Future Artefacts FM

​In this episode, our co-host Nina Davies gets into the artist’s seat, sharing her work ‘Bionic Step’, a ​twelve-minute ​fictional conversation with an academic whose research explores techno-faith, a new form of spirituality which attempts to understand human’s changing relationship with technology. In the episode Nina and Niamh discuss how this fictional dance called Bionic Step acts as a future version of the 1518 Dancing Plague in Strasbourg. Together they examine the changing functions of dance in the aftermath of ​TikTok and how ​technological advancements affect the creation and attention towards faith.

Coming from an extensive dance and performance background, Nina Davies (b. 1991, Canada) now situates her work within the Fine Arts; questioning choreography beyond its performative state. Using moving image, sound, text and fiction her practice aims to further critical discussion around dance by observing how it intersects with language and where it begins to take on commodified or material forms. Her work has been exhibited at SEAGER Gallery, London; Robota - Center for Advanced Studies, Bratislava; Museum Tijdschrift Cultuurcentrum, Brugge; and Strangelove Time Based Media Festival, London. She has performed at Lilian Baylis Studios, London; The Ailey Citigroup Theatre, NYC; and The Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver. Nina co-hosts the bi-monthly radio show called Future Artefacts alongside artist Niamh Schmidtke. Together Nina and Niamh present audio works by artists that use fiction as a way of exploring the world at present.

Image: Clara Atkinson

Artist Nina Davies

Host Niamh Schmidtke

Music Joe Moss and John Trevaskis

Producer Flo Lines

Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead

During this festive season, we invite you to celebrate with the epic adventure mix, A Bell is Tolling, by Jan Berger. This 12 minute mix, composed of RPG* soundtracks, including selections from fantasy epics in late 90s and early 2000s, is the second work featured as part of our collaboration with the Couch**. Together we discuss what magic looks like in game worlds and the limitations of magical tropes and expectations, such as their preference for mediaeval villages, steampunk gadgetry or queer-coded villains. We question, who are the typical protagonists, how do these games enforce gendered and heterosexual stereotypes, and how can magic and fantasy enforce these rigid identities in RPGs? Collectively we consider the counter-culture found in online gaming spaces, such as Roblox, as a testing ground for different identities, constructing social orders mimicking contemporary cultural production and what kinds of subversive techniques these games can show us about the virtual and meat worlds we occupy.

*Role-Player-Games

**The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.

Jan Berger (1993) is a visual artist and platform designer based in Berlin. His practice is primarily occupied with ludic simulation, subject formation and the emergence of cultural mythologies in online spaces. He is the founder and attending curator of the Mythical Institution, a digital project space and art school. As StJennifer, he streams gameplay on twitch.tv.

Artist: Jan Berger

Hosts: Nina Davies and Niamh Schmidtke

Music: Joe Moss

Producer: Mat Jenner

Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)

Our latest mini-series on the New Weird begins with the premier of Philip Speakman’s, Reality Break, a 15 minute audio work, which follows the recollections of 4 facebook employee’s Dungeons & Dragons game in the summer of 2020. Set before Facebook’s Metaverse was released to the public, Reality Break explores the social conscience of these worldbuilding employees. Timed to distract from Frances Haugen’s whistleblowing, which revealed how Facebook’s understood the harm their algorithmic choices made, we address what weirding can do or make sense of, as worldbuilding becomes increasingly co-opted by tech corporations such as facebook. Speakman is the unheard dungeon master at the edge of this piece, drawing analogies between the historic connections of multiplayer games and dungeons, from MUD systems in the 1970s, to 4chan, the metaverse or the weird basement that appears at the end of the work. Together we ask if weirding is a more accessible tool to reimagine our present, that doesn’t require the commitment of imagining a new world, and how the uncanny draws attention to norms enforced by late stage capitalism.

For our regular listeners, you’ll also notice our newest member of the Future Artefacts FM team, Rebecca Edwards, who we’re thrilled to have developed our latest mini-series on the New Weird, and more projects coming soon!

Artists @philipspeakman

Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke

Music @joemoss1

Broadcast through @rtm.fm

Philip Speakman’s practice explores fiction as a technology, and how the imaginary transgresses its unreality through the media, communication and narrative technologies of its times. In the last year he has screened work at Flat Earth Film Festival 2023 (Iceland), delivered a workshop ‘A Self Induced Hallucination’ at the Lethaby Gallery (London), and presented Katabasing, a mixed reality performance for Gossamer Fog’s Alt_R virtual reality studio. His essay '“It May Start Out As A Game But It Ends Up A Whole World”; Creepypasta, QAnon, and the Anomalous Tales of the Internet' is to be published in a special issue of the journal Contemporary Legend later in the year. He graduated from MA Fine Art at the The Slade in 2023.

If we could communicate with the minerals around us, what voices would we hear? What would they speak about? And what relationships would rocks and minerals have with one another?

For this special double bill, co-founder Niamh Schmidtke is sharing their recent audio play, Pulling Blood from a Stone, across two episodes. We have invited guest Alberto Duman to co-present the first half of this 35 minute work. Act 1 and 2 follow pre-history, set 2 billion years ago, and in 500BC, where we are introduced to groups of minerals discussing what it means to be alive and the types of autonomy they have on the planet. Together we discuss the implications of speculating on mineral conversations, and what roles they’ve had in human history, namely in the production of cultural objects and as examples of wealth across time. We collectively imagine the roles communication has, and what ways we make contact with rocks, crystals and stones without speech. Touching on the politics of time, and how we might connect deep time and political time scales, as a way to live well during climate crises, this first episode begins our thoughts about the connections between non-human beings and the scientific valuations placed upon them.

Pulling Blood from a Stone is part of the Earth Water Sky Environmental Sciences and Art Research, Commissioning and Production Programme curated by Ariane Koek and funded by Fondation Didier et Martine Primat to whom we give grateful thanks.

Niamh Schmidtke (b.1997, Dublin) explores the political complications of ‘being green’ by cultivating conversations with the environment, through speculation, audio, ceramics and installations. They examine the relationship between listening and speaking, to consider the kinds of voices that deep time, the sea, or humans could have with one another. In 2023 they were the EARTH artist-in-residence at the Technological University of Berlin, with Science Gallery International, a research residency with the university’s mineral collection. Recent projects also include How to Harness the Wind (2023), a collection of 3D printed clay crystals mimicking those mined for wind turbine construction, funded by Arts Council Ireland, as part of the Hunt Museum’s, Night’s Candles are Burnt Out exhibition. Schmidtke is the SADP (formerly SAUL) artist in residence, researching local clays through workshops and lectures with students. They hold an MFA (Hons) from Goldsmiths, University of London (2021), and a Ba (Hons) from LSAD (2019). They have co-produced the radio show Future Artefacts FM with artist Nina Davies since 2021, receiving an Arts Council England National Lottery project grant, and funding from the Elephant Trust.

Alberto Duman is an artist, university lecturer and independent researcher whose work is situated between art, urban studies and social practice. He is interested in the cultural production of urban spaces, narratives and atmospheres, and the agency of art within the immaterial economy of this production.

In 2016 he was the Leverhulme Trust artist in residence at University of East London, where he produced the project Music for Masterplanning. In 2018, the co-edited anthology from the project 'Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Loss and Opportunity from East London' was published by Repeater Books.

He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts and Programme Leader for the MA Expanded Printmaking at Middlesex University in London, a convenor of the online course PILOT at Autograph and a member of the DIG Collective.

His ongoing project ‘Haunting the Future City’ is developing through educational spaces, films, exhibitions, ‘talking ghosts’ collective writing workshops, conference presentations and building up towards a PhD at Kings College London, Human Geography department.

Artist: Niamh Schmidtke

Hosts: Alberto Duman and Nina Davies

Music: Joe Moss and John Trevaskis

Producer: Mat Jenner

Broadcast through Radio Thamesmead

Sound Actors (in chronological order): Deborah S. Phillips, Oğuzcan Özyurt, Claudia Wiedemer, Sydney LaFaire

Audio Contributions: Dr. Johannes Giebel and Nikolai Azariah

German Translator: Beatrice Zaidenberg

Is it possible to decolonise mineral collections? How might our understanding of mineralogy support climate activism or anti-racist methodologies?

For the second part of our double bill with co-founder Niamh Schmidtke, we are listening to the final half of Pulling Blood from a Stone, a 35 minute radio play. Alberto Duman joins us as co-presenter, addressing key questions in act 3 and 4 about how minerals might hold kinship with specific places or peoples affected colonisation. Diving into Tsumeb, Namibia, in the early 1900s, and a near future in Berlin, these two acts are voiced by minerals which want to fight against oppressive colonists, and the impact of geology’s categorisation of their elements. We touch on how anthropomorphising such rocks can help share their stories and rebellions. This also becomes a way to unpick the roles of these beings within our technology, such as in batteries and the ways their voices might be heard through a miners’ strike, the shattering of stones in oxygen or the rise and fall of mountains.

Pulling Blood from a Stone is part of the Earth Water Sky Environmental Sciences and Art Research, Commissioning and Production Programme curated by Ariane Koek and funded by Fondation Didier et Martine Primat to whom we give grateful thanks.

Artists @niamhschmidtke

Host @ellaberto @influential_bro

Music @jtre_v

Broadcast through @rtm.fm

Niamh Schmidtke (b.1997, Dublin) explores the political complications of ‘being green’ by cultivating conversations with the environment, through speculation, audio, ceramics and installations. They examine the relationship between listening and speaking, to consider the kinds of voices that deep time, the sea, or humans could have with one another. In 2023 they were the EARTH artist-in-residence at the Technological University of Berlin, with Science Gallery International, a research residency with the university’s mineral collection. Recent projects also include How to Harness the Wind (2023), a collection of 3D printed clay crystals mimicking those mined for wind turbine construction, funded by Arts Council Ireland, as part of the Hunt Museum’s, Night’s Candles are Burnt Out exhibition. Schmidtke is the SADP (formerly SAUL) artist in residence, researching local clays through workshops and lectures with students. They hold an MFA (Hons) from Goldsmiths, University of London (2021), and a Ba (Hons) from LSAD (2019). They have co-produced the radio show Future Artefacts FM with artist Nina Davies since 2021, receiving an Arts Council England National Lottery project grant, and funding from the Elephant Trust.

Alberto Duman is an artist, university lecturer and independent researcher whose work is situated between art, urban studies and social practice. He is interested in the cultural production of urban spaces, narratives and atmospheres, and the agency of art within the immaterial economy of this production.

In 2016 he was the Leverhulme Trust artist in residence at University of East London, where he produced the project Music for Masterplanning. In 2018, the co-edited anthology from the project 'Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Loss and Opportunity from East London' was published by Repeater Books.

He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts and Programme Leader for the MA Expanded Printmaking at Middlesex University in London, a convenor of the online course PILOT at Autograph and a member of the DIG Collective.

His ongoing project ‘Haunting the Future City’ is developing through educational spaces, films, exhibitions, ‘talking ghosts’ collective writing workshops, conference presentations and building up towards a PhD at Kings College London, Human Geography department.