‘Octopus’ is a podcast about individuals in a networked world and their relationships and affiliations with fast evolving networked organisms. Our speculations circle around the interaction between mind and matter and the merger of sensations and the material world.
The Octopus Podcast invite guests from art, academia, science and fringe areas to discuss contemporary issues in the fields of technology, art, society, science and politics. It would find out where areas of exchange and communication between individuals, collectives and new organisms can be found and ask: How we can imagine and describe such otherworldly phenomena.
We seek to invent new perspectives and languages to describe the evolutionary processes unfolding in real-time before our very own eyes and sensors.
‘Octopus’ is a Black Mirror Institute production, created and moderated by Sam Hopkins, Liz Haas aka lizvlx and Hans Bernhard and recorded at KHM, the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.
You can find ‘Octopus’ on your favorite podcast platform;
A video version can be watched on Youtube.
http://blackmirror.institute/octopus
Octopus / GvP 4 🐙 Oscar Peña: Creating good jobs through technology
Oscar Peña and Hand Bernhard talking about gig economy and how to do it in a good way, protecting workers rights and about ethical issues in terms of gamification in the gig economy, for example customers reviewing workers. OSCAR PEÑA creates technology that enhances businesses and solves social challenges. Peña is currently leading the technology of HOGARU.com, a tech-enabled cleaning company with 600+ employees. He is happy to connect with anyone who is tackling social challenges and thinks that technology could give them an edge.
Oscar will share his experience building Hogaru.com, an on-demand cleaning service in Colombia. From the perspective of the customer Hogaru is very convenient; you book a service when you need it, pay it through the internet and when the date comes you receive a professional cleaning service. In this way it is very similar to other gig economy companies. However from the perspective of the cleaner Hogaru took a very different approach; their cleaners are full time employees with all their benefits. Oscar believes that it is the job of the technology to provide convenience to customers while at the same time ensure stability to the cleaners. Hogaru thinks it is important that companies make sure all their stakeholders are doing well, and think technology and innovation can help to achieve this.
11 Sept 2021TRANSCRIPT
Octopus / GvP 3 🐙 Bethuel Muthee: Pata Potea: Catching up with the present
A presentation by Bethuel Muthee about debt, loans, sports betting apps, financial speculation and gambling and how it messes up our perception of time, using the trick game pata potea as a metaphor. Kenyan social media has been in uproar over the country’s burgeoning debt and its concomitant strain on citizens through taxation. This comes against a backdrop of a decade of massive government borrowing and the exponential growth of fintech services that have increased personal debt of numerous households. Credit is ubiquitous and has been theorised by scholars such as Arjun Appadurai and Maurizio Lazzarato, to be a fundamental social relation of Western societies. Happening contiguously has been the rise of sports betting, either online via betting apps, or through USSD codes for those without smartphones. Nairobi has a number of betting shops set up by betting companies where one can watch and keep up with a variety of games. Both credit and gambling are happening on digital platforms that exemplify what Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik refer to as the “speculative time-complex” in which the future determines the present. This presentation seeks to think through how notions of the future shape sociality that is increasingly virtual and what, if any, solutions there might be to reclaim the present
BETHUEL MUTHEE is a poet living and working in Nairobi. He is a member of Maasai Mbili artists’ collective. He was series editor for Down River Road’s inaugural issue Place. As a member of Naijographia he has co-curated three exhibitions Naijographia (2017, Goethe-Institut Nairobi), Wanakuboeka Feelharmonic (2018, British Institute in Eastern Africa) and From Here to When (2019, Goethe-Institut Nairobi).
11 Sept 2021TRANSCRIPT
Octopus / GvP 8 🐙 Discussion Day 2
Discussion Day 1 of the Symposium TIMES OF HANDS – GAMIFICATION VS PLAY with Cynthia Chepkemoi, Nestor Siré, Steffen Köhn, Sam Hopkins and Hans Bernhard.
Inside a recent episode
Octopus / GvP 3 🐙 Bethuel Muthee: Pata Potea: Catching up with the present
Published 11 Sept 2021 · Transcript excerpt
[…] Towards the hills where it was green, that was where the railway heads, the officials lived. In the lowlands towards the east is where the Africans lived. In the middle, around the bazaar is where the Asians were settled. The Indians would come in as construction workers. So we can go to the next slide. Nairobi became a city in 1950, and this is a photo of Delamare Avenue, which now is called Kenyatta Avenue. In 1950, this is just prior the city charter celebrations which were done on March 30th, 1950. So around that time there was quite some resistance to the city because a lot of people who were coming into the city were people who had been displaced because their land had been expropriated by the colonial powers, the settlers, and so a lot of people, the city was becoming more and more congested with less and less facilities. […]
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