Talking Culture: Podcast of the Goethe-Institut London

Ben Vickers is a curator, writer, publisher, technologist and luddite. He is CTO at the Serpentine Galleries in London, co-founder of Ignota Books and an initiator of the open-source monastic order unMonastery.  

Ruth Ctalow is an artist, curator and researcher of emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. Artistic director of Furtherfield, a not-for-profit international community hub for arts, technology and social change founded with Marc Garrett in London, in 1996. Co-editor of Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (2017); curator of the touring exhibition New World Order (2017-18); runs the award winning DAOWO arts and blockchain lab series with Ben Vickers, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut; principal investigator for the blockchain research lab at Serpentine Galleries. Director of DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab, a Furtherfield initiative which exists to mobilise research and development by leading artists, using blockchain and web 3.0 technologies for fairer, more dynamic and connected cultural ecologies and economies. 

Dzina Zhuk is an artist and tech-politics researcher based in Moscow and Minsk. She is part of the group eeefff and Flying Cooperation. She co-organizes the annual event WORK HARD! PLAY HARD! in Minsk. Her alter-ego bitchcoin works with voice, audio, future beats and sci-fi synth. Her major interests include jeopardized interfaces; emotional effects of algorithms; non-anthropocentric view towards machine intelligence; and imaginary scenarios of the present day.

Nicolay Spesivtsev is an artist and researcher based in Moscow and Minsk. With a technical background as a computer scientist, Spesivtsev combines a critical approach to computer science that is interwoven with computational economies and queer futurism. He works with imaginations born from overlapping technological, economical, and political landscapes in present day culture. His interests include solidarity born from affective labor, critical approaches to emancipation of joy from assemblages of bodies of living subjects (human and non-human), and systems based on computation, digital decolonialism in Eastern Europe, among many others. He is part of the group eeefff and Flying Cooperation. He co-organizes the annual event WORK HARD! PLAY HARD! in Minsk.

Calum Bowden creates stories, worlds, and platforms that reimagine relations between organisms and algorithms, humans and nonhumans, the Earth and the cosmos. He co-founded Trust and Black Swan. Calum took part in the post-graduate program at the Strelka Institute, Moscow. He has an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art and a BSc in Anthropology from University College London.

Laura Lotti is a researcher investigating the relations between technological, economic and cultural systems. She is a research partner at Other Internet, where she collaboratively explores headless dynamics in networked cultures. She co-founded Black Swan and is a member of Trust.

Alice Boyd is a London and Bristol based composer, theatre maker and environmental campaigner. Her work uses the voice, everyday sounds and electronic textures to tell stories about the world around us. She is interested in the intersection between climate change and the arts, and the power that theatre and film has to communicate big issues. Her sound design in Crisis was shortlisted for #CreateCOP25, a competition for the UN’s COP25 Climate Conference in Madrid. 
 
She is also exploring other aspects of our relationship with the environment through collaborations with writers and other sound artists, on the topics of lithium mining in Bolivia, communication between trees and the importance of urban green space for our mental health. Germination, an audio piece in collaboration with non-fiction writer Laura Grace Simpkins has been selected for Louder Than The Storm’s ‘Climate Intersectionality exhibition 2020. 
 
As co-artistic director of Alan and Ron, a new climate comedy duo, she took their foley show Two Super Super Hot Men to VAULT Festival 2020. She is also a company member of Poltergeist and is currently involved in their show Art Heist as a deviser, performer and sound artist. The show went to Latitude Festival, Underbelly at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and New Diorama Theatre.
 
In 2019, she founded Staging Change a performer-led organisation, which aims to improve the environmental sustainability of the theatre and performance industry. Their network of theatre makers, venues and organisations now includes over 250 members, including Pleasance, Underbelly and National Theatre Wales.

Born 1988 in Berlin, studies in classics and history in Basel, Poitiers and Cambridge, while working as a freelance journalist for the Basler Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In addition, internships and guest dramaturgy at the theatre and co-organiser of the "Junge Salon" (tr. young salon) in Berlin. PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin, which he finished in 2016 with the dissertation "From Mommsen to Gelzer: Concepts of Roman-Republican society in 'constitutional law' and 'nobiles'".

Since October 2016, editor in the literary and arts section and publication of his first debut narrative Seven Nights. On the board for the organisation Arbeit an Europa since 2018 and initiator of the project European Archive of Voices. His book Römische Tage was published in 2019.    

Iwona Blazwick has been Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London since 2001 and is a curator, critic and lecturer; formerly at Tate Modern and London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) as well as being an independent curator in Europe and Japan.

Recent curatorial projects include William Kentridge: Thick Time (2016), Thomas Ruff Photographs 1979-2017 (2017), Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World (2018) and Michael Rakowitz (2019) at the Whitechapel Gallery and Carlos Bunga: The Architecture of Life at MAAT, Lisbon (2019), The Palace at 4am, a group show at the Archaeological Museum Mykonos (2019) and Sight, a solo show with Antony Gormley and the Neon Foundation on the Island of Delos (2019).

Iwona Blazwick has written monographs and articles on many contemporary artists, published extensively on themes and movements in modern and contemporary art, exhibition histories and art institutions and is series editor of the Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Documents of Contemporary Art. 

Kris Nelson is Artistic Director and CEO of LIFT, the London International Festival of Theatre. He was Festival Director of Dublin Fringe Festival from 2013 until 2017.

Home in Canada, Kris Nelson founded the performing arts agency Antonym where he represented Theatre Replacement, Public Recordings and 2boys.tv. He was a producer and Encounters Curator for Magnetic North Festival and initiated and co-curated a variety of platforms devoted to artist touring such as PushOFF.

John Kampfner is an award winning author, broadcaster, commentator and force in the UK creative sector. He was Chief Political Correspondent at the Financial Times, political commentator for the BBC's Today programme, and editor of the New Statesman, regularly contributing to British and international media. He established the Creative Industries Federation in 2014 and was its CEO for five years. John Kampfner was also the founder Chair of Turner Contemporary, one of the UK's most successful art galleries.

His previous five books include the best-selling Blair’s Wars (2003) and Freedom For Sale (2009), which was short-listed for the Orwell Prize. Kampfner is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and adviser to the Frankfurt Book Fair. He presents the podcast series Pale, Male and Stale with the comedian Shazia Mirza which looks at politics and identity.

His forthcoming book is provocatively titled Why the Germans Do It Better. Lessons from a Grown Up Country (to be published in July 2020). When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, John Kampfner was working as the East Berlin correspondent of the Telegraph. Thirty years later, he finds a country transformed. Germany, for sure, faces problems: the social effects of the refugee influx, the rise of the AfD, a slowing economy, an ageing population, worsening infrastructure and a continued timidity in foreign affairs. Yet Kampfner juxtaposes contemporary Germany with the mayhem of 'Brexit Britain' and Trump's America and argues that its political maturity enables it to confront the challenges of the contemporary world better than others.