-diasporic tradition but to show how it should be situated as a few short years within a much bigger story. And if you want experimentalism, if you want avant-gardism, you can find that in blues. You can find it in Marley and griot music, in terms… You can find it everywhere you look. It didn’t just happen in this one narrow period.And, actually, rave very quickly… Having gone to, let’s say, Cream in Liverpool at some time in the whenever it was in the mid-nineties, or Home, this dreadful commercial superclub in the middle of London, and just listening to fundamentally boring music which was still… The point I’m trying to get across is things need to be situated in their time and place. Stuart Hall’s idea of the conjuncture really matters because something which is revolutionary at one period is not revolutionary at another period, necessarily. It might only be a couple of years apart. The possibilities it raises are not necessarily going to be fulfilled. In fact, they probably won’t be because, as we know, when we think about capitalism, it has a great ability to fold back into itself all of the critique which is generated on the fringes. It’s actually part of its logic.Dubber Yeah. And the reverse is also true because you can become very, very nostalgic about something that you were very sniffy about at the time, so you re-narrativise what your experience was.Caspar Absolutely. And I still feel the lure of credentialising, and everyone… I feel this for UK jazz at the moment. I’m really worried about UK jazz because of the way in which people can jump on it, lay claim to it. There’s talk at the moment about “Should UK jazz acts ally with brands?”, because this is a big thing that happens in the music scape, isn’t it? And some people are saying “No. That’s selling out.”, and other people are saying “No, no. The problem is that there is no sustainable economy within UK jazz outside of the public funding it’s received. But that’s a success story for a certain kind of public funding over the last ten or fifteen years, but it’s very vulnerable. How is it going to achieve autonomy? Maybe allying with Nike or some designer is the way to go.”.The way I would think about it is that not only are all music scenes born within capitalism, so there is no safe space to stand outside it, but actually, this Afro-diasporic tradition we’ve been describing is one of the best ways to get a sense of what it’s like to live within capitalism, especially if you have lived within racial capitalism as a not white person. So it’s partly produced by the experience of those people who live within capitalism because the music industry is capitalism. In fact, it might be capitalism in its most raw and obvious form. So there’s no safe space, nor should there be, and we shouldn’t try and… As world music slightly did try and do this, didn’t it? Suggest that there was a world of music and production and labels which lived somehow outside in some sort of golden world of ethnomusicological truth and authenticity.I don’t think the music I’ve been describing is that concerned with those kind of questions. It’s more concerned with producing… Let’s not be too reticent to use words like love and art. Access to something profound, something awesome, something different from your everyday experience, something that might provide some possibilities for you in your life. It won’t set you free, necessarily, but it might provide you… Free your mind and your ass will follow, as George Clinton said. There is a relationship between the kinds of things that you can get from the kinds of cultural scenes I’m talking about – I think there is – and generating the possibilities for improving the world or building it differently. But it doesn’t necessarily deliver those any more than all the talk about the democratisation of the internet necessarily delivers a democratic internet because the forces that are trying to enclose it, limit it, conceal it, or just make things so damn convenient that you just use Amazon because you can’t be bothered to enter your bank details in every other one’s site betray those possibilities.Dubber Caspar, thanks so much for your time. It’s been really, really interesting. I’ve got so many things that I want to go further, and I’m aware of the constraints of people’s patience for my enthusiasms about things, so we should probably wrap it up there.Caspar It’s been so fascinating talking to you. Thanks for your questions, Andrew. I know that you and I share a lot, and being asked those pointed questions, the ones you’ve asked me, are really at the heart of the dilemmas which come with all of this. Academia, over-celebration, nostalgia for something you didn’t like in the past, all of that. So I really appreciate your questioning. Your kind but sharp questions.Dubber Cheers. Thanks, Caspar.Caspar Thanks, mate.Dubber That’s Dr Caspar Melville, senior lecturer in Global Creative and Cultural Studies at SOAS and author of ‘It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City’, and that’s the MTF Podcast. I’m going to link to the book in the post, and you can find Caspar on Twitter, @CasparMelville. I’m Dubber, @dubber on Twitter, and MTF Labs is @mtflabs and on the web at <a href="http://www.mtflabs.net">www.mtflabs.net</a>.And, of course, while it’s always nice to talk about music scenes on the podcast, we don’t always talk about music scenes. We talk about AI, business management, urbanism, cybersecurity, wine, astrophysics, intellectual property, nuclear research, creativity, cartography, and Batman, and that’s just the last ten episodes, of which this is number 117. So feel free to go digging through the back catalogue for more interesting conversations with really brilliant people from the MTF community. Thanks as always to the team – Sergio Castillo, Mars Startin, Jen Kukucka, and Run Dreamer – and to 2050 and airtone for the music. Thanks to you for listening. Have a great week, and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.</div></div></div></div><div class="et_pb_row et_pb_row_3 transcript"><div class="et_pb_column et_pb_column_4_4 et_pb_column_3 et_pb_css_mix_blend_mode_passthrough et-last-child"><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_code et_pb_code_1 et_pb_text_align_center"><div class="et_pb_code_inner"><a href="http://subscribeonandroid.com/mtflabs.net/feed/podcast" title="Subscribe on Android"><img decoding="async" src="https://assets.blubrry.com/soa/BadgeLarge.png" alt="Subscribe on Android" style="border:0;" /></a> <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/se/podcast/id1439245154"><img decoding="async" src="https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/16210150/Apple-Podcast-Listen.jpg"></a> </div></div></div></div></div>The post <a href="https://mtflabs.net/podcast117/">117. Caspar Melville – It's A London Thing</a> appeared first on <a href="https://mtflabs.net">MTF Labs</a>.<hr> Hosted on Acast. 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May 25, 2021

116. Sofia Crespo – Artificial Life

<div class="et_pb_section et_pb_section_2 et_section_regular" ><div class="et_pb_row et_pb_row_4"><div class="et_pb_column et_pb_column_4_4 et_pb_column_4 et_pb_css_mix_blend_mode_passthrough et-last-child"><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_image et_pb_image_2"><img decoding="async" width="795" height="500" src="https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/16205521/sofia.jpg" alt="Sofia Crespo" title="sofia" srcset="https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/16205521/sofia.jpg 795w, https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/16205521/sofia-480x302.jpg 480w" sizes="(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) 795px, 100vw" class="wp-image-216484" /></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_audio_2 et_clickable et_pb_audio_module clearfix et_pb_bg_layout_light et_pb_text_color_dark et_pb_audio_no_image"><div class="et_pb_audio_module_content et_audio_container"><h2 class="et_pb_module_header">Sofia Crespo - Artificial Life</h2>by MTF Labs | MTF Podcast<audio class="wp-audio-shortcode" id="audio-216475-3" preload="none" style="width: 100%;" controls="controls"><source type="audio/mpeg" src="https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/116-sofia-crespo.mp3?_=3" /><a href="https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/116-sofia-crespo.mp3">https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/116-sofia-crespo.mp3</a></audio></div></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_text et_pb_text_4 et_pb_text_align_left et_pb_bg_layout_light"><div class="et_pb_text_inner"><div>Sofia Crespo is a Berlin-based visual artist who uses artificial intelligence to create speculative living organisms that exist in the gap between real biological species and our perception and understanding of what ‘life' is.</div><div> </div><div>Her work is collaborative and connects with scientists, other visual artists, AI experts, musicians and sound designers. She is interested not just in how technologies can create biological forms, but also how organic life can create and use technologies.</div><div> </div><div><a href="https://twitter.com/annagrichting">@</a><a href="https://twitter.com/soficrespo91">soficrespo91</a> on Twitter <a href="http://sofiacrespo.com">sofiacrespo.com</a></div></div></div><div class="et_pb_button_module_wrapper et_pb_button_2_wrapper et_pb_button_alignment_right et_pb_module "><a class="et_pb_button et_pb_button_2 et_pb_bg_layout_light" href="https://musictechfest.s3.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/podcast/116-sofia-crespo.mp3" target="_blank">Download episode</a></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_post_nav_2 transcript et_pb_posts_nav nav-single"><a href="https://mtflabs.net/podcast115/" rel="prev">← Previous episode</a><a href="https://mtflabs.net/podcast117/" rel="next">Next episode →</a></div><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_text et_pb_text_5 transcript et_pb_text_align_left et_pb_bg_layout_light"><div class="et_pb_text_inner"><h3>Transcript</h3>Dubber Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. Now, if you find yourself on Instagram and you’re looking for something other than the children, pets, and meals of friends and family, the privileged lives of the famous, the heavily filtered images of people who are good at wearing clothes, or – if you’re like me – vintage hi-fi gear, then you might find yourself looking at generative visual art. And as you scroll through the abstract designs, hypnotic pulses, and seizure-inducing strobes, you might see something that looks almost, but not quite, like a cross-breed between a penguin and a fluorescent blue slug, or an anatomically unlikely cicada, a fractal parrot, a melty squid, or a patchwork butterfly. If so, then chances are you’ve found the art of Berlin-based AI artist Sofia Crespo.With the help of machine intelligence, Sofia creates artificial life. She joined us to do that at MTF Aveiro in Portugal last year, and she’s started collaborations with other MTFers, not so much to play god, but – to mangle the theology of the metaphor – maybe to act as one of his elves in the living organism toy workshop. Okay, this all breaks down a little bit, but you get the idea. She uses thinking computers to make what you might call speculative creatures, and then she brings them to life.Dubber Sofia Crespo, thanks so much for joining us for the MTF Podcast. I was going to say “How are you doing?”, but you’re not doing very well.Sofia Yeah, I’m not. I’m a bit ill right now, but, nevertheless, thank you so much for having me here.Dubber You’re welcome. And you’re a hospital escapee.Sofia Yeah.Dubber You have to tell that story.Sofia I left the hospital yesterday. I got very anxious after being there for eight hours, waiting, and alone in a room in isolation. I feel terrible for their hospital staff, though. And the police came looking for me, and it was a first. First time running away from hospital for me.Dubber It’s good that you can laugh about it and that, I know you say you’re unwell, but you tested negative for COVID. You have a bit of a fever, but you’re not bleeding to death or anything like that.Sofia No, but I’m worried that I might have tuberculosis.Dubber Oh, really? Oh my god.Sofia Yeah. So that’s something that is also a first. I have all the symptoms, but I haven’t been tested for it.Dubber Wow. And that’s why they were quite keen for you to stay in the hospital.Sofia Yeah. Well, mainly because of COVID because they were worried that I have COVID. But I was in the ER station, so they don’t do TB tests there. They were just worried about something very acute. But, yeah, it’s strange. The only things I know about tuberculosis are that it’s a very old disease that used to kill a lot of people back in the day before there was a cure.Dubber Sure, yeah. The only thing I know about it is that you’re meant to take it seriously. You seem fine, but I’m not a doctor.Sofia Yeah. That’s why I went to the ER in the first place. But it’s a strange time to have that because obviously COVID is the main priority right now as a health emergency.Dubber Wow. Well, I really hope you’re okay. It puts a slightly different slant on the whole interview.Sofia Oh my god.Dubber But let’s assume you’re okay and start with what you do is you make artificial life.Sofia I do.Dubber Which is to say you’re an artist that uses AI to create living creatures. What does that mean? What does that look like?Sofia Yeah. Well, in a way, it depends. There are many things to unpack, like how do we perceive life, what do we see as life, and where does life even begin for us? So what I do is just things that simulate, on a very high level, so to say, what life looks like to us when digitised. So I’m exploring that threshold of where human perception sees something that looks alive and how all those patterns are recognised by our brains. So that’s the bit that I’m really interested in. And when we look at an image, for example, how can we tell “Okay. This looks like this image contains life or a lifeform or something that looks like what I know could be alive in the natural world.”. And there’s a threshold between knowing what that thing is and not knowing, not being able to match it to something specific, and I love that place. An uncanny or visual indeterminacy.Dubber Wow. When I went to high school, which was a very long time ago, there were these things that we were told about how you know if something has life, and it was like “It moves. It responds. It breathes, for the most part.”, but you could say that looking at a cartoon of an imaginary creature. Somebody could just draw something and over several frames make it appear to do those things. What’s different about what you do?Sofia So I don’t draw things by hand. I’m terrible at drawing. So I use an algorithm – or several algorithms, not a single one – to be assisted. A generative workflow. I’m really interested in the automation of processes. So how, as artists, we don’t need to anymore do something by hand, but we can code or create an algorithm or reuse an algorithm that somebody else created and use it to automate a process such as creating a pattern. So what I can do is create a data set instead of creating the image or painting the image. I make a data set of hundreds or sometimes thousands or sometimes even hundreds of thousands of images, and then I train a machine learning model based on that. And then I can tell to that model “Okay. Now generate a one-hour video.”, or a thirty-second video or ten-hour video.Dubber So when you say you start with a hundred thousand images, these are images of a particular creature type, or…Sofia Yeah.Dubber So, for example…Sofia So, for example, recently I trained two models. One on caterpillars and another one on butterflies. And I wanted to create that transition between caterpillars and butterflies to visually explore that transition of how a caterpillar gets its whole body reassembled inside of this cocoon, and then everything liquefies to become a butterfly and be able to fly and live a completely different stage of their life. So for that, I made two data sets, and I trained two models, and then I made them connect to each other to transition from one to another in the closest visual reference that they have. So, yeah, that’s one example of what I…Dubber Sure. I’m really interested, is it the biological life that you’re interested in or is it the intellectual life of the machine when it processes those things and comes up with its own version?Sofia So I’m interested in both things, actually. From the algorithmic perspective, I’m interested in how we developed neural networks based on neuroscientific research, inspired by neuroscientific research, and the idea that neurons are interconnected, and the whole point is that they build a network to transfer information from one to another and that there’s a larger emergence that happens from that interconnectivity between each single neuron. So from that perspective, I find it fascinating that we managed to extract a model of an algorithm and that we can use it now for computer science and artistic applications. So that’s one thing.But then on the other hand, I’m really interested as well in biology and to learn about nature, and also biology as a human study. How we created biology – biology is a human-created thing – to understand and organise, make sense of the natural world. So I also think that’s a fascinating thing to learn about.Dubber For sure. So your interest is in both the computer-generated life idea but also the exploration of biology also for your own interest. What is it you think that people who look at your images and look at your videos should get out of it? Are you trying to communicate something to them? Is there something that people say that they get out of it? Are you not interested in that?Sofia Yeah. To some extent, what I want to communicate is intuitive. So part of it, I say “Okay, this is what I want to talk about. I want to open a dialogue about this.”, and sometimes I just do something and I don’t really know why, but it feels right to do that.And I love having a dialogue with people when they see the work. I think that an artwork is not just made of one part. The creator doing it. It’s made of two parts. The person observing it. And that’s why I think it’s so important to see art as a human thing. We consume art, and art is made for us to consume. We don’t make art for an algorithm to consume, at least yet.Dubber Or another species, for that matter.Sofia Exactly, yes. Or another species.Dubber Interesting.Sofia And I think… Well, a lot of the time, people find patterns that I didn’t see there before. So people say “Oh, there’s a rabbit there in the middle of this picture.”, and I’m like “Where?”, and they have to help me find it. And I love that, how different minds see things and find patterns. That’s one of the most rewarding things for me, to interact with other minds in that way.Dubber Are you a computer scientist who makes art, or are you an artist who uses computer science?Sofia I’m an artist who uses computer science.Dubber Very much art out at the forefront.Sofia Yeah.Dubber So you could be an artist who uses other tools, is what you’re saying.Sofia Definitely.Dubber Right. Because at MTF in Aveiro last year, you joined us, and you collaborated with some people, and it became a musical performance and a responsive video. Is music an element of what you do, and in what way do you think about it being included in that dialogue between the biology and the algorithm?Sofia It’s fascinating. I am not a music artist myself, but it’s something that in the past years I’ve been feeling more and more interested in from the collaborative perspective. Working with music artists and hearing the world the way they hear it or… It’s a different medium. It’s a different way of perception of the world, and I love the combination of visual and sound together. Somehow, my work feels a lot more complete when I work with music artists or sound artists.Dubber Fantastic. It seems like your medium is also Instagram.Sofia Yes, definitely.Dubber And that this is somewhere where your work has a natural fit. Was that a platform just ready-made for somebody like you?Sofia So I wasn’t feeling that comfortable with Instagram before the whole COVID pandemic happened. I was shy. I used Instagram, but the whole situation of not being able to interact with people so often pushed me to look for a channel where I felt comfortable. And Twitter makes me anxious. Even though there’s lots of interesting things, there’s also a very engineering-focused approach to machine learning, and that makes me anxious because many times I share something and it’s all seen as a technical demo rather than art, and that isn’t what I want to do. And so on Instagram, there’s more of an artist community, and there’s more of a… I found a more positive community, and supportive.So I think I had to adapt myself to Instagram more than Instagram being made for someone like me. I’m quite shy, so I had to make an effort to stay engaged and share. And eventually, it became rewarding, actually.Dubber Well, for somebody who’s quite shy, you do seem to collaborate. Do you want to talk about how you work with… I’m thinking of Feileacan in particular – Feileacan McCormick – and how you work with him, and how that collaboration and other collaborations work for somebody like you.Sofia Yeah. So we actually originally met on social media, on Twitter, and on Instagram too. We connected there, and I saw his work with photogrammetry. He was, two years ago, scanning a series of trees, and I thought that was amazing. He was scanning really old trees, like thousand years old, and opening up a conversation about how these trees have seen several generations of humans living and giving them a digital archive. And when we met, that was one of the first things we started talking about. How are we archiving nature? How are we digitally representing nature? And it was a natural thing. I introduced him to machine learning, and he immediately clicked with it, and then suddenly he was teaching me things.So eventually, we started this studio together called Entangled Others, and the whole idea of that studio is to create a space for representing biodiversity digitally and to open up a conversation around new technologies and biodiversity. And it has enriched me so much, to the point that now I don’t imagine working in a non-collaborative way anymore. I love collaborating with people, and we’ve been making a team. We’re trying to include more and more people to it.Dubber As far as the biodiversity thing is concerned, do you see your work as part of an ecological campaign? Are you trying to do awareness-raising or bring people’s attention to particular issues in ecology or things like that, or does it just happen to be about species of animals that may or may not exist?Sofia So the message has been evolving, in a way. When it started, it was more about the joy of the digital, joy of the natural world, and then eventually it became more opening a conversation about how we exist in relationship to others, how we exist in ecosystems, not as isolated creatures, but then also opening the conversation about how machine learning and new technologies are being used. So how AI isn’t this thing that is just biased and categorising humans and used for evil, so to say, and how these technologies have applications to and have potential to open up a conversation about these things that from what we see in the media seem unimaginable at first. So that became our goal, to appropriate these technologies for representing nature digitally.Dubber I’m wondering how you get to the point where you’re somebody who makes artificial life for a living and what the journey is that takes you there. What sort of kid were you, for instance, and – here’s an interesting thought – what do your parents do, and has that had any effect on where you’ve ended up?Sofia Oh, definitely. My parents have been such a big influence. So my mum is an environmental law researcher. She researches how big companies have an impact on the environment and laws of deforestation, etc. And my dad is a former sea captain. So he used to go on very, very long trips around the world when I was little, and he brought me things from different parts of the world and told me all these stories about the sea. And eventually, I ended up doing something that’s a blend of both, in a way. I have this fascination with the sea and with sea creatures, and at the same time also this concern about the environment and the more critical thought that my mum taught me.Dubber And where did the art thing come from?Sofia I think originally it became a way of coping with the world. I think that I was a little bit depressed when I was younger, and art became my way of coping. A place where I felt really liberated. And originally it was a form of self-expression. I was writing a lot. I used to write poetry, and then short stories. And then it all became existential – this writing – for a while, and then I used to have an open blog where I wrote my thoughts. Then I went to university for literature for two years, and then I dropped out because I wanted to live somewhere else in the world. And then I moved to New Zealand and eventually to Europe and ended up in Germany for the longest.Dubber What was the starting point? Where were you originally going to university doing literature?Sofia I was going to university in Buenos Aires. That’s where I come from, from Buenos Aires, Argentina. And I was very interested in philosophy and history of art, and I loved reading and thinking about existentialism back then. I was eighteen.Dubber From that, New Zealand seems like a strange choice. I’m from there. So what took you there?Sofia Well, what took me there was that, back then, there was a working holiday visa for Argentinians, and there was a community around that. And also it was a very far away place. I was a teenager still, so I wanted to go somewhere very far away that was still safe and where I could take some time and be with nature. And I didn’t get the working holiday visa at all, but I ended up going anyway, and it was an amazing time.Dubber Where did you go, just out of curiosity? This might not even make it into the podcast. I’m just curious. What was your favourite part, and why is it Auckland?Sofia Oh, god. It wasn’t Auckland at all.Dubber Ah, what a shame.Sofia I think my favourite part… Oh my god. There were so many amazing places that I’ve been to. I remember… Well, I was in Auckland for a very short time. That’s where I landed, and then I went directly to… What was the name? Oh, god. It started with T.Dubber Well, there’s lots. Tauranga?Sofia Tauranga, yes. I went there and saw the volcano. Oh, god. The volcanos were amazing. And Rotorua. I think Rotorua was my favourite place because it’s all volcanic. It has this very strong smell when you arrive there, and there was also a family that kind of adopted me. It was a bit crazy. This family of a Māori lady married to a Scottish man, and they became my grandparents, in a way.Dubber That’s fantastic. It’s such a lovely place. That’s something I can believe happens there. But you’re right. The geothermal activity there… I can see the bubbling mud pools almost in the work that you’ve created, since some of the work that you did in Aveiro, which was based on local life forms, but it has this bubbling quality to it where it moves and thrives.Sofia Exactly.Dubber I like that that’s part of the story. You’re in Berlin now. Is that correct?Sofia Yes, now I’m in Berlin, and I’ve been here the longest.Dubber Why?Sofia I think when I moved to Germany, I really liked that Germany… Well, at least for somebody who comes from Argentina, it seemed like a much more feminist country to live in. And when I arrived to Berlin, I felt liberated, like this was a place where I could be an artist if I wanted to and nobody would judge me for it, and I could be unemployed for a while and figuring out what to do with my life if I wanted and nobody would judge me for it. At the time, I was completely broke, didn’t know what to do, and I needed a supportive space. Berlin seemed welcoming and interesting, and I ended up staying here.Dubber And there’s certainly no shortage of interesting people to work with there.Sofia Yeah, definitely.Dubber That’s really interesting. Let’s go back to your work for a bit. The fact that you’re a digital artist and the things that you make are all in the digital domain, I wonder if you see gallery exhibitions or photography books or anything like that, these tangible things, as a valid expression of your work. Are you interested in doing those sorts of things?Sofia Definitely. This year, we opened up an exhibition which we unfortunately couldn’t go to see in person, but we made a sculptural piece, and I’m really, really fascinated in the transformation of a digital piece into a physical one.So something that I’ve been working on as well, I also worked with the cyanotype technique, which is a very old technique for printing – one of the first printing techniques that existed from the nineteenth century – and I use it to print the pieces that I generate with machine learning. So there’s a cross between a really new technique that you can only use now with a very, very old way of printing.Dubber And, of course, the conversation around digital art right now is about NFTs. Is this something that you’ve become interested in or that you’re exploring?Sofia Yeah. So we started putting NFTs out there I think… Well, a few years ago. I think in 2019, were the first ones. But then lately, there’s been a very large discussion about environmentalism and NFTs, and I’m torn between both things. On one hand, I really care about the environment and I really care about the CO emissions, but on the other hand, I really care about the artists and how they’ve been affected by the pandemic situation, and I think that it’s really important to not shame artists for putting their work for sale. I stand somewhere in the middle where I think it’s really important to allow artists to sell their work. And I think that artists are usually a vulnerable part of society because to make art, you’re supposed to create without an intent of selling. There’s all this societal baggage that gets thrown at artists. And at the same time, you’re also not supposed to sell your art digitally because that’s polluting or whatever. So there’s a very high moral bar for artists, in a way.Dubber For sure. For people who haven’t been following this closely, do you have a short description of what NFTs are and how they work?Sofia Yeah. NFTs basically are using a smart contract or a blockchain protocol to sell. So you can monetise out of a digital piece because there’s a token that is uniquely generated for that single piece, so that allows to trace back originality of an artwork, and that’s a very crucial part of selling a digital asset. And NFTs stand for non-fungible tokens. That means that once you generate that token, it cannot be broken into several pieces. You cannot sell one pixel of that artwork to somebody else because it’s supposed to stay all together, so to say. So that’s the concept. Hope I explained it correctly.Dubber Yeah. So also you can have millions of copies of that same image, but only one of them is the authentic original, and that’s the one that has the NFT associated with it.Sofia Right.Dubber Yeah. It’s really interesting. And, of course, when people have these conversations that say “Artists shouldn’t be doing this because it’s environmentally unfriendly and it uses X, Y, Z amounts of energy.” overlooks the fact that when artists have exhibitions in other countries, they have to put their work on planes, they have to fly there, people come in from all over the world in cars, etc.Sofia Exactly.Dubber So, obviously, there seems to be some sort of trade-off there. But it’s an interesting… Is digital artist something that is yet recognised as a thing that you can be in a way that… Because I know some years ago, it really wasn’t considered a legitimate description.Sofia Right. It’s weird to say this, but in some strange way, thanks to NFTs, I think digital art is becoming more of a legitimate thing to do. But weirdly enough, I’ve had people… I had exhibitions where I set up my work and physical exhibitions at the very beginning, I think in 2018, where people came and saw my art, and they said “How do you even make a living, if you don’t mind me asking?”. I was like “Well, where do I begin? I don’t make too much of a living, but I do what I love.”.But also doing AI art is a weird subset of digital art in itself. A large part of society still thinks that AI art is basically you sitting in a room pushing a button and the AI does everything for you and that there is no human intervention there. So it’s a clash of new things that… What’s it called? There are new jobs that didn’t exist some years ago, right?Dubber Sure.Sofia My parents took a while to understand what I was doing.Dubber But they’re on board now?Sofia Yes, definitely.Dubber Fantastic. So this question of AI and creativity is a really interesting one. Like you said, people imagine that you just press a button and then a clever machine goes and does all the artwork for you, but also it raises this idea of the relationship between machine creativity, I guess is the term. Is there a point at which there is actually some genuine creativity going on within the machine itself?Sofia Right. I think a crucial part of creativity comes from iterations, like having so many iterations from a single idea and exploring all the ramifications that one idea could have, and that’s something where assistive creativity helps a lot. If I want to create a jellyfish arrangement of tendrils and whatever on an image, I can, with the generative art workflow, create a thousand, two thousand iterations if I want and then choose from one of them.And there is something as well that I really love that Vera Molnár, who is one of the mothers of generative art, I would say, if not the mother of generative art, she says that there is something to the element of randomness that really helps to the human creativity. So seeing something that one wasn’t expecting to see suddenly can help a human think of something else. I don’t know if I’m making justice to her exact words, but I feel really inspired by that. The element of randomness in what I do.Dubber Yeah. It’s interesting because one of the things that occurs to me is if your method is to put images into an algorithm that says “Process these images and then generate something that you’ve learned from looking at those images and create a new image.”… I don’t know how well I’m characterising that, but that seems to be the process.Sofia Yeah.Dubber I imagine the next step could be you take all of the ones that you’ve selected as works that you want to display and you feed them back into this algorithm and go “This is how Sofia Crespo thinks about art. Make me more Sofia Crespo artworks.”. Is that a possible next step?Sofia Definitely. You could take all the works that are done as the data set and then create something that… Or you can predict what I will create next.Dubber Right. So, actually, your greatest artwork could be a machine that generates your artworks.Sofia Definitely. But I personally think that, to me, it is a personal exploration, and there is a lot of work that the humans do. So, in a way, I feel like it isn’t the machine making the artwork for me. It is me making it and using a tool that we haven’t used long enough that we still attribute lots of sentience to it, in a way, but it isn’t sentient at all. Or at least that’s how I see it.Dubber Not yet.Sofia We’ve had discussions about this. Not yet.Dubber Not yet. It’s really interesting. So my other question would be the extent to which you’re going deeper and deeper into a particular subject, this relationship between computer life and biological life and how those things think about each other, if you like, in a visual form. Do you think of that as going deeper and deeper into a subject as it seems to me, or are you going across in breadth and going, for instance, “Today, I’m doing caterpillars and butterflies, and next week, I’m doing frogs and lizards.”? Is that your domain and you’re tunnelling down into it, or are you going “Well, what’s going to take my curiosity next? What’s over there?”, and could it go beyond biology in that respect?Sofia It’s both things together. On one extent, I feel like I took on a focus. The nature and the relationship to nature in a digital space became my focus, and it has brought me so much joy to work on that. I’ve had different artist faces where my focus point was completely different, and it didn’t bring me that much joy. And at some point, I decided “Okay, this is going to be my focus point. I’m happy with this, and I’m also curious to dive deeper into it.”. So I feel like I’m constantly learning. I could learn tomorrow something new, and that would spiral me down to create a new series dedicated to that.And at the same time, my work has become more human as well. Originally, I didn’t want to talk very much about humans. But eventually, I ended up talking more about how humans represent data about nature online, how we think of AI, what it represents in society, and it has slowly become more and more social, in a way, which I wasn’t expecting at all.And now, I’m even generating stories. Well, it’s a collaboration. I’m not doing it alone. We’re a collaborative team where we’re generating stories. Generative micro-documentaries of one minute. We use David Attenborough’s AI voice to narrate them.Dubber Fantastic. So you’re part of this collaborative team. Are you also part of an art scene? Is there a group of people around the world who do things that could be broadly categorised as a movement that you’re part of?Sofia I think it’s a movement, yeah. I think AI art is the larger subset of digital art, and then there’s also gradually more and more nature digital art. Digital art that talks about nature and that opens up a conversation about it. And I’ve seen more and more of that, which makes me really happy because I don’t think that nature and technology need to be separate from each other, that to experience nature, you have to be without any technology or that if you’re experiencing technology, you cannot have nature in it. So I feel like that’s definitely going to become an art movement if it isn’t already.Dubber What does success look like? How do you know when you’re operating at peak acclaim or peak success in terms of your art? Is that already happening, or is that something that you see as a particular goal? That you’ll know that’s true when this, this, and this are true.Sofia So on a general level, yes. It depends which day you ask me this question. If you ask me on a day where I have a million bugs to fix and nothing is working, then I might say I don’t feel like I reached success. But I think it’s very social, again. It’s a feeling of being able to inspire others. It’s a feeling, as well, of open up about something that was important to me, so there’s a healing process as well.In a way, art is a practice because you’re constantly practising it. And it feels like when you think you got good at it, you always need to keep practising. So that’s the fun of it, learning continuously. And I don’t have a specific point that I say “Okay. When I reach that, I will stop.”. I imagine to keep making art until the very last moment of my life, hopefully.Dubber And hopefully that’s a long way away and not at the other end of…Sofia Oh, yeah. Not tuberculosis.Dubber Exactly, yeah. It’s really interesting. So, well, hopefully a long and healthy career. It’s really good to talk to you, Sofia.Sofia Thank you.Dubber I really appreciate you joining us for the podcast today. And good luck with your police encounters and your hospital runaway experience. At least you’ll have a fantastic biography to write when people are doing a retrospective of your work.Sofia I’ve heard that a few times. Thank you.Dubber That’s Sofia Crespo, and that’s the MTF Podcast. And if you’re worried about her health, it’s okay. I checked. It was a mystery. It went on for far too long, but she’s feeling much better since that interview was recorded. You can find Sofia’s work online @soficrespo91 on Instagram – I’m going to link to that in the show notes – and <a href="http://www.sofiacrespo.com">www.sofiacrespo.com</a>. I’m Dubber, @dubber on Twitter. MTF Labs is at <a href="http://www.mtflabs.net">www.mtflabs.net</a> and @mtflabs all over social media. Thanks as always to the team – Sergio Castillo, Mars Startin, Jen Kukucka, Run Dreamer – and to FadedAeon and airtone for the music. That’s it for this week. Stay safe, it’s not all over yet, and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.</div></div></div></div><div class="et_pb_row et_pb_row_5 transcript"><div class="et_pb_column et_pb_column_4_4 et_pb_column_5 et_pb_css_mix_blend_mode_passthrough et-last-child"><div class="et_pb_module et_pb_code et_pb_code_2 et_pb_text_align_center"><div class="et_pb_code_inner"><a href="http://subscribeonandroid.com/mtflabs.net/feed/podcast" title="Subscribe on Android"><img decoding="async" src="https://assets.blubrry.com/soa/BadgeLarge.png" alt="Subscribe on Android" style="border:0;" /></a> <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/se/podcast/id1439245154"><img decoding="async" src="https://cdn.mtflabs.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/16210150/Apple-Podcast-Listen.jpg"></a> </div></div></div></div></div>The post <a href="https://mtflabs.net/podcast116/">116. Sofia Crespo – Artificial Life</a> appeared first on <a href="https://mtflabs.net">MTF Labs</a>.<hr> Hosted on Acast. 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What is MTF Labs Podcast?: MTF Labs is a growing global community of over 8000 brilliant innovators established and developed over a decade. These innovators come from a wide range of backgrounds, disciplines and skill sets. Many are academics – doctoral, postdoctoral and professorial; others are professional artists and musicians; some are industry experts, and many are scientists. MTF includes producers, curators, media professionals, policymakers and more. They come together from fields as diverse as medicine, agriculture, oceanography, theoretical physics, automotive, aviation, policy, product design, social sciences, robotics and AI, music composition and performance, arts management, cryptography, business incubation, traditional and Indigenous crafts, neuroscience, ecology and economics – and they pool their expertise in collaborations that could happen in no other context.<hr> Hosted on Acast. See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://acast.com/privacy'>acast.com/privacy</a> for more information.
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