MTF Labs Podcast

Transcript

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 www.robertina.net. I’m Dubber, @dubber on Twitter, and MTF Labs is @mtflabs and on the web at www.mtflabs.net. 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.

Transcript

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 www.mtflabs.net.

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.

Transcript

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 www.sofiacrespo.com. I’m Dubber, @dubber on Twitter. MTF Labs is at www.mtflabs.net 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.

Transcript

Dubber      Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. So I want to just get straight down to business. And since we’re interested in bringing together the brightest minds in any field, if it’s business we want to get down to, who better than a Harvard Business School professor to guide us?

Gary Pisano is, among other things, a researcher, author, and educator. He’s a consultant to a whole lot of the world’s largest corporations, and he’s an expert in industry innovation, strategy, enterprise growth, and international competitiveness. He’s got a particular interest in the biotech industry, but his work spans across fields as diverse as aerospace, automotive, fashion, electronics, entertainment, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, restaurants, semiconductors, software, the chemical industry, and web platforms. His most recent book is called ‘Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation’, and it shows how large organisations can develop the kinds of strategies, systems, and cultures of innovation needed to allow for the sort of innovation that we need in order to solve grand challenges, deal with a changing world, and grow.

Dubber      Professor Gary Pisano, thanks so much for joining us for the MTF Podcast. How are you doing?

Gary           I’m doing terrific, Andrew. Thanks for having me here.

Dubber      Fantastic. You’re the Harry E. Figgie Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. The first question, who is Harry E. Figgie?

Gary           He was an industrialist. Started a fairly large company. I don’t know exactly when. It was probably the fifties or so, or forties. Rose to quite a bit of prominence and then endowed a chair at Harvard University, I think because it was interested in manufacturing. And the department I’m in is actually Technology and Operations Management, where we spend a chunk of our time doing manufacturing, and that’s also been a chunk of my research as well.

Dubber      Sure. Operations management being?

Gary           Operations management being a very broad area of inquiry. Everything from supply chains to manufacturing. There’s technical aspects of scheduling.

I’m trained as an economist. My work has always spanned two areas: manufacturing and innovation. I trained as an economist in economics of R&D, economics of innovation. But when I joined Harvard back in 1988, it was actually the then called Production and Operations Management Unit which actually had some people doing innovation. So I joined that unit, but I had to teach about production, so I learned a lot about manufacturing real fast.

Dubber      And this is not specific to any one particular industry. It’s a broad church.

Gary           Yeah, absolutely.

Dubber      Fantastic.

Gary           Yeah, we’ve got folks working in everything.

Dubber      Yeah, for sure. I used to have two books on the shelf in my office when I was a professor. One was called ‘Everything They Teach You at Harvard Business School’, and the other one was called ‘What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School’. And my joke was “That’s the sum total of human knowledge right there.”. What do they teach you at Harvard Business School?

Gary           Oh, wow. Well, it depends how you think about it. Let me tell you how I think about it. Yes, you do learn some stuff about business. You learn about capital asset pricing models, and you learn about some technical things on supply chains or marketing and branding. You learn some substantive things, of course. But if you think of how you could read all of those things in a book, you can get all that.

So I think the way we’ve always thought about it at Harvard Business School, certainly the way I think about it, is we teach you a way to think about problems. So it’s a problem-solving mentality and a problem-solving approach. I think that’s what we do very well. And then I think what we do at our best is we teach people how to learn from their experience. So if you’re thinking about case-based methodology, you’re confronted with a case, and what you’re really learning is how to approach a problem but also how to understand what you don’t understand. And each time you do a case, it’s like an experience, and then you build upon that.

Now, I say to our students that in the first week of their jobs after Harvard Business School, they’re going to have a hundred real-life cases, and what’s going to determine how well they do in their career is not how well they… Partly how well they solve those cases, those real-life cases in their real-life jobs, but how well they learn from those. Where are you on case number one hundred after the first week? And I think we teach… It’s really an approach to learning. An approach to reasoning.

Dubber      I guess how well they do is also affected by the fact that they’re building an incredibly powerful network by being at Harvard Business School.

Gary           I think so. People say that. Nobody’s ever researched that. You do have a network, but folk don’t do folk favours who aren’t good. So this idea that it’s all the network… If you’re not very good, I don’t think the other people are going to do you many favours, and certainly… It would be an interesting question for somebody to do research on. I’d have to think about how you’d do it. I do think people get to know each other, so they obviously… They reach out to classmates, and so that helps. So you’re in the radar screen of people, so if you are good, there’s other people who know you’re good.

But I think what ends up happening is these networks grow very big over time through your work, and you’re exposed to lots of other people. So maybe the power of the network that matters is not the one you got from Harvard Business School or from your university, but through the other things you’re involved with. The companies you’re involved with, the industries you’re involved in, etc.

It would be interesting to study that question in more detail. Certainly, it probably can’t hurt. But if it was just the network then it would be disappointing because then you could just have people come to Harvard Business School for two years and party for two years, and then they know each other, and they’d move on. That would be a very hard experiment to run and probably unethical as well, but…

Dubber      I think it’s pretty much how British politics works. But I’m interested how somebody ends up being a Harvard Business School professor. Were you a lemonade stand kid? Were you this entrepreneurial type?

Gary           Yeah, it’s a great question. Was I interested in business? My father was a salesperson. He was a salesman. He worked for a company called Black & Decker. Machine tools. And I used to, as a kid, go around with him. Sometimes he would take me with him on sales calls. But did I aspire to be a business school professor and go into business? No.

When I was in high school, I wanted to be a lawyer. In fact, I wanted to be a criminal lawyer, funny enough. I used to love reading books by criminal lawyers. I don’t know why, because now it just seems so alien. As an undergrad, when I went to Yale, I thought I’d want to be a lawyer, and then I realised everybody else wanted to be a lawyer. I thought “That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.”. There was this part of my brain that said “If everybody wants to do something, that’s too competitive. Maybe…”. So then I fished around for what else I wanted to do. And then what I really loved was architecture, so I thought “I want to be an architect.”. I took some great courses in art and architecture, but I’m not very good at drawing, so I got worried about doing that.

And then I wasn’t particularly interested in economics, funny enough, but I stumbled into a professor who was studying the economics of innovation as my undergraduate advisor. That was purely by accident. And I certainly got very interested intellectually in technology and how it evolves, and the impact of economics on trade and economic performance. This was in the seventies when the US was struggling. There was a lot going on with Japanese competition. I actually spent almost a year in Britain studying this at the University of Sussex, down in a place called Science Policy Research Unit, which I think at one time was probably the best place in the world for this type of research. I was just very lucky that I became research assistant there.

And then I was really excited about this, so I went to graduate school to study this, but I still didn’t think I’d be a professor. I thought I’d study it and then go do something else. But then my thesis work turned out to be pretty good, so I got a few good job offers, including one at Harvard. So I said “Well, let me go to Harvard, and I figure after a few years they’ll kick me out. If they cancel the tenure system, I’ll find something else to do. I’ll get involved with a company or whatever.”. But then I kept working, and then I got tenured in 1997. And the longer I did it, the more I’ve enjoyed it. When I first went there, I wasn’t quite sure I really liked it, but I actually love the place, and I love the work I do.

It doesn’t mean I don’t still think about other things, but I think what I’m fortunate about at this stage in my career, and particularly at an institution like the Harvard Business School, some academic institutions really discourage you from getting too involved with practice. They don’t want you to consult. They don’t want you to do any… And they consider it almost being dirty. Harvard Business School has always taken the opposite attitude. Actually, if you think about it, the venture capital industry was started by Georges Doriot. He was a Harvard Business School professor, but he also started a venture capital firm. So we’ve always had this view of “You can be an academic, you can be a scholar, but you can also have one foot in the world of practice.”. And so I have one foot in the world of practice through my consulting. I’m on boards of directors, and I find that stuff really nourishing and exciting and interesting. And so, for me, it’s a perfect balance in the world.

I still love doing my academic research. I still try to publish in scholarly journals, and still do. Just had a paper accepted yesterday, so I’m excited about that. But I also try to do work that’s more practitioner-oriented, and I consult, and I get involved with companies. So, for me, it’s a really happy balance, but I can’t say it was part of the grand plan. I can’t say that I stared out on the horizon at the age of sixteen or seventeen and said “That’s the path I’m going to take.”. It was much more evolutionary.

Dubber      Sure. I’m interested, has the art and architecture helped?

Gary           Maybe. So I’m a big fan of cross-fertilisation of ideas. And I’m fortunate. My wife is an artist. She’s trained as an art conservator. And she does art of different types, and she’s studying botanical art now, and I see… There are connections between things. Studying innovation, it’s a lot of design. Well, architecture is about design. And how do architects work, and what do they do? And I still have those up on that shelf back there, some of my favourite architecture books, so I’ll go back and look at those and find cross-pollination of the ideas. So maybe it’s helped a little bit with my creativity, but I probably can’t put my finger on it. I’m reading books now on art and nature and how patterns replicate, and that’s… Because my wife does botanical art, so she’s always looking at these patterns, and then I started reading about the mathematics of that. So it’s often a direction.

Now, can I say that’s ever going to show up in my research? I don’t know. But hopefully it’s making me a little bit more of a broad thinker about some things. I’m a big believer in broad thinking. And when you think about some people who were really great in things, they’ve crossed over. They were not trained in the original thing. One of the best chefs in the world was trained as a lawyer. So Massimo Bottura was trained as a lawyer, and he became a great chef. One of the greatest photographers of all time – I’m a big fan of photography, and I do a lot of it – Ansel Adams was trained in classical music. I think there is a lot to cross-pollination of fields.

Dubber      Is there something inherently creative or innovative about certain people, or can innovation be a practice that is instilled within an organisation?

Gary           I think it can be instilled. People will say “No, this is born. Creativity is born.”, and think about applying that to any other field. Say somebody’s a gifted brain surgeon. Well, there are gifted brain surgeons. Of course some brain surgeons are more gifted than others, but that doesn’t mean we don’t train the other brain surgeons. We train them. We train everybody. Some lawyers are more gifted than others, but they all get training, and thank god they do. And so I certainly believe that training matters. It helps you.

And I’m not a big fan of the whole mystery of innovation and creativity. I think it’s been made that way – and sometimes self-servingly – that it’s the creative visionary, and “Ooh! These magical powers! And I have them and you don’t.”. And you get these people who write books about that and others who play it up, and you have – I hate to say – other academics who studied some of the Steve Jobses of the world, and it’s all about the mystique of them and the mystery. I don’t think it works that way. I actually think it’s like, look, there are processes here which go on, and there are people who are great at orchestrating those and seeing the opportunities, but they can be trained, and they can be instilled in organisations, and we certainly see that. So, no, I think this stuff can be trained and should be trained.

Dubber      Is there a leadership dimension to that?

Gary           Well, huge, yeah. So, actually, what does the leader do? The leader creates the organisational context in which that can occur. So if you think about real creativity, it involves people playing with ideas that are outside some zone of comfort. Taking a leap and getting into…

So if you think about the first step in a lot of this, the first question we often ask when somebody presents us with a very new idea, new hypothesis, is “Well, how do you know that’s right?”. And that’s actually the worst question you can ask because then you just shut down the discussion, because if it’s a new enough idea, you have no idea whether it’s right. We do that in academia all the time, by the way. Somebody says “I’m thinking of this idea. I’ve got a hypothesis about some phenomenon.”, and they’re very excited about it, and then our natural tendency is to start to ask those hard questions which eventually they’re going to have to answer, but not now. But I’m certainly guilty of this too. I’m sure I’ve asked somebody and said “Well, tell me why you think that would be true.”. And if it’s early enough, the answer is “I have no idea whether it’s true, but that’s why I want to go and explore it.”.

A leader creates an environment where it’s okay for people to say “Here’s an idea. It’s probably half baked.”, “Fine. Go explore it. Go experiment with it. Let’s find out which half of it is baked and which half of it is unbaked, and then we’ll iterate from there.”. Now, eventually, you have to make sure things are done right, and there has to be rigour, but that’s… A leader creates an environment where people can be free to do that, but also hold people accountable then for just not willy-nilly making stuff up, but then being disciplined in how they approach these things. So I think leadership is a huge component to this. Huge.

Dubber      The standard received wisdom is that start-ups are small and innovative but perhaps lack some of the resources needed to execute, whereas these large companies have all these resources to execute with but they’re resistant to risk because the stakes are so high. Is there a happy medium? Is there a way that they can learn from each other? How can that be levelled out?

Gary           Yeah, it’s a great… And, again, it’s the generalities. Are all start-ups innovative? No. In fact, most start-ups die, so it’s not as… And a lot of start-ups are full of all sorts of pathologies in terms of the leadership, and you have a founder who starts a company and has a very definite idea of how things are going to be, and they’re intolerant to everything else. And they’re worse than a big company in some way because they don’t have the resources and they don’t have the agility.

But I do think the start-up attracts people by definition who are willing to take risks. I point this out in my book ‘Creative Construction’, the difference between an innovative environment and an entrepreneurial one. An entrepreneurial environment, true entrepreneurship… In true start-ups, everybody’s risk-taking because they know the data. They shouldn’t be naïve. Most start-ups fail. I don’t know what the exact number is – there’s numbers thrown around – but we know a vast number of them fail. And when your start-up company fails, you lose your job and sometimes all the money you’ve… And definitely all the money you put in. That’s risk, so you get a self-selected group of people who are willing to tolerate that. That’s not the case in a larger enterprise where people are paid salaries. And there’s no way Microsoft is going bankrupt next year. Not with twenty-five billion dollars on their balance sheet, or whatever it is. So you do get differences in the environment, and I think it’s a difference in comfort.

I think what ends up happening in a start-up is there is that true fear of failure, and it’s true fear of failure in a good way that “Look, we have to move. We have to survive. We have to push forward.”. That’s a little different. A larger company can be focused very much on… It will focus on the risk because it’s got more to lose.

And I was teaching a case study not long ago to my class. I won’t mention the company because I’m not sure he’d want me to say it, but it was very interesting. We had a case protagonist there who started up a venture inside a large company, and it’s grown to be quite successful. But he listed a few to talk about it, and he said to them “You spent a lot of your time talking about the risk, but I was struck by the fact you didn’t talk much about the opportunity.”. And the students were like “You’re right.”, and they were like “Wow. We did that. That was our natural tendency, to think about all the reasons the company shouldn’t do this project, but we didn’t think about all the reasons they should do the project.”, and it was an eye-opener. And so I think that mentality, though, can get created in larger companies, where every time somebody proposes something, there’s ten people who will tell you… Not even tell you it’s wrong, but tell you all the things that could go wrong. I’m sure there’s more than ten things that can go wrong, but if you focus just on those, you’re never then going to see what is the potential upside.

Dubber      I was struck by the title of something that you wrote with Willy Shih, the ‘Restoring American Competitiveness’. This was the seminal article that always pops up whenever your name goes into a search engine. And I’m curious about that title because ‘Restoring American Competitiveness’ can be interpreted along the lines of, say, ‘Build Back Better’, or along the lines of ‘Make America Great Again’. Which does it have more in common with?

Gary           Definitely not the latter title by the politics of it. But why did we choose that title? At the time we wrote that article, it was 2008. We felt that American competitiveness with respect to manufacturing, in particular, and as it was affecting what was going on in the technology space, was declining and that we had to figure out ways… And that book is focused very much… That article. And the book is called ‘Producing Prosperity’, which is about the role that manufacturing plays in supporting an innovation-based economy. And so the idea was: to produce prosperity or to restore competitiveness, some types of manufacturing are really required. They are part of the innovation ecosystem. And the thinking there was that we were losing sight of that.

The manufacturing debate… We still see evidence of this, even today. Manufacturing today is not about producing a lot of jobs. About nine percent of jobs in America are manufacturing jobs, and given productivity improvements, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where you produce lots and lots of jobs through manufacturing. That’s not the role of manufacturing. I understand why politicians focus on that, because they have to talk about jobs, but that’s not the kind of direct manufacturing jobs you’re going to be producing through expanding our manufacturing sector. But it’s related to lots of other things. There’s skillsets and knowledge and capability that you require for innovation that manufacturing, if you have it close by, can really be helpful. I think we’re learning a little bit of the power of manufacturing in looking at the last year with COVID. Suddenly, it was like “Well, we can’t produce any masks. We can’t produce ventilators. We can’t produce these things.”, or “We can’t produce vaccines.” or whatever it is. We’ve learned about the power of it for those kinds of issues.

But it’s also important in terms of innovation. A lot of innovative products require innovative processes, and if you don’t have the capability to make those then the innovation eventually gravitates to those places. And that was the point Willy and I were making as our concern, that as manufacturing gravitated outside the US, it wasn’t that everyone else was going to do the grunge work of manufacturing and America was going to do all the fancy stuff of R&D. It was that the R&D eventually was going to follow it. First comes the production engineering, then comes the design, then comes the testing, but, eventually, the other stuff goes with it because there’s many situations where the co-location matters.

Dubber      Right. Something I’m really interested in, the discourse of all this, for me, is that you use the words prosperity and competitiveness almost like they’re synonyms, because to me what you’ve just described is restoring American prosperity, but what you called it was American competitiveness. Why is it important for a country to be competitive?

Gary           Yeah. So that’s a great question. I’m glad you asked that because, one, these terms often get thrown around, but we were pretty clear about it. In fact, when I start talks on this topic, I always ask people “Who are you competing with?” and how we think about that question. And if you asked that question in 1900, people would say “Oh, I’m competing with the folks in my town.”. The blacksmith down the town or the carpenter down the town or the brewer down the town. And if you asked that question years later in the fifties, it was “My region.” or maybe “My country.”. And then with trading blocks, you’d think, well… Within Europe, think about people starting to realise “Wow. I can compete with other countries in Europe.”. If I’m in Italy, now I’m competing with the French, where there used to have more boundaries. Or the US, if you think about the North American free trade area, and “Okay. So there’s more competition.”.

But in the global economies, you’re competing with everybody, so now you’d say countries compete. Well, countries don’t actually compete. The people in those countries compete. American competitiveness has no meaning for me if I’m out of a job. If somebody in some other part of the world took my job, they’d say “We’re a competitive economy.”, it’s like “Not for me.”. So I actually think about the competitiveness and prosperity together of individuals. How do you make people more competitive in their ability to gain access to these jobs? How do you raise skill levels? All of those. And that’s what competitiveness is. It’s the resources of your country and particularly the human resources of your country becoming really competitive in attracting the work they need. When we define competitive properly, it is about the prosperity of the people in them.

Dubber      When you talk about that kind of upskilling, are we talking about training or are we talking about education as the important part of that?

Gary           Yeah, great question. I think it’s both. I think a lot of it is education, but a lot of it is just getting the right skillsets. So, right now, one of the biggest challenges in manufacturing in the US, and Willy and I were hearing it as far back as… Well, we wrote the article in 2008. We wrote it during what was then called the Great Recession, and then we wrote the book ‘Producing Prosperity’ in 2012. I was reading very recently that one of the biggest challenges now as we’re coming out of the COVID induced recession, as manufacturing is scaling back up, is shortage of skilled workers.

If you think about the kind of manufacturing that the US and other advanced industrialised countries in Europe or Japan, the kind of manufacturing that is going to be in those countries where they’re going to be competitive is in very sophisticated stuff, and sophisticated stuff takes sophisticated workers. There’s sophisticated machinery involved, and it takes sophisticated workers. And some of that is education, and some of it is also training, and training workers on that, but I think it’s the combination of it that’s getting people really well trained.

Manufacturing isn’t what it was sixty/seventy years ago, where it was more manual. I like to say it doesn’t require a strong back now, it requires a strong brain. And if you go into these factories now, they’re quite technical. There’s folks in white coats in there. People are operating machines. The machines are working on the product, but the people are working on the machines. So that’s what’s going on there. And there’s programming and there’s geometry. And I hear – Willy and I were hearing this a long time ago – about people complaining “I just can’t find the skillsets I need.”. And in some areas, like skilled machinists, people that operate CNC tools and… They are very, very hard to find.

Dubber      And, presumably, with the onset of AI and robotics in those kinds of environments, the concern would be you need to stay ahead of the robots in order to be able to do that. How do you do that? Is AI coming for management positions?

Gary           Yeah. That’s a great question. It’s coming. What does AI do best right now? It can recognise patterns, so I think any job where it’s all about just purely pattern recognition is likely in some trouble. But there’s a complementarity that I think needs to be appreciated, and I use the analogy of autopilot in aeroplanes. There’s a lot of autopilot in aeroplanes, but it doesn’t mean you don’t want really skilled pilots. And, in fact, you need particularly skilled pilots when the autopilot can’t function right, which, actually, it doesn’t function right under extreme circumstances. So under many circumstances, autopilot is just fine.

You get this discussion with autonomous vehicles. This example was given to me by an expert on AI at Harvard, because people were saying to me “Well, autonomous vehicles means my eighty-five-year-old grandmother can be taken around now. We don’t have to worry about it.”. But he said “If you think about the conditions where an autonomous vehicle won’t work – there’s a bad storm, the sensors are clogged because there’s hail or whatever, there’s ice,” and he goes “Now, that’s a driving condition where you definitely don’t want your eighty-five-year-old grandmother with limited vision in the car. You need somebody who’s really skilled.”. And I think the same thing is true of, say, pilots. When a plane gets in trouble, like the guy who landed the plane in the river, you need, now, superstars.

I think the same thing applies in all these other professions where its AI may handle many routine things and will make some things routine that weren’t before, but it doesn’t mean it can handle all the contingencies, and that actually raises the bar on what the humans have to do. The humans have to handle the really complex stuff that’s the exception, the bad condition, the crisis, the thing where the algorithm breaks down, and they have to be able to recognise that. This gets challenging. You have to recognise when the algorithm is breaking down and it’s time to quote-unquote go off autopilot.

That’s what a good pilot does. A good pilot realises “Wait. Things are not right here. The instrumentation is not right. Something’s going on. I’m going to manual, and I’m going to fly this plane out of a problem.”. Again, I’m not a pilot, so maybe if you have pilot listeners they’re going to say that’s not quite the right example, but stick with me on the broad analogy. You need to be able to get out of that, and that takes skill. That really needs skill. That’s not going to be automated for you.

If you had managers who were just going to follow routines or follow… You see some of this with people doing an analysis with an Excel spreadsheet. It’s not AI, but they get an answer saying “This project has got a higher rate of return than that project. Let’s do that.” without thinking about it. You don’t need that kind of manager. To know which number is bigger on a spreadsheet, you need somebody with about a third-grade education who knows… Maybe second grade, actually. Even in kindergarten they know which number is bigger within a range.

What a sophisticated manager does is says “Wait a minute. Yeah, I know this number is bigger than that number, but let’s go dig deeper. Wait a minute. What did we miss here? Wait a minute. What else is going on?”, and they’re working their way around, and they’re finding the flaw in the procedure, in the algorithm. And that’s what we need now of managers, and we need that for, as well, workers who are now going to be engaging with these systems fairly routinely. And we better educate people about that and train them to do that, otherwise we’re going to have some real problems.

Dubber      I want to talk a little bit about growth because growth is one of those things that… It’s kind of a mantra and the underlying logic of, well, capitalism, essentially. Is perpetual growth sustainable?

Gary           So that’s a question I’m obsessed with. You’ve probably been reading my background because you’re hitting all the things I’m obsessed with.

So my course I teach at Harvard Business School is called ‘Driving Profitable Growth’. It’s the area I’ve been doing my research on for the last four or five years. So it’s more growth for companies than economies. And so certainly for companies, you can ask…

Dubber      Can you separate those things though?

Gary           Great question. You can a bit, but not completely. So you can certainly have economies where individual companies don’t grow, but you’ve got to be able to create new companies that create the growth. You stack on top of it.

The question “Can companies grow perpetually?” – and, of course, I don’t know if anything is ever fully perpetual, but we don’t understand a lot about… So the data shows most companies don’t actually grow very quickly. So it is the obsession of every company, but it turns out to be sustained long-term growth is really rare, not the rule.

Dubber      Do you mean they expand and contract, or do you mean that they plateau and then they grow a bit more…

Gary           Once they plateau, they tend not to grow after that. It’s quite interesting. Companies are a lot like people. They do most of their growing in short time spans. We probably do most of our growing somewhere around the age of – I don’t know – between age… We have growth spurts somewhere around adolescence or so, or age nine to fourteen, whatever it is. It turns out companies do a chunk of their growing… They have periods of time where they grow a lot, and then after that they just plateau. And then they sometimes get smaller by selling stuff off, but they almost never return to their glory days of rapid growth.

Dubber      Is that the same as reaching maturity, or is that atrophying?

Gary           It’s a little bit of atrophy. So I’ve been really grappling with this, and, actually, the subject of my next book will be about company growth. What happens is, it’s like product technology. If you think about what happens to technologies over time, they become more complex because we add more functionality to them, and that’s almost true of every technology. You can measure it by parts. You think about any product. You chart it on a… What was the first generation, the second generation? Do it by cars, aeroplanes, aeroplane engines, computers, computer… Whatever it is, the number goes up. And partly it’s because we ask these things to do more and more, but we begin to plateau. We get diminishing returns in terms of the functionality.

I think we can think about organisations a lot like technologies. An organisation is a technology. We don’t normally think of it this way, but that’s what an organisation is. It’s a technology for carrying out transactions and creating economic value. That’s in some sense what it does. As an organisation, as a technology matures, it begins, and they just get more and more complex. They start adding stuff on to what they do, which makes it more and more difficult for them, ultimately, to change direction. And I think that becomes the key issue, is the markets they’re in are maturing, there’s less growth there, they can’t pivot to others. That’s certainly one hypothesis I have now.

I’m always struck by the massive amount of complexity in large organisations. And I often ask senior leaders “How do you get things done? How do you actually do anything here?”, and they laugh like “Ha, yeah, you don’t know.”. I say “No, I’m serious. Quite literally, how do you do things? Because I don’t understand.”. And sometimes I’ll consult these companies, and then I’ll follow a decision, and it’s like… You get dizzy. I literally say “Let me staple myself to a…”. I don’t know. These days it’s all digital, but in the old days, you can think about a folder being passed around. A Manila folder. If I could staple myself to it and see what happens to that, “I’m a decision. Where do I go?”, it’s just ping-ponged around in all these different groups, and it baffles me. It’s actually quite remarkable things get done in some organisations. So I think that’s part of it.

Now, does that analogy apply at an economy level? I don’t think so because at economy level, you can get births and deaths of these entities. So if these entities become too… They themselves atrophy in a good economy, and I think this is the best of a capital economy. Those companies atrophy, they die, they go away, and new companies rise up. It’s a kind of Schumpeterian process. And you get dynamism, and resources get reallocated. So economies can continue to grow. They tend to grow when they’re young and they have an explosive growth phase, but I think economies can continue to grow. And I think we define growth differently than just sheer output, but it could be quality of life and other metrics. So I do think growth for the economy level can be perpetual and desirable. I think it can be for companies as well, but I think there’s lots of forces that act against it.

I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. I have to figure it out before I write the next book, and then you can have me on a podcast in the future and ask me “So what did you figure out?”, because I’m still grappling with it.

Dubber      I will take you up on that, for sure. At the national level, is GDP still a good measure of that?

Gary           Not really, no. So there’s lots of people smarter than I who’ve written a lot about the limits of GDP. It’s a crude measure, but there’s lots of things it doesn’t pick up. I wouldn’t say “Get rid of GDP.” or anything like that, but there’s lots of things we don’t pick up in these statistics, and as long as we can figure out how to adjust for them in making policies, we’re probably okay to stick with those statistics.

But GDP is just sheerly the output, but how do you think about… If you’re thinking about quality of life… GDP without pollution is different than GDP with pollution. I’d rather have my GDP with clean air versus not. I don’t know how that quite gets picked up. There’s lots of things that occur that don’t…

The other thing I was thinking about the other day was when we measure inflation, we look at purely prices, but it’s very, very hard to adjust for the quality. I think there’s a lot of what I call service inflation, which means the quality of service goes down but the price stays the same. Now, it gets picked up as “Well, the prices didn’t go up.”, but is service really good? And I don’t know if those are fully… It’s hard to adjust for those.

So I do think there’s lots of unmet need. So I’m a big fan of growth because there’s tonnes of unmet need. I’m not one who at all would say “Gosh, we’ve got to stop growing.”. We have to grow. And people who say “We don’t have to grow.” are generally living very comfortably. They’re not the people who are living uncomfortably. And then you ask them if they’d be willing to give up their comforts to allow others to be comfortable, and they’re generally less excited about that. Until you’re willing to give up your comforts… There’s lots of other people who are less comfortable. There are lots of people who don’t have healthcare. There are lots of people who can’t afford things. There’s lots of dirty water in the world that needs to be cleaned up. There’s lots of air that needs to be cleaned up. Those are all forms of growth. When you correct those problems, that is growth. That’s a good thing. So growth can and should be viewed as a good thing.

Dubber      Should we stop making quite so much stuff along the way?

Gary           It depends. When people have enough stuff, they say we have too much stuff. It’s not for me to choose whether we should make stuff or not because there’s lots of people who want stuff, and I think they should buy it and have it. So I think stuff is good. We have to think about ways to produce stuff responsibly. Yes, we should, because the problem isn’t the stuff, it’s the side effects of the stuff. The waste that gets incurred, the dumping, the plastic, all the other junk, the energy that gets used to make the stuff, but we can figure out… Again, a part of good growth is figuring out how to make stuff in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet, create all sorts of problems. So, no, stuff is not necessarily a bad idea if people… Again, people need stuff. There’s lots of people in the world who don’t have adequate housing, don’t have adequate clothing, don’t have things that they need, and so we should be producing stuff.

Dubber      I like that you said that a company is essentially a technology, because it’s also a culture, and that’s a word that you’ve used a lot in your writing. What do you mean when you say culture?

Gary           A culture is a social contract. It’s an agreement that we have – it’s generally implicit. There’s all sorts implicit – about how we’re going to behave. How you’re supposed to behave if you’re part of this group. You want to be part of this group, this is how you behave. And as somebody once put it, its culture winds up being how you behave when no one is looking. And so I think that’s what is incredibly important.

And, look, I’m an economist by training, and economists typically don’t do anything on culture, and I’ve just found it to be really fascinating. And in the work I’ve done on innovation and the ‘Creative Construction’ book, I have a whole… A third of the book is on culture because people talk about cultures of innovation. And, to me, I’m just scratching the surface of that.

And I think culture, by the way, is also part of the growth stuff because one of the reasons companies stop growing is their cultures break. But it is an agreement about how you’re going to behave, and it’s almost never written down. So companies have these value statements and things which are written down, and those almost never reflect the culture. Those are just usually cheesy statements that they paid a public relations firm a lot to create. But then you say to people “What’s really important here?”, and then it’s actually you go watch people. You observe.

So culture are the behaviours, and you can feel behaviours. Sometimes the values are harder to see. So the behaviours are expressions of the values, so I always say “Look at the behaviours.”. What are people doing? What are they saying? What are they not saying in meetings? What are they saying after? That will tell you a lot about what the culture is. So it’s basically the social contract that we’ve at least implicitly agreed to follow, and there’s different ways folks come to learn those. Sometimes it’s just you learn by observing. You go into an organisation, and you… That’s the first thing new people do in an organisation, is they look around. They’re like “Okay, how do people behave at meetings? Who challenges the boss? How do people speak here? Do they…”, and they start to emulate those.

Dubber      It’s not often a monoculture though, is it? There’s often competing cultures within an organisation. An example, I used to work both in radio and music industries, and you’d always get the so-called creatives in one end of the building complaining about the management and salespeople who would always say “Well, it makes no difference whether we’re doing this or shoes or toothpaste or whatever. It’s still sales. It’s just business.”. Are cultural industries special, or are they different in some way, or do those cultural clashes play out in all different industries?

Gary           Oh, they play out everywhere. And they’re not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. So monocultures are dangerous in the sense that… I use an example from nature. Bananas are largely a monoculture because they’re largely one genetic dominant variant of bananas, and there’s a banana blight going around the world. The bananas have been dying because they’re very vulnerable. So, in nature, genetic monocultures are extremely vulnerable to, say, disease or attack.

So an organisation, which is a real… It’s a catch twenty-two because a lot of times people work… We really need to have “We all need to be behind this.”. You get this monoculture, and that works great, but then the environment changes, and then you’ve got… You’re going in this direction and you can’t change.

So some of that tension is good, and you see it a lot, and some of it is understandable. So you see it all over. Research and development versus manufacturing. Through my professional career, because I do both work on innovation and R&D and manufacturing, I have worked on both sides of that aisle, and I’ve just watched that play out. And part of that is natural because these folks have different jobs. The manufacturing person is like “I’ve got to make the stuff. It’s got to conform to quality, and I’m going to be held accountable for cost.”, and the R&D person is like “It’s got to be new and different, and I’m excited, and…”, and those can clash, and you do have to find compromises.

So the clashes actually can be good within bounds. If it gets dysfunctional, and this is where leadership matters, it’s like “We’re going to have different opinions on this. Some of those differences are helpful, but let’s remember the problem we’re trying to solve, and let’s not question people’s motives. We may have different means, but as long as we have the same motives… Look, we’ve got the same problem to solve.”. In the case of the radio you point out, “We’re trying to make listeners really happy because that’s ultimately… If our listeners aren’t happy, we’re not going to make money. If we don’t make money, none of us are going to have a job. So let’s focus on that. We’re going to make the customer happy, or we’ve got to solve this problem. We should be all motivated by the same thing. Now, we have different sub motives. That’s fine. But at the end of the day, let’s not question if the other people involved don’t share the mission.”. If people share fundamentally different missions, then you’ve got a problem. And that’s the job of leadership, to make sure… “We all have different jobs here. We have to. We have different specialities, different things are going to be important, but we have the same job in some way. We’re on the same mission.”.

Dubber      Yeah. It’s interesting. The radio case study, to me – obviously, because I’m interested in it – it’s really fascinating because in the minds of the two different sections… For the creative people, the listeners are the customers, and to the advertising salespeople, listeners are the product. They’re not the customers at all. So the actual motivation is coming from completely different directions. Does that play out anywhere else, or is that just the nature of broadcasting?

Gary           Oh, think about healthcare. It plays out huge. Think about this conversation with pharmaceutical companies. Who’s the customer? They say “Well, the patient. You’ve got patients. You’ve got physicians. You have payers.”. In most parts of healthcare, the people who are paying for the product is different from the one who’s using it, versus the decision-maker, so who do we focus on? So how do you think about that? And different parts of the organisation may be focused on different needs. And the reality is, they’re all important. If somebody won’t pay for a drug, it doesn’t get used. If somebody won’t prescribe it, it won’t get used. If patients don’t want it or don’t know about it, it’s not going to get used. And then, well, who’s paying for it?

So the radio situation is an example of realising that organisations sit in complex ecosystems where it’s not always as simple as what we maybe were taught at one point in time of simple supply and demand. “There’s one side and there’s demand, and there’s one product.”. There’s multiple products that are being sold. And you’re selling advertising, but you’d better sell listeners on it so that listeners come, and so they’re both important. And there may be trade-offs there that have to be thought through, but thought through intelligently. And it doesn’t mean everybody gets their way because that’s impossible, but… So some of that goes back to… Not culture, but it comes back to clarity around strategy and being clear about the trade-offs you may need to make in some of those contexts.

Dubber      The health company parallel is really interesting, and you’re actually on the board of a couple of health companies yourself.

Gary           Yes, I am.

Dubber      That must be a growth industry about now.

Gary           It is, yeah. Look, it’s hard. These are biotech companies. I’ve been involved with pharmaceuticals and biotech since the eighties, so I know that industry well. And I’ve worked with a lot of companies, and I’ve served on several boards. On two boards now. And, yeah, they’re very exciting. There’s just so much going on. I’ve followed and been involved with the biotech, pharmaceutical, life sciences industry… It’s four decades now. It’s going on four decades, which is a frightening thing to say out loud. And the potential to influence lives in a really positive way is pretty extraordinary. And so when we see organisations doing all sorts of new things, and getting a chance to get a front-row seat on that and see how hard it is, too… This is really hard stuff, and some really great people, dedicated, so it is fascinating to watch.

Dubber      To what extent is intellectual property an important component of these sorts of conversations around innovation within large industries?

Gary           I think it’s important because innovation is and can be expensive, and so then the question is “Who’s going to invest in it?”. It’s the classic argument of “Who’s going to invest in it if you can’t somehow protect what you’ve created? If it’s out there.”, especially in a global economy because there’s folks who could just pick stuff up and run with it, and you start to destroy the incentives.

If you go back to how most patent regimes were designed, it was to maximise the trade-off between “Look, in exchange for disclosing, I’m protected. But through disclosing, others can build upon it.”, so good IP law really helps the building upon. It should focus on the building upon as opposed to… Sometimes we want to get rid of the exclusivity. You hear that. “Let’s get rid of that exclusivity.”. You hear this with pharmaceuticals a lot. This sector doesn’t attract the kind of investment it does if everything is generic, so don’t worry about that part. Let people exclude, but then make sure there’s a capacity to build upon and get better.

And so I think IP is quite important in fostering innovation as long as it’s not blocking. Imagine I could patent the car and say nobody else could do anything in cars. Or just electric vehicles. “I have the patent on electric vehicles.”. Some really broad patent. That would be harmful to society because then it blocks all the cascading that can occur. But if I can patent a particular technology within that that I’ve worked hard at, then sure. I have the right to capture that, and I should protect that. Others can build upon other things. If well designed, I think IP can be a really important part of an effective innovation system.

Dubber      You said that we should have good IP law. Do we have good IP law?

Gary           So I’m not an expert on that. I’ve looked at it a bit in the past. IP law evolved, at least in the US, through court cases, through common law, really, and so it depends how courts have been… In general, I think they’ve been striking the right balance. I know some years ago that there were these moves to put on business models that could be patented. I don’t think that went anywhere, and that’s probably a good thing.

I don’t think it’s broken, but there’s people who spend a lot more time… I’ve thought a lot about how companies use their intellectual property and their strategies around intellectual property. I’ve spent less time thinking about the design of these regimes. Again, there are people who spend their careers and who might have very different views. When I think about countries that struggle to innovate or I think about places where we’ve seen struggles to innovate, I don’t think about it as “The IP stuff was what was broken.”. But I think it’s a great topic to be working on. I’m glad your group is working on that with the European Commission. I think it would be helpful to think about it.

And the other challenge, you have the global economies getting harmonisation across these regimes. If you have really big differences then it can really distort things in terms of where things get done and who does what, where, and etc. But it’s an incredibly important asset for companies. Intellectual capital is an incredibly important asset now for companies. And I certainly know the kind of companies I’m involved with where intellectual property is huge, and when you have to spend years working on stuff, we need some way to protect that. Otherwise, we just could never attract the capital to do what we need to do.

Dubber      How pervasive is the ethics conversation in the board room?

Gary           Well, I think they are in every… At least every company I’m involved with. We always make sure we’re being incredibly ethical and clear about what we’re doing, and boundaries, and things which are not tolerated. Ethics should be so front and centre to what you do that you almost don’t need to talk about it, although you do have to talk about it. I think it’s an incredibly important topic. And organisations that don’t have those conversations and aren’t clear about their boundaries… It’s more than boundaries. It’s “How do you treat people? How do you…”. Ethics is a broad term, but having a real ethical compass I think is important because there’s complicated decisions that you have to make in a health organisation. In every organisation, you’re making complicated decisions, so you’d better have real clarity about that and know where your compass is pointing.

Dubber      The more specific aspect of that question is are ethics part of the metric for how well you’re doing as an organisation?

Gary           Yes and no. Certainly, in Wall Street… Investors don’t measure that. Some say they do. But they matter because if you’re not… Look, I think we’ve learned that if companies are not ethical, they get clobbered. It’s a losing proposition to be unethical.

Dubber      I’m seeing some really big counterexamples to that in the world.

Gary           Yeah. If you think about companies that make huge ethical violations, I think… Now, some companies don’t get caught, but the number that do, it’s…

Dubber      I’m not talking about not being evil. I’m talking about actively being good.

Gary           Yeah, are you actively being… So this gets to a really interesting debate about “What does it mean to be actively good?”. So I think some organisations would argue, some philosophers would argue, that, look, what does it mean to be actively good? Hiring and employing lots of people and paying them well is being good.

In fact, there’s arguments that are interesting – I’m not sure where I come out on it – and say “Look, the whole idea of stakeholder capitalism just gives more power to CEOs, and they already have enough power.”, so “Our elected official should have more power.”. There’s a counter-argument to what’s going on now with “We need to fix capitalism. We need to make it more ethical.”, or “We need to make companies have broader social responsibility.”. I’ve read some very interesting counter-arguments that say “You really want CEOs to have more power? Don’t they already have enough? The power should be at the ballot box.”. And some people argue “Well, the ballot box is broken. That’s why we have to turn over to companies.”. So you see where we are with this.

And we have these discussions in my class, too, around companies that grow and companies that have different approaches to capitalism and ethics. And, again, ethics not in terms of doing bad, but good, like how some companies view what their mission is. And I don’t think there’s easy answers to that. I think, ultimately, what companies are going to get rewarded for is, look, they need to attract customers. Customers have to care about the ethics of the company. The investors have to care about it as well, and that’s what influences behaviour.

I’m always surprised at the number of people I run into – and who you sometimes least expect in terms of their background. Private equity managers and all that – who care… They think a tonne about those things. Like “What’s the right thing here to do for the employees? What’s the fairest thing to do?”, or “How do we think long term?”. So I think there’s stereotyping that gets done that’s not always helpful in it, but it is an interesting question.

Companies are being ethical when they’re producing great product for customers that they didn’t have before. Giving people choices they didn’t have before. It’s very popular now to beat on Amazon. Everybody loves beating on Amazon, but everybody uses Amazon. I can just tell. Looking out my window, I can see all the Amazon boxes on all the houses. And I see them around and realise, well, there’s lots of people for whom Amazon is an absolute lifesaver. If you’re working, you can’t get to the store, Amazon delivers. Now, if you’re a small merchant, you hate Amazon. I get it. There’s controversy on “How does Amazon treat its employees? Do they treat their employees well?”. Amazon would argue, “Look, we employ…”. I think around the world it’s six hundred thousand people. These are complicated arguments to think through. I don’t know if there’s a single right answer to them.

I certainly think that organisations do well when they treat people well. That is, when they treat their employees well and fairly, when they treat their communities well and fairly, and they treat their customers well and fairly, and do the simple “Do what’s right by them.” as opposed to “Do the minimum we need to do.”. I think there’s a good view of just doing, in the end, what is right by people. That can go a long way, and just having that as your compass.

Dubber      You get invited to consult to a lot of companies, and presumably you say some of the same things to all of them. What’s something common that you would… Let’s say you were invited into Amazon to tell them something interesting to help them… Presumably, that you get invited because it’s helpful to the company for you to be there. What is the helpful thing that you would be likely to say to an organisation?

Gary           Yeah, pretty much. And, by the way, we were just talking about ethics. I’m not an ethics expert. There’s people who spend their careers thinking about it, so that’s certainly one of the areas I don’t get invited for because there’s people far smarter than me on the complicated issue of ethics. And it’s an incredibly important issue, so that would be one where I wouldn’t be invited, and if I were, I wouldn’t speak on it because I don’t think I can say anything that some other people who are much better at it…

But the kind of things I get asked to speak about are really a few things. One is innovation and the work that came out of the ‘Creative Construction’ book. How do we maintain our innovativeness as we get bigger, as we grow? Because that’s been one of the dilemmas. You said it at the outset. As companies get larger, they lose that risk-taking. What else do they lose, and how do they create that verve? You innovate to grow, and then you grow, and then you lose the capacity to innovate. It sounds really miserable. I refer to that in the book as a catch twenty-two. And so that’s a lot of what I work on with organisations. What I get asked to speak about. And, to me, you can grow… Sorry, you can innovate as you grow, but it’s about clarity of the strategy. It’s three things. It’s strategy, it’s good systems, and it’s the culture, and those are the three jobs of leadership. So that’s a big chunk.

I speak a lot and work with companies a lot on just strategy alone. So I think many organisations don’t have… Strategy is an expensive word. It gets used a lot. Everybody’s a strategist. And then you ask “What is your strategy?”, and you get some eighty-page PowerPoint presentation that’s loaded with charts. And it’s like “Look, a good strategy, you could stick it on one page. What is the fundamental purpose of this business? What are the fundamental choices about how it’s creating value? And what’s it about, what it’s not about.”. And it turns out, strategy is a really hard thing to work out. It’s a simple problem in the sense that it’s not multidimensional, but it takes a lot of work to figure out, and it is a creative act to figure it out and to work through it and make sure you understand what this organisation is going to be about or not. I work a lot with companies on just helping them be clear about strategy because I find the practice of strategy, in reality, is quite poor. So I often work a lot with companies on strategy.

Dubber      Do you need to be an optimist to do what you do?

Gary           Yeah, I guess so. Somebody once referred to me in an interview and they said I was an optimist by nature, and my wife laughed at it, so I’m afraid if I… And she always listens to my podcasts, too, so I’m going to be careful how I answer this one. So I think I am. She’s going to be laughing right now, I know, when we get to this part of the interview.

Yes, I am. I really am an optimist about things. I don’t know if you have to be an optimist about things, but you have to feel like you can change what’s happening. I think all of us who get into this world of social science, you’re trying to make things better in your own way. And, for me, I try to make… I certainly believe that if you can make organisations work better, you can actually make the world a better place. They create more value. They create better jobs. They can operate better. And I believe that with the right kinds of… We can make progress, just like we make progress with technology. Our televisions today are better than they were when I was a kid. Our phones are better today. Things are better. Technologies are better. Again, organisations are technologies. That’s all an organisation is. We can make those technologies better.

So, yes, I’m optimistic. I guess if I weren’t optimistic about that then I would find something else to do with my time. I’d probably retire and just do lots of photography.

Dubber      Brilliant. Gary Pisano, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Gary           Great, thank you very much. That was fun, Andrew. Thanks.

Dubber      That’s Professor Gary Pisano from the Harvard Business School, and that’s the MTF Podcast. Gary’s book is called ‘Creative Construction’, and you can pretty much find that anywhere you’re likely to find business books. You can follow Gary on Twitter, @motogp61. Not sure why, didn’t ask, but we’ll link to that on the podcast page. His website is www.gpisano.com, where you can read more about his work and his many, many publications. I’m Andrew Dubber. You can find me @dubber on Twitter, and MTF Labs is @mtflabs and, of course, www.mtflabs.net.

Special thanks to Gary’s wife Alice for listening in this week. This is one way to grow the audience. Hope you enjoyed, and we’re really happy to have you with us. Thanks also to the team – Sergio Castillo, Mars Startin, and Jen Kukucka – who make the show possible with their diverse and complementary range of skills, to Anthony Vega and airtone for the music, Run Dreamer for the MTF audio logo, and, of course, to the MTF community of brilliant minds from all sorts of backgrounds and specialisms, of whom you are a valuable and valued member. So I’ll catch you next week, stay safe, and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.

Transcript

Dubber      Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. There’s a lot of talk right now about cities. Cities seem to be the atomic unit of public policy. Smart cities, sustainable cities, social progress cities, cities of culture, industrial cities, music cities. And the ways in which we design and develop cities and public spaces, especially post-COVID, once we are actually post-, are central to initiatives like the New European Bauhaus, the Green New Deal, AI4Cities. Things that ask questions about not just “Where shall we live?” but also “How should we live?”.

Now, someone who’s been thinking about city environments from a design, architecture, systems, and social perspective at places like Harvard University and Qatar University, Geneva, MIT, and Vermont is Dr Anna Grichting. She’s a Swiss architect, urbanist, and musician who’s spent her career using arts and design to create a more beautiful, biodiverse, and sustainable world through co-creative, interdisciplinary, and holistic approaches to design projects, especially at the city level.

Dubber      Dr Anna Grichting, it’s great to have you with us for the MTF Podcast. How are you doing?

Anna          I’m doing very well, and thank you so much for inviting me. It’s a pleasure.

Dubber      You’re very welcome. You’re described as various things on the internet, primarily as an urbanist. What’s an urbanist?

Anna          An urbanist is a word we use, I think, a lot in Europe. It obviously has to do with the urban, with cities, with planning, and it’s also quite large because it encompasses all the different scales. And I’m also particularly interested in landscape urbanism. So it’s really this bringing together landscape and urbanism and also architecture and urbanism.

And I think, obviously, for a few centuries, we’ve been dividing disciplines. And increasingly, especially now, looking at ecology, environment, climate change, nature-based solutions, it’s even more and more important that landscape… What I tell my students, or even in conferences, is that landscape, in fact, for me is the foundation of any project of architecture or urbanism because we need to start from the ground. We need to start from the topography, from the water, from the biodiversity, from the soil. Soil is very important. So it’s even the landscape aspect which I find very important.

And why urbanism? Because in certain countries and disciplines, we tend to talk about architecture. We talk about urban design. We talk about urban planning, and urban planning can be very linked to policy or geography. And so we separate it in different… It can be found in different faculties or different ways of teaching. And so, for me, urbanism is a way of really… That’s maybe more holistic.

Dubber      Are cities fit for purpose anymore?

Anna          Fit for purpose? What exactly…

Dubber      Well, fit for humans is probably really what I’m asking.

Anna          Yes. Well, it’s an interesting question because, on the one hand, if you listen to UN-Habitat, etc., it’s saying “Well, in the future, we’re shifting from this urban and rural balance to more and more people will be living in cities.”. So there is that focus, and it’s definitely something we have to think about. Even here in Geneva, we think about, very carefully, “Are we going to eat up…”. We don’t have much territory in Switzerland. So “Are we going to eat up all the countryside and continue sprawling, or are we going to densify the city?”. And, of course, there’s all the questions of infrastructure because you need certain densities for infrastructures.

But, on the other hand, I feel also that we need to look also more and more and study the rural, and instead of everybody flocking to the city, what do we do in rural areas so that people don’t leave the rural areas? How do we make them more attractive? We have a lot of, whether it’s inner Italy or places even in France, these shrinking villages or cities where people are leaving because there’s not activity, etc. Obviously, now, with digital infrastructure, it’s become… And the COVID has shown us it’s becoming increasingly accessible. I know lots of people now, when we’re on webinars, they’re up in the mountains. I was nearly going to be up in the mountains today, but I wasn’t sure about my internet connection, so I came back to the city. So, for me, I think the question is the balance.

And, on the other hand, there’s something quite interesting if… I’m very interested in biodiversity. And because we have this intensive agriculture, we use a lot of pesticides. You’ll actually find, for example, bees, a lot of bee populations. There’s a lot of urban farming in bees. They’re actually healthier in the city because we don’t have this countryside full of pesticides. So we find some of these paradoxes that sometimes maybe the city in some ways becomes more healthy or greener than the countryside because we’re not necessarily doing the right things in the countryside because we’re doing this intensive cultivation, and we’re not really taking care of the soil and biodiversity. So I think we have to rethink all of our structures, generally, yes.

Dubber      Interesting. I’m surprised by the idea that people are moving to the cities increasingly. It feels counterintuitive for some of the reasons that you’ve mentioned. COVID shows that you can work from home. Broadband is getting better in a lot of places. So it feels like decentralisation would be the primary trend that you would see happening. But you think, despite that, there is a reason that people are drawn to cities. There’s a reason that people want to be near lots and lots of other people. What is that reason, do you think?

Anna          Probably several. Obviously, there is the economic opportunities that the city is associated with. Now, whether they’re real or not… Sometimes they are. Of course, maybe it’s more difficult to survive in a city in certain ways. In the countryside, it’s easier to grow your own food. Although, we’re seeing now that that’s happening in cities too. And cities like Detroit, which were shrinking cities, people have started actually… All the vacant lots, people are starting to grow food again, so the city is becoming rural again through this shrinkage. So I would say it’s not that obvious, this difference.

And I was actually recently working for the Aga Khan Foundation. I’ve been collaborating with them, and I worked for them on different projects. But I was reviewing a project that just recently won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. It was a project for public spaces in Tatarstan in Russia, and it was under the president of Tatarstan. Tatarstan is a very small republic which has… It’s the only republic in Russia that has a president. The others are states with governors. And so they rolled out this project for public spaces, led by a brilliant young lady called Natalia Fishman, and the idea was to build public spaces not just in the cities but also in the rural areas. And the idea was that every space or village or urban area should have good public space.

So what was interesting here is that part of this project – it has many different facets, which is also why it received an award – it was also involving a lot of young architects, keeping the young architects in Tatarstan because they all want to leave to Moscow. They all want to leave. The attractivity of the big cities. Making it more attractive to work there by having these exciting projects. She created a biennale for young architects. There’s a whole series of things attached to this. So making it more attractive, creating these exciting projects, and also producing locally. So there was a lot of capacity building. Instead of importing maybe badly designed… Or if we want good design, spending a lot of money to import urban furniture, was actually producing it locally. So you’re creating capacity and jobs. And the other thing is having good public spaces in these villages, small towns, means that young people also start to associate more with their place. It creates an identity, etc.

So it’s quite interesting to see how this project of public spaces was also about stopping this migration. Making the smaller towns, cities, also more attractive, and also creating these small industries which provide or make public spaces, maintain them, so that also creates interesting and exciting jobs. For example, one of the producers, I went to see. So I was lucky to visit all of Tatarstan. Either they make agricultural machinery, but then they can also make urban furniture, or they use laser cutting, etc., to make all different parts of this urban furniture, and this also then creates opportunities for youth to then get into these jobs.

So it’s just one example that I find very interesting of… It’s urbanism. It’s an urban project on public space, but it’s really addressing this question of “How do we make all these areas attractive and create this urbanity, maybe, or this public space which people maybe need, also, to…”. It creates an identity, and it’s also, obviously, a gathering space. And so it’s very important, public space.

Dubber      It sounds like you’re taking the things that are best about cities and applying them to small places and villages and rural communities but also taking the best elements of what could be considered rural and essentially make cities rural again.

Anna          Yeah.

Dubber      It that the key to it, is to find the best elements of each?

Anna          Yes, I think so. I think it’s, obviously, opening our minds and reintegrating, whether it’s knowledge, whether it’s all this separation, the city and the countryside, etc. So we have to, obviously, preserve. We have to have natural spaces or natural reserves to preserve biodiversity. But, as I was mentioning before with the bees and all this, it’s not always as obvious as we think.

And I think also, at one stage, if we look at the modern movement in architecture and Le Corbusier, who is a very famous Swiss architect here – he wrote about the modern movement in architecture – at that time, it was really… It was interesting because it was very much about hygienist movement, which now, in this COVID pandemic, is interesting too because it was all about fighting the disease in the cities. And people were living in dark spaces, and it wasn’t hygienic. So they came up with this very rational approach to the city, and saying “We have to get people out of these slums, and so we’re going to build these high rise and lots of space and air.”. So, in a way, it was understandable, but it was also very much about separating functions, zoning – very rational – where public space was maybe no longer at the heart of it, communities, etc. So there’s an understanding of that, but there was also, I think… We lost a lot of the quality… What makes a city. And I think now we’re coming back to this much more integrated way of thinking of a city and planning a city and designing a city.

And also, one thing I didn’t mention with the Russian project – which was part of the reason it was also awarded – it was a participated placemaking programme. So the idea that we’re also designing with the people. It’s not like we’re up there saying “We know exactly what you need to be happy and to make a good space.”, but it’s also really this co-creating. Co-creating the spaces with the people. So that’s really important, and it’s also an emerging field of urban design which I think is increasingly important and being more and more implemented today.

Dubber      It’s interesting that you raise both co-creation and modernism in the light of European Commission President, von der Leyen, has announced this New European Bauhaus as this great new European design-led cultural project for addressing the big societal challenges. Do you think that that’s something that can have the impact that’s expected?

Anna          I think it’s a good idea. Obviously, the reference to the Bauhaus is interesting, but it was a certain moment in time with certain challenges. But it’s definitely an extremely important school in integrating the arts. Obviously, we need to take it a step further and integrate the sciences and technologies and nature, have nature-based design and… Obviously. This morning, I was reading an article about the natural capital which is starting to be valued and put into the economic equation. So, yes, I think it’s great to use this as an inspiration, but, obviously, it needs to probably go beyond Bauhaus to integrating also many more disciplines.

Dubber      In terms of ruralising cities, to what extent is vertical farming a useful approach to something like that?

Anna          I think it’s a very good approach, and I think it’s also… I think the scale is very important. And I think this pandemic was interesting to show us also the questions of scale, and whether it’s the scale of our economy where we’re sourcing things all over… We have a global economy, but there are also limits to that. And when we talk about resilience, sometimes we also need to scale down, and we need different types of systems to create this resilience.

So that’s why when I was in Qatar and working on food urbanism, which is something I identified as soon as I arrived there, I thought “We really need to work on this because they import over ninety percent of food.”. Desalination. Water is all from desalination. And the food security… The insecurity is very high. And when I was there in 2017, they had this crisis in Saudi Arabia, and from one day to the next, the supermarkets were empty. So all this work I was doing, the students were all of a sudden really… They understood the work, but they realised how important it was to start thinking about producing more locally.

So, of course, these technical solutions are important because we need to feed the whole planet, but then I think… In Qatar, we were also working with permaculture, with soil, with biodiversity because, of course, in these systems, you’re not going to address biodiversity, whereas if you’re working in the soil and in the ground, you can create really a whole ecosystem with food. Food forests. And I was working with a farmer there, Mohammed Al-Khater, Turba Farms, and he’s actually creating this whole farm based on biodiversity, permaculture, etc., and even showing that how he works on the soil, he can grow things all year round, whereas… I even created a garden in the university, and people said “Well, you can’t grow anything in Qatar.”. So the idea was “Well, you can.”. And he’s going to the state of actually saying “You can actually grow all year round. You just need to know what to do with the soil.”. And he uses both new ideas and new technology and also a lot of very traditional and indigenous knowledge. And I think that’s what’s important, is really using this deep and indigenous knowledge – and that’s also to do with the cycles of what we’re doing – and also the technology.

So I think that this greenhouses, vertical farming are a solution, especially what we did with the students. What I was teaching them was this systems thinking because with this idea of vertical farming, the idea is also… It’s being resource-efficient. And if you can use regenerated energies then you’re recycling as well. In Qatar, there was no composting, so I actually bought a specialist and we built a compost heap on the university because you’re creating a resource. This waste is becoming a resource for growing, etc.

So the vertical farming is really a system where you can be very resource-efficient. However, I think we really should be complimenting and having… For example, if you create a food forest – which means you’re integrating different species and it’s adapted to the climate, you’re creating shade, and the different species are also enabling the pollination – you have a whole system, and you can really create that in Qatar and everywhere. We’ve started working on that. So I think it’s about also these complementary systems, which is also creating a much more habitable space because if you just have buildings and vertical farming, you’re also then generating heat island effects and etc. So vertical farming, yes, but also permaculture, biodiversity, and soil, and really coming back to the soil.

And I thought during the pandemic, what’s really interesting – and this is something that I had learned from Mohammed Al-Khater who’s… He’s actually a natural doctor. He studied as a natural doctor – was this link between the gut biome, the soil biome, and the ecosystem. And we’re talking so much about immunity these days. So when we’re doing this work, we’re really also, let’s say, acting or enabling the whole health of the human and the health of the ecosystem, and so I think that’s important. And, as I said, I’ve met someone in Qatar. He was a brilliant young man, and he’s really doing this. You can actually see his farm and someone who has the knowledge of the gut biome working on the soil biome and creating this… Growing food. Also essential oils. Healing in all different ways.

Dubber      Qatar’s really interesting. It’s certainly an interesting place for a Swiss architect to end up. My knowledge of Qatar extends to hours spent in the Doha airport, but what is it that brought you there? What was the thing that made you think that was a place that you want to spend seven years of your working life?

Anna          Interestingly enough, I’ve never really planned my life or my career. So when I went to Harvard, everyone was saying “Well, what do you want to do after your PhD?”, and I had no idea. It was great to be there, and it gave me four years where I could work on Borders and really develop my research. And when I came back, I worked for the Aga Khan Foundation. So they were working in the Islamic world, and, at the time, they were actually preparing the award ceremony in Qatar. I left just before the award ceremony.

I was offered a position at Seoul National University because I’d been working on the Korean Demilitarized Zone and collaborating with Professor Kwi Gon Kim, who’s an honorary professor there. He’s done a lot of research on the wetlands in the Demilitarised Zone. So I had the work piece. I was about to go there, but the conditions were maybe not exactly the right conditions for me, and it was really a long way to go. And all of a sudden, this interview came up in Qatar, and I flew out there, and they offered me the job. I work also with intuition, and it just felt like the right place to go at that time. I didn’t really know that much about Qatar, but I was… I’m a mountain person, but I’m also… The desert, I found very attractive as well.

And also I’d studied in Harvard. So it’s a university and programme that’s really well established, Seoul National University. And this was a new programme in Qatar University, so, on the other hand, there’s also a lot of opportunities when you’re coming into someplace that’s new. Maybe there’s more to create than when you come into a very established institution.

What was very interesting also when I arrived there is that all the education and culture was being led by the women. Sheikha Moza, the wife of the former emir, she created Education City. So she brought all these university faculties, she’d pick and choose, and then made one university with all these different faculties. A really brilliant lady. So she was really working in all the social and educational developments, and also the Qatar Foundation that gives the research funding of which I benefitted for my work.

Her daughter was establishing all the Qatar Museums. Well, it was already established, but she was the one who developed and brought all the public art. There was amazing public artists there. I had this opportunity with my students to meet Richard Serra, to meet Jeff Koons, Christo, just before he passed away. So it was amazing because it’s a small place. All these artists were coming. And I was working on public art as well because it was an emerging field in Qatar, and so I was able to get my students to meet these great artists. So this was Sheikha Al-Mayassa. She was developing all the arts. And Sheikha Al-Mayassa’s aunt was the president of my university, so I was in a university which was being run by a woman.

So I must say, when I arrived there, it was very inspiring also because it was really being led – the culture and education and social developments – by women. So I think it was a really good time to arrive in Qatar.

Dubber      And you were teaching female architecture students at the university.

Anna          Yes.

Dubber      What’s the significance of that, do you think, on a long term basis?

Anna          It was interesting for me because I’d actually been… Well, I lived in Ireland when I was young. So I went to high school there, and I was at high school with the nuns, so I was actually quite used to being in a segregated community. And I must say, I never suffered from it. I had a good time. So I tend not to be critical of the place I’m in. It’s always looking at “What are the opportunities?”. Actually, Qatar University was eighty percent female students and twenty percent male, and people often said “Well, the women are harder working.” and etc. So it wasn’t necessarily, for me, a negative thing.

In the master’s programme, we do have men and women. So at that level, in the master’s I was teaching, it was mixed between males and females. But my colleagues were mostly male, so the teachers were mostly males, but the students were majority female. But I also enjoy this… The sisterhood, and the fact of being in spaces with women and developing things with women. I think there’s also a lot of positive parts of being in circles and women’s circles and developing things with feminine and feminine energies.

Now, I am, I would say, for women’s empowerment, and so my teaching… When I’m a professor and teaching, it’s not just about teaching knowledge or subjects, but it is about creating leaders and visionaries and empowering, giving people the power to be creative and also to take on the tasks or to create the projects that need to be done. And this is what we did. We identified projects that needed to be developed in Qatar, and we actually developed some of these projects, and one of the projects we ended up presenting to the Minister of Planning.

So it was really empowering them in this bottom-up approach to architecture, which is obviously not what you would see in… In French, you say an ‘émirat’. An emirate. That’s where you have an emir or where you have this top-down system. For me, that was important, to show them “Well, you can develop a project and then bring it to the right people rather than just waiting for somebody to give you the job and say ‘Okay, this needs to be done.’”. Your job as an urbanist or an architect is to actually see what needs to be done, as well, to improve the environment. It’s not just about real estate or making money or… Of course, we have to make beautiful objects as well, but it’s not just about that. It’s really about improving the environment and the quality of life for everybody.

Dubber      Rapid lane change, you’re also a jazz singer. And I’m trying to picture how somebody who is operating at this level of large-scale buildings and cities and landscapes and gardening and then what I think of as very much in the intimate world of jazz… Partly, I guess, because jazz doesn’t have massive audiences for the most part, but also because it’s a very personal expression. How do those things speak to each other? How does the jazz singer and the architect in you communicate?

Anna          At the root, actually, because I’ve studied, really, these links between architecture and music, I always thought I should choose. And in the end, I never made the choice. And I think the more I move on, the more they’re coming together. And I always loved maths. And for architecture, obviously, there’s a mathematical side, and music is also… It’s mathematical, isn’t it? It’s about proportion and harmony. And if you study the golden rule in architecture, it’s about proportion and harmony. Then you look at spirituality and the chakras and the… I love the number seven. So the scales, everything is found in that.

And I started singing, actually, in Ireland. In my family, my aunt played piano. My father always played a bit and improvised. But in Ireland, I studied singing, and the Irish love singing. So there was a seed that was planted there. And when I studied my architecture studies, I actually started to take classical music lessons, and I founded a rhythm and blues band called The Mad Hatters. Long time ago. And my first concert was actually in the architecture school. We had a yearly bal masqué. It was like the Bauhaus used to do. Bal masqué. What do you call it? A fancy dress, where people got dressed up. And we had one with New York. Everybody was dressed in skyscrapers and… Anyway. So that was my first concert, was actually in the architecture school.

So they did develop together, and – as I said – I always thought “Well, I should do one or the other.”, but then I realise the more I develop that I was an interdisciplinary person, and it’s part of one of my facets. And it’s true that if you’re very career-oriented in academia and you want to have a career path, it’s quite difficult to be interdisciplinary, multifaceted. But, for me, I’ve never had a vision of what I wanted to be that stopped me just developing in all of these facets. Luckily, I didn’t say “Well, I need to be this person or this kind of professor.”, so I developed both of them together.

And one project I did was called ‘Border Meetings’. So when I finished my master’s. It was on the Berlin Wall divided cities. I actually made a CD with… I’d been reading philosophers and poets and… So there was spoken word, and I worked with musicians who play with improvised music, and also there was… I had recordings from Berlin, so I used these recordings, spatial recordings, and there’s even… I talk about the Röstigraben in Switzerland, which is this border between French and German-speaking part. And I had recordings of my grandfather. So I also brought in recordings with places like Berlin or places… So that was a first attempt to really create a CD with my work on the borders.

And when I was at Harvard, I also took a music class in spatial sound composition. And there, I didn’t have any musicians, so I made these pieces called ‘Mouthpieces’, which was all with my vocals, but, of course, you can make all sorts of transformations with digital technologies. At the time, I was going to Cyprus every year many times for my research, and I had recordings from Cyprus, so I also intermingled them. And then it was a twenty-four speaker spatial sound system, so what was really interesting to me as an architect was actually how you build a space through the sound. So I was able to really develop this work from my recordings from Cyprus, from my own vocal production, and then creating space through this spatial sound system.

And then I actually met… There was a musician in Boston who knew songs from… Byzantine Christian songs and also Sufi songs. And so I actually, when I performed this in Harvard, had a real musician on the stage who was playing the lute and bringing this music as well. And another thing, when we arrived in… With ‘Border Meetings’, I was… He was my partner, was a musician. So I’ve always, always been with musicians. So I think that’s also part of it, was being in the musical world, because being with musicians, being in jazz clubs or travelling… That’s how we travelled to Pakistan for the ‘Sufi Moon’ project.

And then when I arrived in Qatar, I was with my husband, actually, who I met in Boston. He was a writer and jazz musician. And it was just the moment that the Swiss was opening an embassy there. So there was really a synchronicity between me arriving there with my husband, who’s a musician, and the ambassador, who was formerly in Syria, had to leave Syria. And so I presented my project to him, and we actually developed a project called ‘Desert Bridges’ where we brought musicians from the US, Swiss musicians, an alphorn player from Switzerland, and there was a jazz traditional singer from Qatar, and we had also some Indian, Syrian musicians. So we did this fusion, and we performed for the opening of the Swiss embassy. This was sponsored by the Ministry of Culture. So it was really this bridging of culture. So it’s also about the borders, ‘Border Meetings’, but how music is really a universal language and we can also bridge different cultures through this music. So that was also a great opportunity to be able to create a project in Qatar with my late husband, Cheo Jeffery Allen Solder.

Dubber      So what’s the current project? Musically speaking, what’s the next big thing for you?

Anna          At the moment, I’m working with my trio, Anna Jazz and Roses, with Michel Bastet, who I used to have a trio with before I left for the US and Qatar, and Frederic Folmer. They’re both really accomplished jazz musicians who’ve travelled and played all over the world. And just recently, we celebrated the fifty years of the right of votes for women. This was in 1971 in Switzerland. So…

Dubber      Really? That late?

Anna          Yes.

Dubber      Wow.

Anna          Well, it’s interesting. Because we have a democratic confederation with referendums and… It had to be that the men had to vote to give the women the vote so we could change the constitution. We couldn’t change the constitution without the men voting. And it’s interesting, some places, they still vote by raising their hands. And so it took time. Some cantons actually voted before, but it became really a federal law. So, yes, it was very, very late. I was inspired by this, and also just wanted to… There’s a lot of women suffragettes, Swiss suffragettes, and to honour them.

So I’ve started working with my musicians on a piece called ‘We Too’, actually. It’s thinking of the ‘Me Too’, but the ‘We Too’, the really inclusive celebration, it’s about celebrating how far we’ve gone. Of course, we still have a long way to go, but the idea is really celebrating already how far we’ve come and being inclusive and also saying it’s about evolving now together with men in a more balanced relationship. It’s not about just separating ourselves, but recombining. So that’s one thing I’m working on at the moment which I find really interesting and exciting.

And, just an anecdote, because I was obviously doing quite a bit of research on this and there was a lot of programmes. And you can see the Matterhorn on this image behind me because I’m from the valle, from the mountains. And my great grandfather was a mountain guide, and my father was a ski instructor as well as being an engineer and director of a factory. But it was interesting because women climbers… I remember there was one woman who was going to be the first woman to climb the Matterhorn, but women were not allowed to wear trousers, and so she had… They had these long skirts, and because it was windy, they could never really get to the top because the conditions were really bad. I read about this. They used to get fined if they were seen wearing skirts. They would be heavily fined. So there’s some really amusing stories about these women who wanted to be mountaineers and climb mountains, and they couldn’t wear pants to do this, and so… There’s some very, very interesting stories. And even the mountaineering club wouldn’t accept them. So now, obviously, things have evolved, but… Yeah. So we want to celebrate, as well, how far we’ve come.

Dubber      Is it a good place to do that? Is Switzerland… Has it caught up?

Anna          I think we still have a long way to go, but it’s like everywhere. I try not to be Swiss-centric, Eurocentric, especially when I… Like I told you, I arrived in Qatar. There was a woman president of my university. Well, there were none in Switzerland at the time. So I think we always have to be very careful about how we look at different countries.

But just recently, in the valle, for example, where I’m from, we just had these elections. Municipal elections and for the parliament. So the women have gone from twenty-five percent to forty percent. So I think that’s really great. Forty percent in the parliament. In Geneva, we just had a vote last week. We’re going on to the second round, but I think there were seven or eight men and one woman, and she got the most votes over all the men. And, obviously, she’s an ecologist and socialist. So, for me, that’s good because I think we need to go towards more ecology. And with COVID, we need to also be socially because there’s a lot of inequalities which have been revealed and even accentuated with the pandemic. So I’m really, really happy that there’s a lot of women who have social concerns and ecological concerns. So it’s really increasing, definitely.

So, yes. Hopefully, we’re catching up with whoever is the model. I’m not sure. I’d have to do more research to see who we need to catch up with, but… Actually, our president last year was a woman, and we have a rotating system, so… And we do have a good representation in the government.

Dubber      Right. Fantastic. You mentioned the ‘Sufi Moon’ project in passing in that recounting. Do you want to tell me a little bit more about that? Because that’s a really interesting one for me.

Anna          Yes. ‘Sufi Moon’ is a project that I developed with my former partner, Jean-Jacques Pedretti, who’s a trombone player and alphorn player. So he was invited to play in Pakistan with this Sufi soul music festival. So I went along. He was playing with his colleague, Robert Morgenthaler. They were playing alphorns, trombone. So they performed there and played with some other musicians, and we met… It was an amazing festival. I met this singer who’s very well known in Pakistan and also worldwide called Abida Parveen. She’s a Qawwali singer. And all the Sufi singers and traditional singers of Pakistan were performing there. Also an Indian Sufi musician was there. And I was so taken by this music. My discovery of Sufism was through the music there.

And so when we got back to Switzerland, I started to work on this project, ‘Sufi Moon’, and then we found the funding. And so we returned to Pakistan, and we also brought the musicians. So it was with two alphorns and trombone – they were the two Swiss musicians – myself on vocals, and then a Pakistani Qawwali vocalist and a tabla player. And so we created this fusion, and we performed in jazz clubs in Switzerland. We brought them here to Switzerland to perform, and then we performed also in Pakistan. And the highlight was actually performing in a Sufi shrine in a very small village called Pakpattan. The singer we were working with, Sher Miandad, he was actually the singer in this shrine, the Shrine of Baba Farid. So, for me, that was just an amazing experience, to be able to sing in a Sufi shrine with ‘Sufi Moon’, and it was a great experience. And then we also recorded a CD in Switzerland with the musicians.

Dubber      Yeah, that sounds fascinating. Did the music lead you to the spirituality, or was it just as a visitor to a culture that you were singing?

Anna          I’ve always been interested in spirituality, let’s say, as opposed to religion. Because I was working on ‘Borders’ and I… Working in Cyprus and Jerusalem, and living in Northern Ireland and always hearing about Catholics and Protestants and… So I really became interested in the spirituality. So I started to become interested also more in Buddhism and just exploring, and also the more feminine. Why are the women not in these religions? So I was also very drawn to that.

It was definitely the music that then sparked my interest in Sufism, and because it… What was really interesting is, there, that the music… Because in a lot of places – especially in the villages – people don’t read or write, so all this beautiful poetry is transmitted through the music. I’ve always been attracted by Persia, Iran, and I was very lucky to go there several times, especially when I was in Qatar, and then just last year for the Aga Khan as well. And, of course, they also have the… Well, Hafez is my favourite poet. And Rumi, of course. We all know Rumi as well. So I must say that, yeah, I just really discovered the world of Sufism, and I must say, Hafez is probably one of my very favourite poets.

And so ‘Sufi Moon’, the idea of the moon was the feminine but also because the crescent moon is very important in Islam, so it was a way I… How do we bring together these cultures? And so I found that the theme of the moon was the way that I tried to weave the music and the cultures together.

Dubber      Is there a unifying project or unifying vision that brings together these music and spirituality and architecture and urbanism and landscapes and… Is there something that you feel like you’re working on that weaves those things together somehow, or are you over here for a bit and then over there for a bit?

Anna          I think, as I said, more and more I find everything coming together, and I think in the future that’s definitely where I want to go. Where I’m going. I feel there’s an openness and more, let’s say, necessity and reception also for this. Even just talking to you today and being invited. Also that my personality… Because sometimes when I was a professor, I’d hide that I was a jazz singer because… Now, I really want to develop my projects and myself in all these aspects. And I think also that we see that we need more integrative thinking, more interdisciplinary thinking, and I just feel that there really is a fertile terrain for this now. And, as I mentioned, thank you so much for inviting me. But I feel that I’m also being seen in these dimensions more and more, and this is what I really want to develop in my projects. And I think I always had that dream, long ago, of creating a project which would really bring all of this together. So it’s definitely where I want to go.

Dubber      Fantastic. Anna, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Anna          Well, thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you.

Dubber      You’re welcome.

Dubber      That’s jazz musician, architect, and urbanist, Dr Anna Grichting, and that’s the MTF Podcast. Anna is @AnnaGrichting on Twitter and www.annagrichting.com on the web. I’ll put those on the podcast episode page. We’re @mtflabs and www.mtflabs.net, and you can find me @dubber on Twitter. Thanks to T. Bless & the Professionals and airtone for the music, to Run Dreamer for the MTF audio logo, and to the MTF production team – Sergio, Mars, and Jen – for making this possible. You can subscribe, follow, like, share, recommend, and discuss, and, of course, we’d love to hear from you too. But that’s it for this week. Look after yourself, look after your city, and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.

Transcript

Dubber      Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. So given that you’re listening to a podcast right now, it’s a fairly safe bet that you have a computer or a smartphone and it’s connected to the internet, which means that it and you and perhaps everyone you’ve ever sent an email to is in some sort of twenty-first-century peril right now.

Enter the cybersecurity specialist, coding furiously against time to take down the criminal underworld, foreign agents, malware and spyware, and lock out the hackers and the bots. The hunter becomes the hunted, and so on. In fact, according to actual cybersecurity expert Yaniv Balmas, there are actually some pretty simple things you can do yourself, or stop doing, as the case may be. And there are some things you might not actually be in a position to do anything about at all, but, well, chances are, you’re not as interesting a target as you might think. Here’s hoping, at any rate.

But given that we live in a world where everything is so very digital and so very connected, from our conversations to our thermostats, our politics to our pop music, I thought I’d have a chat with Yaniv – he’s Head of Cyber Research at Check Point – to talk about what’s going on in the world of cyber and see what I can do to avoid a catastrophic network breach or some such.

Dubber      Yaniv Balmas, thanks so much for joining us for the MTF Podcast. Can I ask where we find you today, where you are right now, or would that give too much away?

Yaniv         Well, I’m at home, like most of the other people around the globe.

Dubber      Yeah. And where is home on the globe?

Yaniv         Well, I live just outside of Tel Aviv in Israel.

Dubber      And you’re in cybersecurity. Is Tel Aviv a good place to be doing cybersecurity?

Yaniv         Well, Israel has been called a cyber nation. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but, yes, there is a lot of cyber business going on in Tel Aviv and all around me here.

Dubber      All right. So we should probably just get to the very, very basics. What is cybersecurity?

Yaniv         When I started this career, there wasn’t such a term, ‘cybersecurity’, actually. It was ‘security engineering’, maybe, or ‘information security’. So cyber, for me, is just a big, new name for something. And, technically, what we’re talking about is we’re talking about mistakes. Human mistakes, usually.

So we have software running. We have hardware running. We have all of these mechanics and all of these electronics going on. They should theoretically be perfect and do exactly what they’re supposed to do and absolutely nothing else, but, unfortunately, or fortunately – it depends who you ask – that’s…

Dubber      It depends on whether you make your living out of cybersecurity or not.

Yaniv         Yeah, exactly. Usually, it doesn’t work that way. There are bugs. There are errors in there. Some of them are just bugs and errors. Some of them might be much worse than that, and they could lead to a lot of security issues, and I guess that’s the core of cybersecurity. That’s where it all starts.

Dubber      Because what I imagine when I hear ‘cybersecurity’ is that there are lots of, for want of a better term, baddies in the world who are trying to break things, steal things, blow things up, make people’s lives miserable, and you’re the last line of defence, frantically typing like a hacker in a movie onto a screen to stop them from getting in. Is it anything like that? Is anything of that true?

Yaniv         Well, I always think – about this typing like a hacker in a movie – that if someone would ever make a film on me while I’m working, it would be the most boring film in the world. It really doesn’t look that way in reality.

Are we the last line of defence? I don’t know. There’s a pretty large community. Some of it is by vendors. Some of it by individuals. Some is mixed. And there’s a lot of work being done on the defensive side of cybersecurity around the world. I don’t think it’s enough. I don’t think it will ever be enough. But I think that all of us, as a whole, we’re changing something. I think we’re protecting the world, the cyber world, just a bit.

Dubber      What are we protecting it from? What are the actual risks? What could go wrong?

Yaniv         So many things. But the question is not ‘what’ but, maybe, ‘who’. Who are we protecting from? There’s a lot of different individuals or groups that may be a threat to someone, and the real question is “What is their motivation?”. And I think if you’re looking at it from that perspective, you can basically divide it into two very large groups.

One of them will be the ones that are financially motivated. Those would be mostly related to what we refer to as cybercrime or scams, whatever. Their end goal is to steal your money, like any criminal anywhere in the world. It really doesn’t change. Just the playground changes. So now it’s the internet and the computers and not pickpocketing on the streets, but the concepts are pretty much the same. So that’s one group of people we should be aware of.

And sometimes these guys are pretty sophisticated and do a lot of very advanced technical work, and sometimes they are just… I don’t want to say kids, but unsophisticated. They do the very bare minimum necessary in order to steal your money. From a technical perspective, it looks like “This will never work.”, but the truth is that it works. It works a lot of times. And that’s the first group.

The second group… I think it’s, on the one hand, much, much more dangerous. These are usually not motivated financially, but they are motivated by… Usually, their goal is to steal information. So we might be talking about business espionage. We might be talking about intelligence agencies. Stuff like that. These are usually groups that are much better funded than the other ones. They have very high technical skills. They could do a lot more damage, but they are very structured, and, usually, they don’t attack everyone. They just attack who they need to attack. And if you’re not a target for them, then you have nothing to worry about, but if you are, then it’s a different story.

Dubber      How does surveillance fit into this? Because I know there’s a lot of talk about personal data security and privacy and these sorts of things. Is that in the same ballpark, the same territory? Do I need to worry about my Google Home or Siri or anything like that, or is this a different domain that we’re talking about?

Yaniv         Again, it depends on how you look at it. For example, I’m an intelligence agency. I want to do surveillance on one individual. Probably, I have my tools. I have my ways of doing that. And, again, you or most of the people in the world usually don’t really have anything to worry about that because they will never be a target of these kinds of organisations simply because they are, well, without disrespect to anyone, uninteresting.

Dubber      That seems plausible.

Yaniv         I like to be uninteresting. It’s a nice place to be. But, on the other hand, there’s surveillance on a larger scale. And that’s like when China, for example, wants to control all of the internet traffic that everyone does and see wherever anyone browses to – and I’m just giving China as an example. There are other examples not from China, of course – and that’s concerning.

Usually, their target is not an individual. It’s a very large group of people, and mainly it impacts our privacy. So now when I’m browsing to somewhere, I don’t know. Somebody might be looking at where am I browsing. Maybe he’s not specifically interested in that, but he does have this information. And this should worry basically anyone because it happens, and it happens everywhere. It happens by governments. It happens by big corporations that control most of the internet traffic, most of the search engines, and social networks and so on. You heard that on the news. I didn’t say it.

And, yes, I think privacy is something that we should all be worried about. And I think, generally speaking, we are losing our privacy. Day after day we have less and less privacy, and I don’t know if it’s something we should accept or fight against with all our power. It’s a new world, and we should know to adapt to it in that way or the other.

Dubber      I’m thinking about things at the national, the nation-state level. Things like spies in the old fashioned spy story sense of people putting bugs into… Well, there was a famous case of bugs in the typewriters at the… I think it was The Pentagon, that were there for decades collecting every single keystroke of these electric typewriters.

But now, obviously, all of our information, all of our communication is all zeros and ones flying over the internet. And, presumably, it’s not just a case of being able to listen in on that. It’s now being able to manipulate that and change what that data says or to be able to actually control, at a distance, things like nuclear power plants or electricity stations or those sorts of things. Is there a nightmare scenario that all of the cyber security world is gearing up for?

Yaniv         Just open Netflix and find whatever science fiction movie you like, and you’ll see this doomsday scenario.

Dubber      Are you saying you’re already working on it, or…

Yaniv         No, no. It’s there. These are the movies that we grew… At least me. I grew on. So this is the doomsday scenario where the machines take over, and now… I don’t know. Something like that. But, frankly, we live in the real world.

I think espionage is not something new. It’s been there since the beginning of time, I think. Just a different playground. The internet is a wonderful place, and it makes our life much easier. Makes things closer to us, easier, more accessible. We can do things remotely. It’s wonderful. But when you think about it… So when somebody who doesn’t have the right permissions or the right access gets into these places, then the damage potential is also much, much bigger just because of the nature of this. The internet. These services. It’s all there. And if somebody malicious is sitting there, then he basically controls everything.

And this can be applied to anything from – I don’t know – your personal emails to nuclear power plants around the world. There are ways to defend against this, but if history told us something, it’s that there is no one hundred percent security. If there’s a way to get in there, somebody will manage to do it.

Dubber      Because I’m thinking we are in an age where we’re becoming… It’s not just us that’s becoming increasingly connected. It’s everything we own is becoming increasingly connected. So your home speakers, your lights, your air conditioning, your fridge, your toaster, whatever. They’re all connected and speaking to each other, speaking to the internet. And, presumably, if you’ve got somebody who is malicious enough and with the skills to do it, not only can they start turning off and on your lights, which is annoying, but they could presumably turn off your heating in the middle of winter, or they could… There are things that can be done at a grand scale to an entire population of a country. Years ago, there was an attack on Estonia where they essentially shut down the country and potentially caused the starvation event. So what do we as individuals, I guess is my question, what should we be thinking about, and how concerned should we be about this?

Yaniv         I think, first of all, we should definitely be concerned about this. I think the better term is ‘be aware of the risks’. So these risks are out there. Usually, if we apply just very basic security procedures, regulations, and stuff like that – really not complicated stuff – we can be safe, let’s say, in a ninety-nine percent ratio. That’s the most important thing, just the awareness to these things, because – as I was saying – in the same sentence, I could say “Look, this is not… You shouldn’t go into a bunker and close everything, disconnect from the internet.”. This also doesn’t make sense to do. So I would say just keep using whatever you’re using. Technology is going forward. Go forward with it. Just be aware that everything that you connect today to the internet, everything that becomes digital, everything that becomes connected might also be a risk.

At Check Point Research, we did several research projects just on these type of things. There’s a very unique category that we like to find projects on. We call it ‘the things you wouldn’t imagine that could be hacked’. So, for example, we showed how we can take over your network by sending a fax over to your network. Just by sending a fax. We also showed how we can control your entire network just by exploiting your smart lightbulbs at home. So these are the kind of things that you were talking about. So we show it is possible. Others show the same as well.

Dubber      Well, I have to say, the one that alarmed me was I watched a presentation that you did where you showed how a network could be attacked via somebody’s camera. There was a digital SLR camera that happened to be on the network, and you were able to go in through that. That’s quite astonishing because it’s not… I have exactly that camera that you were showing, and I was thinking “Right. I had not thought of that as a risky entry point.”.

Yaniv         So, yeah, that’s it. The thing is that everything, as you said, is connected. Things that you wouldn’t imagine that… Why should they even be connected? And they are connected, and sometimes you’re not even aware that they are connected. So, again, this goes back to the question of awareness. You should be aware of these things, and if you don’t need them, disconnect them. And if you need them connected, make sure you’re protected, at least the bare minimum that you can do.

Dubber      And what is the bare minimum?

Yaniv         The bare minimum, usually, is you make sure that every connected device is updated with the latest firmware versions, security versions. Usually, unfortunately, it’s something that most people don’t do. They don’t even know how to do. And usually it’s not a big problem. There’s a big button saying ‘update’. Just push that button once in a while. That’s one thing.

Another thing is check. If your camera is connected to the internet at your house, that might be fine. But if it’s exposed out there to the internet, then you have a serious issue. It shouldn’t be, and that’s something that you can check. And if you don’t have the technical skills to check that, just find the nearest somebody who knows a bit about computers, and he can definitely set this up for you. It’s not a big issue.

Dubber      I want to run some terms by you because I’ve heard them and they sound important, and I don’t know what they mean. Let’s start with ‘zero-day’. What’s that?

Yaniv         That has, also, a very interesting background to it. So let’s start from the past. So when I started my – I don’t know – career or my online life, there was still no internet. We had BBSes. These bulletin board systems.

Dubber      I remember.

Yaniv         Yeah. And it was a great time. And what did we use this wonderful technology for? For, obviously, sharing games. Usually illegal games. That was the cracked games, hacked games. Stuff like that. That was what we did as kids. And at these times, the games, the freshest games, the newest games, the ones that just been out from the vendor, the BBSes called them ‘zero-days’. That’s where the terminology came from. ‘Zero-day’.

But as we grew and as cybersecurity came to be, ‘zero-day’ changed a bit, and now it doesn’t refer to video games or computer games, and now it refers to vulnerabilities. Security issues, basically, that can cause damage to whoever is using them. And those vulnerabilities are referred to as ‘zero-days’ when they have not been discovered yet. Nobody found them. Maybe someone found them, and he is maybe exploiting them, but the vendor or the community didn’t find out about them yet, and that’s why they are called ‘zero-days’. The minute they are detected and the minute they are protected, they are no longer zero-days. Now they become one-days, two-days, three-days, n-days, and so on. So that’s a zero-day.

Dubber      Right. What’s Stuxnet?

Yaniv         Stuxnet is the name of very famous malware or an attack that happened in 2011, and it is the attack that caused the Iranian nuclear facilities to stop operating for several years. So those facilities are usually top secret and very, very well guarded. And somehow, someone managed to put this piece of malicious code inside the machines that are responsible for the centrifuge and made the machines go boom, basically, and this paused the Iranian nuclear programme for several years. It’s attributed to several places. I don’t think we should go into that. But it was, I think, one of the first cases when we saw the great power of cybersecurity, of offensive cybersecurity, and the damage and what it can really do. This happened, again, in 2011, so ages ago in internet terms.

Dubber      Sure. But it’s interesting that… It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that you would want to have connected to the internet.

Yaniv         So, basically, it wasn’t connected to the internet. Many military facilities and top-secret facilities all around the world, usually, they are not connected to the internet, exactly to prevent these and other kinds of attacks. It’s still really unknown what really happened there, but the common word on the street is that what happened is that somebody, or somehow, they managed to put some USB sticks maybe in the car parking lot, or maybe they just handed them over to workers from the facility. They looked legit because a lot of people are just giving you USB sticks, and then it just takes one of these guys to take this USB stick and put it into his computer inside a top-secret network in the facility, and that’s how the malicious code was able to get into the facility without them being connected to the internet.

Dubber      Right. You mentioned the phrase ‘offensive cybersecurity’, and that’s an interesting concept because you think of cybersecurity as being preventing things from happening to you, but obviously it’s something that can be deployed to attack. Is this something that you’re trained for when you become a cybersecurity specialist?

Yaniv         First of all, I say that it’s a zero-sum game. If you protect against something then somebody needs to attack, so it’s always offensive against defensive. And is this something that you are trained for? From my perspective, if you want to be a good defender, you need to at least know how offenders work, how they think like.

I don’t think that everybody gets this training – everybody who works at the defensive cybersecurity – for many reasons. Some are legit. Some are less legit, I think, but it’s not a common thing for everyone to know offensive security or the techniques or the methodologies used there. But I think as years go along, more and more people know about this. There are more courses about this. The material gets integrated into many cybersecurity trainings and offerings out there. So I think the knowledge is being shared, slowly but surely, out there.

Dubber      Interesting. Is this the future or even the present of warfare, or is this more happening at the skirmish level? More just small attacks on individual installations or whatever. Is there a global battle going on that we may not necessarily be aware of?

Yaniv         Of course. I think that we are aware of it. At least me. And if you look at things that are going on in the world – there are many cases – then, yes, definitely. Cybersecurity is the new arena inside any modern warfare, and it’s only getting bigger and it’s only getting better, I would say. And, definitely, next wars… Hopefully we won’t see them, but if there will be such, we will definitely see a lot of offensive cybersecurity taking place throughout this war and maybe even winning the war.

And I think, even, the interesting part is that for offensive cybersecurity, even the term ‘war’ gets… It’s not the war that we know. It’s not tank against tank. It’s not man with a rifle against man with a rifle. Now, it’s just someone sitting in one part of the world pushing a button against somebody sitting in another part of the world pushing a button, with real-life consequences, with real things going on. But there is no actual war. You’re not sending anyone to the front lines. So it’s a different concept. Something that we need to probably get used to.

Dubber      Well, this is something that has been part of the public imagination since – I don’t know – Matthew Broderick in ‘WarGames’. This is a long time ago. Were you the kind of kid that was sitting there watching this and going “I have to do something about this. This is my life now.”?

Yaniv         Definitely. That was one of the cases. And, yes, I love science fiction. I love this kind of stuff, definitely. It had a big impact on me as a kid and carved my way into cybersecurity. But if you’re asking how did I, specifically, go into cybersecurity…

Dubber      That’s exactly what I’m asking.

Yaniv         So I’ll give you a good answer for that. There’s one very interesting or memorable case that I remember. I was, I think, fourteen years old, maybe thirteen years old. And, as I told you, computers didn’t have internet yet, and we loved video games. And we shared them either through BBSes or people would come to my home with floppy drives, and we shoved them into the computer and do whatever we do in order to play the games.

And I remember this day when somebody came to me with these floppy drives, and I installed the game, and I started playing it, and then my computer crashed all of a sudden. And looking at what’s going on, I see that there is a computer virus that took over my computer. I still remember the name of this virus. Its name was ‘Haifa’. But, by the way, this is an Israeli city, so it didn’t make me feel very proud of being Israeli. I just felt like “Oh my god. This is the end. All of my video games. All of my life. I’m sitting eighteen hours a day playing this computer. What’s going on?”. I remember this distinct feeling of [groan]. It was such a bad feeling, and I think that was, at least for me, the moment where I decided that “I’m going to fight these things. I’m going to learn how they work. I’m going to understand how they do this. I’m not going to go through this situation ever again.”. And if you’ll ask me, I think that was the tipping point for me, and from that day, I decided that “I will do cybersecurity.”. Again, there was no such term then, but “I will do computer security when I grow up.” and…

Dubber      I love that this is like a comic book #1 superhero origin story, that you’ve got the spark. You’ve got the passion and the drive. It made you so angry that you put on the cape and the mask, and now you’re protecting the world from these villains. To what end? Is this a never-ending battle? Can we ever win?

Yaniv         No. I don’t think there is an end for this battle. As long as there will be new technologies, there will be new issues, there will be new bugs, there will be new vulnerabilities. It’s actually the opposite of ending. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger, worse and worse. So I think that I have job security for a long time from now, and that’s basically it.

Dubber      That seems like a nice place to be. Okay, so I’m interested not just in what the individuals can do and not just what the national governments can do, but at a mid-scale, what can a business do? Let’s say you’ve got a company. You employ a few people. Everybody has laptops they take home. What sorts of things should you be thinking about from that perspective?

Yaniv         Yeah, so organisations are a much… They’re a different story. It’s a much bigger playground. There’s a lot more technology that’s integrated into it. The risks are definitely different than if you’re an individual. There’s a lot more at stake here. And, usually, those systems that you have, the technology that you have, are much more complex. They are interconnected. Even you don’t even know exactly what’s there and how does it work. There’s no one singular individual who knows everything. And that calls for different types of solutions, different types of protections for organisations.

And, really, if you look at the cybersecurity field, there’s… I wouldn’t say dozens. There are hundreds or thousands of such solutions. One for every scenario. If your organisation is working cloud-based, if it’s not cloud-based, if you’re running this business, if you’re running this software, if you have users connecting remotely, if you don’t have users connecting remotely. And for each one of these scenarios, there’s usually a solution or several solutions, and it’s an industry. What can I say?

Dubber      So are there any best practices that we should apply across the board? Like “If you’ve got a company, everybody should have this on their phone.”, or “They should use that on their laptop.”, or “These are the rules that you should follow.”?

Yaniv         So it’s really hard to say because even there, the world is changing. So organisations used to be run very similar to each other let’s say twenty or thirty years ago. You have a data centre. You have your workers. You have maybe one office, maybe several offices. But today, the situation changes a lot because every organisation looks completely different in terms of how its IT networks are built, and that’s the reason why there is no one common solution that could be applied to everyone.

I think there are several solutions, and usually the right approach will be to use the layered solution. So build layers upon layers upon layers of security. So start by, for example, a firewall. Don’t let in what you don’t need to let in. Just like the advice I gave to the home users. If you don’t need this port open, just have it closed. So a firewall will take care of that for you. Then, if you need people to connect remotely or if you have offices remotely, then use a DPN solution that can solve this. Then, you are receiving emails let’s say every day, then these emails might deliver malicious stuff. You need some email protection there for you. And then it just keeps going on. And this is, even, the traditional organisation.

Now, organisations are shifting to the cloud. It sounds really big, but this is the world, and cloud now offers another challenge for security vendors. So it’s a different world, and the systems are not sitting on-premise now. They’re sitting somewhere in the world. And sometimes they are not even systems. They are services. How do we protect them? So, again, there’s a lot of methodologies there and a lot of companies and a lot of solutions, and it’s really quite a complex world. What can I say?

Dubber      Yeah. Where do you start? I know that the good advice is use two-factor authorisation and change your passwords from time to time. Those sorts of things. Is there anything else that might be counter-intuitive that you think “Oh, actually, one good tip, you should do this.”?

Yaniv         So this is a really good tip, what you said, for individuals. Not for organisations. It doesn’t really make sense. Yeah, okay, if you’re an individual, use two-factor authentication. Really good advice that will help you a lot with a lot of things. But if you’re an organisation, it doesn’t really make sense. “Well, I have five thousand employees. What do you mean? Use two-factor authentication for all of them? And for what? They are using thousands of services.”. So, again, organisations make it much more complicated. But for individuals, the advice that you gave is perfect.

Dubber      Right. Well, I know you have good job security and you have this really great superhero origin story, but you’d be a pretty good criminal, I imagine. What’s stopping you from going down that path?

Yaniv         I don’t know. My conscience, maybe.

Dubber      Yeah?

Yaniv         Yeah.

Dubber      Is that what we’re relying on for everybody who does what you do not to become these Lex Luthor masterminds that go and hold cities to ransom or rob banks or whatever it might be? It’s just they’re good people?

Yaniv         Well, yes, basically. Why do you trust the cops? They could go and do bad stuff as well, but they choose to be the good guys. And I hope that most people choose to be the good guys. That’s all I have to say about that.

Dubber      Okay. Well, we know that there are some bad people in the world. There’s some major headlines recently. ‘SolarWinds’ is a phrase that I’ve heard, and there’s been some other stuff on the news. Do you want to tell us what the big headlines are and maybe even help us understand who the baddies might be?

Yaniv         So you mentioned one of the really biggest events that took place just a few months ago. It’s called SolarWinds, and, actually, it’s called SUNBURST, the attack. SolarWinds is actually the product that was involved in this attack. And I think this was really maybe a milestone in development of offensive cybersecurity. Something that I didn’t see throughout my entire career, such an attack. That was a pretty interesting case.

It was something that we refer to as a supply chain attack, and that’s where… So imagine if I want to attack some target, but this target is really tough. I can’t really attack it. It’s really well protected, and it will cost me a lot of money, and I will spend a lot of time in order to attack it. But, basically, I can do something else. I can find out who is supplying things to this target. So, for example, “Okay, I know that he is using this product. This product is called SolarWinds. It’s being developed by this company that’s based in Austin, Texas, and doing that. But this company is much less secure than my original target, so why won’t I go and attack this company, SolarWinds? And after I successfully attack it, let’s implant something inside their software. The same software that they then deliver to my original target.”. And this is referred to, again, as a supply chain attack, and that’s basically what happened. So this company, SolarWinds, got hacked, and whoever their customers were received malicious updates of the software.

The problem with this is that as a customer of SolarWinds, there’s practically no way for you to understand that this software update that you just got – like you do every week or every month – is malicious, because it looks legitimate. It’s signed by SolarWinds. It matches every criteria that you can imagine, and, still, it’s malicious. And that’s what happened.

And, unfortunately, SolarWinds is a very successful company. Not unfortunately. Fortunate for them. But they have a lot of customers and a lot of major customers. Most of them are Fortune 500 companies, and… You can imagine. And all of them are now targets of some unknown attacker, and he can now go into their networks although their networks are super, super protected. And that attack was on such a large scale. So many organisations got hit by this. And I’m not just talking about any organisations. I’m talking about the biggest names that are around, like Microsoft or Cisco or IBM or… And the list goes on. So these are really the software vendors and the hardware vendors which we rely on and use on a daily basis, and just the thought of what happens if they are now hacked and this guy or this organisation or this group can now access their source code, do whatever they want with their product, this is… You mentioned the nightmare scenario earlier. I think this got close to this nightmare scenario. The potential of damage that someone could do using this attack is mind-blowing.

And, eventually, we don’t really know what were the real consequences of this attack. We just found bits and pieces of the attack, and this is scary. This is scary to think about it. And, again, you need to go and think “What is the motivation? Why would someone do something like that?”. I don’t have a clear answer for that, but I think it’s something that we should all be aware of, that something like this happened, and I think we’re going to hear about this incident for the months and years to come. Surely we’re going to find more details. And it’s one of the major events that I’ve ever seen in my career.

Dubber      Wow. And something about exchange servers. There’s been something just recently. That’s a lot of people’s email.

Yaniv         Yeah. Like SolarWinds wasn’t enough, then just a few months after that came another issue that’s a really big issue. Now, we’re talking about just a few weeks ago where a security researcher from Taiwan, his name is Orange Tsai – that’s his nickname, at least – he found the vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server. So, basically, these are the servers which manage email, sending and receiving, for 99.9 percent of the organisations out there. And the specific vulnerability that he found may allow an attacker to take full control over the servers and basically over the network that he attacks without any authentication needed, without anything but just access to this server. And, usually, these servers should be somehow exposed to the internet because that’s what they do, and that means that basically 99.9 percent of the organisations in the world were actually vulnerable to this thing.

And the worst thing about it is not that… Sometimes you find the vulnerability. You tell the vendor about it. He fixes it, and catastrophe is avoided. Everything is okay. In this case, this vulnerability, once he found it, it turned out that it was already being used in the wild. So somebody might have found it before him, but this someone just didn’t tell Microsoft about it. He just took it and used it. So you can imagine how many days, weeks, months, years have we lived thinking that everything is okay while there is this someone in the world that can just, with a click of a button, go into almost any organisation in the world that he wants to and do whatever he wants in there being completely undetected. That’s to finish off with a scary story. So here is the scary story for you.

Dubber      So when they find a vulnerability, presumably the response is to patch the vulnerability. But there isn’t a way to find out what that vulnerability has allowed, right?

Yaniv         Well, you always know what the potential is, but the good guys would report the vulnerabilities to the vendors. The bad guys would find the vulnerabilities and not report them at all. And “What usage do they do with these vulnerabilities?” is unknown.

Dubber      Presumably there’s a market for that. There’s a market for vulnerabilities. People saying “You find something in Microsoft Exchange Server, come to us, and we’ll give you some money for it.”.

Yaniv         So, first of all, there are several markets for these kinds of things. There is the let’s say legitimate, quote-unquote, markets, and this is by legitimate companies, sometimes even nations and states. They want to have access to such vulnerabilities. Sometimes, by the way, companies will have these programs called bug bounties, saying “Okay. You find the vulnerability in my product. You did a lot of work for that. Let me pay you your bounty for that.”. And there’s actually a lot of money going on in these markets, but these are the legitimate markets.

The same markets also exist in the darker corners of the internet where you sell to much less legitimate people the vulnerabilities that you find, and you might imagine how they use these vulnerabilities later. The prices in these dark places usually are much, much higher than the legitimate ones.

Dubber      Wow. So where to from here? You mentioned awareness at the beginning, rather than concern. What’s our recommended further reading here? What should we go and find out to be more aware of these sorts of things?

Yaniv         Well, first of all, there’s a lot being written and said and a lot of places you can go and hear about cybersecurity, if you want to, and read about it. It’s really all over the place. I can’t recommend one place as opposed to another, but, really, the internet is full of them. Just go into Google and type ‘cybersecurity’, and you will find a lot of good reading places.

I think, for the general public, just be aware of the situation. Be aware of the new findings. Be aware of the new vulnerabilities being found, of the new cybercrime campaigns out there, of the new techniques being used. So you should be aware of that. You don’t need to understand every bit and byte of that. You don’t really need to understand how it works or who is doing that. You just need to understand that it’s out there and it’s being used, and as long as you have that in mind, I think you are already halfway to being protected. And the second half is much easier than the first one, and that’s just a matter of pushing some buttons and probably you’ll be protected from that. But if you don’t know what’s out there and if you don’t know what’s the risk then there is very small chance that you’ll be able to protect yourself against it.

Dubber      Fantastic. Well, it’s reassuring to know that there are good people like you plugging the holes and making the world safer for us. So, Yaniv, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Yaniv         Sure. It was my pleasure.

Dubber      That’s Yaniv Balmas who is Head of Cyber Research at Check Point and also self-confessed former BBS computer game pirate. You can find some of Yaniv’s presentations about cybersecurity on YouTube, as I did, and you can also follow him on Twitter, @ynvb. I’m Dubber, @dubber on Twitter, and MTF Labs is @mtflabs everywhere. Thanks to airtone and Be Still the Earth for the music, to Run Dreamer for the MTF audio logo that you’re going to hear shortly, and to the MTF team – Sergio, Mars, and Jen – for making it all come together. That’s it from me this week. Don’t forget to back up your hard drives, wear a mask, update your software, wash your hands, change your passwords, stay safe, and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.

Transcript

Dubber      Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. I quite like wine. Maybe you’re the same yourself. I’m not someone who has it every evening, but when I do have it, I enjoy it, and I know enough to have some favourites and also to know what my sort of thing is when I come across it. I particularly enjoy drinking wine with people who know more about it than I do, which, to be fair, is a low bar, but it’s always interesting to learn something along the way.

So when I’ve been to wine tastings at vineyards or in the company of winemakers, which I’ve been lucky enough to do on occasion in a number of places around the world, something I’ve been struck by is that here’s someone who overlaps with the world of MTF in ways you might not expect, because while you might not think of growing and stomping on grapes for a living or serving thirsty customers in a restaurant or selling bottles in a retail outlet as having a great deal of connection with the worlds of innovation and creativity, well, au contraire. This is science meets art at its most fundamental level. The last winemaker who poured me a glass of Reserva was a microbiologist by training, a musician by calling, an entertainer by nature, and an innovator, creating new and award-winning combinations.

So I thought I would indulge one of my enthusiasms by tying it, however loosely, to the established interests of this programme. Wine is art, wine is science, wine is politics, and it can also be a platform for social justice and inclusion, and someone who knows that better than anyone is wine writer and critic, Julia Coney.

Dubber      Welcome, Julia. Thanks so much for joining us for the MTF Podcast today. Apologies for the clichéd wine music. How are you doing?

Julia           I’m good. The sun is shining out here. It’s not too cold, so I’m happy.

Dubber      And where do we find you today?

Julia           Washington, DC.

Dubber      Right, okay. So there’s been a lot going on there in the last few months. Do you care to talk a bit…

Julia           Just a little bit.

Dubber      Yeah. We hear some bits and pieces. I’m a long way away, but some of the news filters through. You’re from the world of wine. Has there been some impact on how wine is enjoyed or consumed or sold that’s come about in the last… Well, in the last couple of months, particularly?

Julia           Well, I think one of the good things that has happened is the tariffs have been lifted for the US between the US and Europe for four months while people actually sit down and talk things through on how to do a tariff, or “Is it going to take place?”, or are they going to continue to have it. I’m very excited that’s stopped. And also because there’s a lot of moving parts in wine, especially because of the way the system is set up in the United States, that a lot of people were really hurting – a lot of importers, distributors, retailers – because the price and the mark up just was so expensive, so high. So hopefully, with everything coming out, it will be okay. So that’s some good news that has come out of Washington, DC, besides the November election.

Dubber      Yeah, for sure. I know that there’s a lot of wine production that goes on in the US, but I guess probably not all of the consumption of wine is of American wines. What proportion would that be?

Julia           I will say, I think people still drink the majority of American wines in America. California is the biggest, but then after that, you have Oregon, you have Washington State, you have, in New York, the Finger Lakes. We also drink a lot of European wines as well. And it also depends on where you live because the way the system is set up, everybody can’t export their wine to certain states, so it depends… New York can get anything, I always like to say, but a lot of Europe doesn’t always make its way west. So I’m here in the DC, so we’re able to get a lot of good things.

So I just will say, people are now more curious about wine. In a way, I think the consumer is more informative. Where before, it was people just saying “You should drink this.”, I think the consumer now is like “Well, I did my own research, and I’m probably not going to drink that.”, or “I want to try something new.”. And I think with the onset of social media, we have new drinkers, which is always a good thing.

Dubber      Yeah, for sure. We should probably back up a little bit because there are probably some people listening to this going “Hang on. What have I tuned into? This is not what I was expecting.” because we focus a lot on artificial intelligence and artistic experimentation in nuclear power reactors. Suddenly, we’re talking about wine. And I want to justify it because – we were talking just before we started this interview – I see it very much as this intersection of creativity and science. There’s a real heavy science going on. Where do you come into this from?

Julia           Well, as a wine journalist, I look at wine. Wine is farming. Agriculture is science. You have to know acid, you have to know ratios, because a lot of wine happens in the vineyard but a lot happens in the lab. And I think people forget that if they’re making – what I say – wines of place, wines of character, wines that are interesting… That’s why you find a lot of engineers, chemistry majors, they become winemakers because of that intersection of science and farming and…

Also, right now, we’re using technology to talk about wine. We had to. I’ve been on more Zooms with wine in the past year than I had ever thought in my entire life. But also I think wine and artificial intelligence will happen. You have a lot of labels now that are putting AI labels so people can use their phone. Think of all the apps. We have apps to take a photo of your wine bottle. That app then uploads it. Now you have a record, and then you could rate it. You could see other people’s rating of that wine. Some of them purchase from that site. So I think technology in wine is moving faster than I think the wine world is ready for.

Dubber      Sure. Recommendation engines, particularly, I guess you’re talking about.

Julia           Well, that. Also when you go to a restaurant, there are going to be apps where you’re going to say “Okay, I’m scanning a wine list. I’m having this wine. How can I get it now?”.

Dubber      And pairings too, I suppose.

Julia           Pairings, yeah. Well, pairings are subjective because I think it goes back to everybody’s taste. What I like and you don’t like is okay. So I think pairings will look different now than… Especially with the restaurants slowly coming back. For a long time, all the somms told everybody what to drink. And then now, with social media, I go on Instagram and I talk to winemakers. I don’t tell them what to drink. And then you have to think about other… Like Clubhouse. Clubhouse has wine rooms, and everybody’s talking about drinks on Clubhouse, and whisky, beer, and all that. So technology in wine is here to stay, even though I think some wine people are a little reluctant to embrace it.

Dubber      Interesting. And of course, all of this happens with a backdrop of politics and labour and history, and there’s a big story to be told there.

Julia           So many stories. Wine, to me, tells a story. It’s economics. It’s politics. It’s also romance. It’s family. If you think about Europe, they’re really family dominant. I know stories that are “Hey. I moved here with ten thousand dollars, and I’m going to start a winery.”, and fifteen years later, they have that dream. They’ve worked hard. They worked their butts off to get there, and they have that too. So wine just tells a story of everything that goes on, in my opinion.

Dubber      Is there a distinction between the story of farming and the story of wine? Is it particularly different?

Julia           I think people don’t think of wine as farming. People think “Oh, they’re grapes that grow. Okay.”, and when they think of farming, they think of animals. But you have to have somebody watch those grapes due to climate change. Spring frost. Rains that happen. What’s going on? I look at weather now more than I ever did before I started working in wine because I didn’t want to know what’s happening. And so farming plays a place… It’s come so if you look at… There’s farming, and then there’s biodynamic farming. People who look like “It’s a moon day, so I can’t do this to the grapes.”. You have a lot of that that’s happening in biodynamic farming, and people putting crystals in the vineyard. It’s still farming, but it’s getting… It’s just very different.

Dubber      Yeah, wow. How much of superstition falls into this? Because it sounds like once you start paying attention to whether you put crystals in the ground or which direction the moon is facing, it sounds like it leaves science a little bit, do you think?

Julia           No, I don’t think it leaves. I think because it is part of science. Don’t we look at the stars? Don’t we look at the moon? Don’t we call that science? So it’s still science. It might not be a science in your wheelhouse of what we think science is, but there’s a science to it.

Dubber      Interesting. You’re billed as somebody who talks a lot, particularly as a journalist, around the intersection of wine, race, and language, and I thought that last bit was really interesting. How does language play a part in all this?

Julia           Wine is presented in the world context. It’s a heavy European-based way we do descriptors. You’re from New Zealand. Let’s describe Sauvignon blanc. What have you heard? Gooseberries, right?

Dubber      Yeah.

Julia           I have never had a gooseberry until four years ago. So if I come from another country and I don’t know what a gooseberry is, we have to change the language on how we’re talking about this wine. Grapefruit is not everywhere. Lemons are not everywhere. So we have to change the way we talk about it in the language, in the way we present this wine, to make it so someone who is from the Caribbean and they grew up with something completely different as far as flavour and pairings… How do we present wine to them? Because if I say “Oh, it has gooseberry.”, they’re going to be like “What is that?”, just like I was like “I have never had a gooseberry.” until four years ago. Everybody doesn’t have the same food, so the language has to change based on who you’re talking to and based also on how we’re, as journalists and writers and teachers, explaining wine.

Dubber      Right. And what are the stories that need to be told in journalism? Is it just reviewing wines, or is it about telling the story of individuals who are growing wine or…

Julia           Every part of the wine industry, not just the people growing wine. Vineyard managers, the viticulturers, the people who are just literally taking one grape and exploring the science of that, because we have this disconnect, almost, like it is the winemaker and then it’s the wine and then we’re reviewing those. But then, bring it back, because every bottle of wine, pretty much, you have in your hand, ten thousand hands have gone to make that one bottle. So if that many hands have touched it, the person who prunes it is not necessarily the person who selects the grapes. The person who actually presses the grape, or a machine, that’s not… It’s so many moving parts, and so it’s telling those stories and giving honour to the people that do that hard work because wine is hard work to make. Wine is not easy. I always tell people wine is not easy. That’s why I’m not a winemaker, because it’s science. I don’t like chemistry.

Dubber      Yeah. Well, I don’t like early mornings, so that’s probably why I’m not a winemaker. But it’s really interesting because there are so many dimensions to this. There is obviously the growing, but then there’s the understanding of the microbiology of it and how the alcohol is formed by the sugars. And even the communication of it. To be able to explain to somebody who visits your vineyard how it’s working, I think is… It’s a real set of skills.

Julia           And also the right time to pick, to select the grapes. That’s based on weather. That’s based on science. Is it a good time? And then what vessel we’re putting in it. Is it going to be a tank? Is it going to be concrete? Is it going to be oak? And then how much of that oak is new? How much of that has been used before? And so all those sciences go into wine, and so we have to look at those like “Okay. Well, am I going to move it from oak into steel, or steel into oak?”, and then that’s a whole other thing they have to think about. And then bottling. So much happens. Corks, right? You were in Portugal. You know Portugal makes the corks. Well, is it too much air so then the cork ruins the wine? All these things go into play.

Dubber      Actually, interesting, because I don’t often get a wine expert on Zoom. So where do you stand on the bottle caps, the non-cork plastic bottle caps? Are we in favour or…

Julia           I know they do that primarily in Australia and New Zealand, and I’ve had delicious wines from there. When you’re talking ageing potential – and when I say ageing, that’s buying a specific wine meant to be aged, because all wines aren’t meant to be aged – there’s a question on that. But I have had aged Australian wines and New Zealand wines, and they were phenomenal. And then I’ve had corked wines from a traditional bottle, and it was like “Oh, this happened.”. But wine is such a science in a bottle that that could happen whether it’s a cork or whether it’s a screwcap, so it’s something to think about. A lot of people don’t realise that. You can get a bad bottle of wine even with a screwcap. It’s a little less likely, but you can, still.

Dubber      Right. Now, I’m familiar with, obviously, Californian wines. Sonoma and Napa Valley and so on. How much of America is a wine region?

Julia           In terms of numbers… California wine is why we have wine in America. They were the pioneers to do that. But this is a fun fact: every state makes wine. Whether or not you want to drink it in the United States is a different conversation.

Dubber      Where should I avoid?

Julia           I am not a fan of muscadine grape. It’s a little sweet for me. It depends on if you like sweet or not. I personally love Oregon. I love the Finger Lakes. They’re doing some crazy, fun wine in Texas. And I mean Texas Hill Country, which I never thought I… Twenty years ago, it was like “Hmm, let’s see where this is going to go because right now, it’s not there.”, but now it is.

Dubber      Is that about the climate? Is it about the soil?

Julia           All of it.

Dubber      Is it about the culture?

Julia           No, not culture, but climate and soil because Texas Hill Country is in the middle of the state, and so you get tornadoes. Not necessarily where the gulf is where you’re getting hurricanes, but all that affects wine because if a hurricane passes… And we’ve got to think about how the wind travels. Wind travels, and things settle on grapes and settle into the vine, which means it settles into the soil. So it’s all connected.

Dubber      Interesting. Now, you’re the founder of something called Black Wine Professionals. And obviously there’s something that really needs to be unpacked there, and I guess the most important thing is the reason that it exists. What is the purpose of Black Wine Professionals?

Julia           Well, the US has a big racial history, with slavery and the Black Lives Matter movement and everything. And as a wine professional, I was often given bad looks. Horrible comments said to me about… People didn’t expect me to be the wine professional. They didn’t expect for me to be the journalist. I walked into a winery in California, and a winemaker was like “Oh, I didn’t expect you to be Black.”, and I said “I didn’t expect you to be an asshole, but here we are.”. And those kinds of comments have happened more than I actually share. And I started the Black Wine Professionals because so many times, I would be on a media trip to go to a wine region and people would go “We don’t know that many Black people to add on the trip that work in wine.”, and so I created a Listserv. So I’m like “Here you go. If you can’t find anybody… You can’t tell me that anymore because I created a list for you.”.

Dubber      And is this one of those domains that Black people have been prevented from participating in? Is the representation a problem? Is it just that it’s just not expected?

Julia           Well, not expected, representation, and I was at a… And I know the people who are listening are going to be like “Woah, this is crazy.”. I was at a Champagne Week conference of all these Champagne producers, and you had a lot of people coming from the US that came with importers or distributors, and not one person of colour. And actually, not one female. Not one woman. And I was just like “This is ridiculous. Why…”. And I was there on my own money. And I’m asking these distributors, and they were like “Well, I don’t know who else I could have brought.”. And I started listing the names of all the wine directors that were women and women of colour to him, like “You could have done…”, at really nice restaurants. But the mindset is “I don’t see these people in my purview, and so, therefore, they don’t exist.”. It’s like if you eat oatmeal every day and then all of a sudden you try a cereal, and you’re like “Oh, something different.”. So I look at it like that. If you do the same thing all the time, are around the same people all the time, then you need to explore that the world is bigger than that. So that’s why I started it.

Dubber      Sure. There’s probably all sorts of deep and complex reasons why this is the way that it is, but I wonder if there’s a causal relationship between the history of land ownership and winemaking now.

Julia           Well, the land ownership, if you look at people of colour, cannot… We don’t own the land as much, and so that’s the problem. But when it comes to the buying aspect and the selling aspect, that’s a whole… They’re two separate things. That’s why we’re trying to get, and I’m working with universities and people to… We’re getting more people into the winemaking, business of wine, viticulture. All what I call the non-sexy part of wine. The sexy part of wine is the drinking of the wine. That’s the sexy part. The non-sexy part is working in a vineyard. It’s taking a hose and cleaning the floor. That’s the non-sexy side. It’s doing the harvest. So getting people in those positions, and then also saying “Okay. They don’t have land ownership, but how do we change that?”. Because you have to remember, California, in Napa Valley, an acre of land is almost a million dollars. An acre. That’s a certain income level to be able to buy that. But it’s not as certain if you’re trying to get to become a winemaker. If you’re trying to work in the business. So it’s getting people in those positions and also looking at it like “Okay. Eventually, if you can come together, work for a place, then how can we get more land ownership?” because that’s the… Land is very expensive. God’s not making any more of it.

Dubber      Yeah. Well, there is that. In fact, if anything, there might be less of it quite soon.

We have this massive community that we’re part of that are I guess what you’d call tinkerers. Experimenters. People who build things. People who make things. Is winemaking something that you can experiment with at home?

Julia           I personally wouldn’t, but that’s me, because – I know people are going to laugh at this – I don’t like bugs. And fermenting and gnats and hoses, that’s just not my jam. But there are a lot of winemaking kits on the market where people actually can make wine in their home. I don’t know if that’s going to be a wine to sell. And I would say, if you’re making it at home, and once you go to bottle it, be mindful of how you store it because a lot of times people are like – even if you’re buying wine – “Oh, I’ll put it on top of the refrigerator. It’s in the kitchen.”. Wine should be in a really cold room in your house or a dark closet. But I will say, if people want to make it and have fun and experiment… I say that now. Who knows? In six months, I’m like “I bought a winemaking kit. Let’s see where it goes.”.

Dubber      Yeah, interesting. It’s probably not the important thing by any stretch about the Black Wine Professionals website, but one of the things I absolutely loved about it is when I went there, there was this playlist, and it’s the most celebratory collection of music. I had it on repeat all the last week. It’s been so much fun. But there is this… It’s almost like a declaration. It’s like a celebration of “Yes, we’re here.”, and I… How deliberate was that kind of selection of music to go along with this community of people?

Julia           Well, it’s funny. I don’t make the playlist. My advisor makes the playlist. I said “I want playlists that are fun, people can vibe to.”. I said “I want you to think of me dancing with a wine glass in a vineyard.”, and she went “Done.”. I said “That’s all I want.”. Because also too, wine has been so stuffy. You know this. Wine can come across a little nose in the air, it’s not for anybody, and I wanted the playlist to be fun and people to have a glass of wine and just dance around in their home, in their yard, wherever, and play that music and just jam out.

Dubber      Yeah. We’re not talking Mozart quartets or anything like that.

Julia           No, no. We like Earth, Wind & Fire. I told her “Every playlist has to have a Beyoncé song and at least one Earth, Wind & Fire and ‘90s hip-hop.”, all on a playlist and seamlessly…

Dubber      Yeah, you got me on all three of those. That’s fantastic. Now, I noticed you wrote something about a year ago about something called ‘Uncorked’ on Netflix.

Julia           Yes, Netflix.

Dubber      And it’s not something I’ve seen. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what that was and why that was important?

Julia           So it’s funny you… Saturday was the one year anniversary of the movie launching on Netflix. So it basically is loosely based on a gentleman named Dlynn Proctor who was in California when he was studying to become a Master Sommelier through the Court of Master Somms. And the movie is just a riff on his life, but it’s a relationship… It’s like a father and son relationship where someone finds… They find what they want to do, but then they’re trying to get their family on board to go with it but also to… If you love playlists, that is the best playlist. That playlist is on Spotify. It is so good.

And so I wrote this piece about ‘Uncorked’ because ‘Uncorked’ is the first movie of its kind where the majority of the cast are Black people talking about wine. The majority of wine movies have always been the stuffy old white guy. It’s been about a judgemental… “We’re judging the wine. We’re saying this.”. And here is just this guy who found his passion, who happens to be young, and it’s a fun movie to watch. Even if you don’t like wine, it’s just one of those movies… You laugh, you cry, and in the end, you’re like “Okay. I really feel good about that.”. And also it was filmed in Memphis, and it makes you want to just go and have some Memphis barbeque and some good wine too.

Dubber      Fantastic. How does somebody become somebody who knows about wine? Where do you start? What’s the journey?

Julia           I’d say drink a lot.

Dubber      Drink responsibly!

Julia           You have to taste wine. I got into wine in my late twenties, and I really then… And so I’ve had twenty years of just drinking and tasting wine. Even trying wines I wouldn’t normally try. I try everything. Do I like everything? No. But you have to… I say your tongue is a muscle, just like… You know how you go to the gym, and you keep going, and you’re like “I feel good. I’ll keep going.”? That’s the way your wine tasting is. You have to keep tasting wine.

And I always like to tell people, when you see wine for people… Like, we work, we have to spit the wine because otherwise you’ll be drunk in the middle of the day doing a tasting. Try to actually taste the wine, spit the wine, swirl the wine, then taste it again, spit it again, and see what you like, and then pair it with food that you don’t think you should. I always tell people I love Champagne and potato chips because we think of Champagne as this celebratory, “Oh, it’s the anniversary. I’ve got to have this fancy meal.”. No. I just pair it with Lay’s regular potato chips, and it works.

Dubber      Yeah, interesting.

Julia           That’s how you learn. That’s the science of part of it. That’s the geeky part, is understanding every wine is not going to go with every potato chip.

Dubber      Yeah. It’s experimentation.

Julia           It’s experimentation.

Dubber      Do you write down your results? Do you have a journal where you’re…

Julia           I have a journal, and I’m slowly getting someone to transfer those journals into words. The pairing is so different because the reason why I say… If I have a Blanc de Blanc Champagne – that’s a Chardonnay-based Champagne – I can’t have Ruffles potato chips. Now, those potato chips may be different in where everyone’s listening, but Ruffles doesn’t have the same salt content as the Lay’s. So I’m matching the salt of the chip to match the saltiness of the wine, and so that’s my pairing. Ruffles, I’ll do a Blanc de Noirs – which is Pinot Noir and Chardonnay – because it’s a little softer, and it’ll balance the chip. So that’s my crazy notes.

Dubber      The ritual of wine drinking is interesting as well. You talked about swirling and the spitting and…

Julia           It’s so pretentious. Think about it. I always swirl the glass, and you smell it, and then you see people… It’s fun. That’s a part of it.

Dubber      Does the shape of the glass matter as much as it seems to?

Julia           Yes. The glass matters. Yes, they do because if you’re drinking a white wine in a red wine glass, it’s getting too much air. So literally the shape and the size does matter. And also, too, everybody likes the stemless. Well, what happens is, if you have a cold white wine, you’re warming up the wine faster, and if you have a red wine, you’re actually making it warmer and warmer. And also, too, if people are listening, your red wine also needs to have a little chill on it when you start drinking it. I know people are shocked about that. They’re usually like “It should be room temperature!”. No. It shouldn’t. It should be at least seventy to seventy-two degrees. It needs to have a chill on it. And you want the stem so you don’t warm up the wine. So that’s why glasses matter.

Dubber      So you hold the stem. You don’t hold the bowl.

Julia           You hold the stem, not the bowl.

Dubber      Right. What’s your background that led you to this? I know you said you started drinking wine at twenty. What sort of kid were you that led you to being this kind of person?

Julia           So first of all, I come from a family that doesn’t drink. My family doesn’t drink. So I used to work for law firms. I used to be a legal assistant. And one of the attorneys that I worked for had just come back from California in the late ‘90s, and I was like “Your stuff is in the way. I can’t get to my desk. All these wine bottles.”, and he was like “Didn’t you study abroad in France?”, and I was like “Yes.”. He’s like “Didn’t you drink wine?”. I’m like “Yes. Everyone drinks wine in France. It’s cheaper to drink wine than to have a soda, so, yes, I drank wine.”. But he had a barbeque at his house, and he paired these amazing California wines with ribs, brisket, chicken, and that was the first time… And he just made me understand food and wine pairings and why food and wine go together. And so I explored that in my twenties. Never thought I would be talking about wine.

Eventually moved from Houston to DC, and I started a beauty blog, and I used to be a beauty writer. So I transitioned that blog after ten years, and I decided that I wanted to be a wine journalist. I wanted my third act to be wine, and so I took some formal classes. And I took the formal classes not because I didn’t know about wine, but I just wanted a little structure on the regions, a little more history than I was doing on my own. And so that’s when I set out to just transition… And also beauty and wine go hand in hand. A lot of people don’t think that. And when I say that, I mean science of beauty. The science of fragrance and matching and oils and structure and alcohol. All that is the same as wine. It all goes back to science.

Dubber      Sure. So to go back to the childhood thing… And you’re from a non-drinking family, but you went to study in France. What happened that led to that? When you look back, do you see an obvious journey, or have you just been pinballing around completely different domains?

Julia           I’ve never been asked that question. So for me, looking back, I had a very early obsession with France because I was a James Baldwin fan. I started reading James Baldwin in middle school, and my parents were like “You don’t want…”, and I was like “Oh, I want to take French.”, and they were like “Okay. Well, you have to go to a school where we can have a French class.”. And so I started taking French in the seventh grade, and so I took it all through high school, all through college. And I knew I wanted to study abroad, and I have a degree in English literature, so where do you go? It’s Sartre and all of these writers, and you go to France, and I studied abroad. And I look at it now like, yes, all that led to this, but I didn’t know that at the time because, in my mind, I was going to school to be a lawyer. And then when I worked for lawyers, I realised “I like working for them. I don’t want to be one.”.

Dubber      Sure. I can understand that impulse.

Julia           Yeah. And then when I started blogging, I knew I needed to do that, that that was the calling and figuring all that out. So it’s like pinballing, like [pinball ricochet noises].

Dubber      But with a coherent narrative about it. You’d think of somebody who reads James Baldwin and studies in France as somebody who is very sophisticated and learned, and with a wine glass in one hand and writing and thinking, and the romantic ideal of the wine drinker.

Julia           And I saw it in France. You see it. And then when I started really travelling… And travelling opens your eyes. I’ll tell anyone this. There’s something about travel… You have to be uncomfortable because you don’t know the language. You don’t know what’s going on. The subway system’s different, the taxi drivers. Everything’s moving. And so in my late twenties, I just really travelled so much. I would go to wine regions on vacation. Some people were just like “Oh, where are you going?”. “I’m going to France. I’m going to Italy. I’m just going…”. I would go “Oh, I’m going to see the Colosseum, and I’m going to drink wine.”, and that’s how it became those two vacations, for me, were always together with that.

Dubber      Interesting. The Champagne thing you mentioned earlier is interesting to me because that has this territorialism, this idea of borders, because Champagne can only come from that one place. And so there are other sparkling wines from different places around the world, but there is a really interesting… I guess you’d call it a power dimension, a political dimension, about ownership over a particular method of… Is that something that expands outwards across other types of grapes or other types of wines?

Julia           Well, yeah. You’ve got Champagne. You have Prosecco. Prosecco can only come from a certain region. Everybody can make Chardonnay, but you can’t put… You can’t make Napa Valley Chardonnay and put it on a label. The territorial thing is the history of Champagne. And it’s so French. If it was any other place, it wouldn’t be, but it’s so French to say “No, you can’t make this.”. But it also goes back to the other regions. You have Burgundy. You have Bordeaux. Those are all… And I look at it like “They want to protect their name. They want to protect their grapes. They want to protect their association.”. Every wine region does it. My whole thing that I tell people, that doesn’t make it better than something else, because – like you said – I love sparkling wine. I drink a lot of sparkling wine. That is my go-to all the time. And I tell people, there are some sparkling wines that taste better than some Champagnes because you can have someone make Champagne, it doesn’t mean it’s good. It just means it’s Champagne.

Dubber      Right. So if somebody puts your name or your face on a bottle of wine, it’s going to be a sparkling…

Julia           Oh, yeah. Oh, it’s going to be sparkling. If my name is ever attached to anything, it’s going to be a sparkling wine.

Dubber      Yeah, fantastic. Julia, it’s been so interesting talking to you. I really appreciate it. What should people do next? Having listened to this, having heard about wine, what do you recommend that they go out and do? Assume that everybody’s had wine. They’ve tried wine. They’ve got some and that. Is there something that they should explore or something they should read or something they should watch that will take people to the next level of that journey?

Julia           I want everybody listening to go to a country that you would normally not buy wine and buy a wine from there. So Slovenia, Georgia, Hungary. Go to a place that you would normally not gravitate to as a wine place and buy that wine. Step out of your comfort zone. And guess what? I have to do that as well because I have… My comfort zone is sparkling. I’m always going to go for sparkling, and I may go for a California red. But then I force myself to say “Hey. Try this Hungarian wine. Try this ferment that you’re not used to having.”, and just an exploration to get me out of the rut of drinking the same thing.

Dubber      Interesting. Thank you so much. It’s been really, really fascinating. Really appreciate it.

Julia           Thank you. And wine is science. You have to remember that. Wine is science.

Dubber That’s wine writer, Julia Coney, and that’s the MTF Podcast. Julia is @JuliaConey on Twitter and www.juliaconey.com on the web. MTF Labs, much the same. @mtflabs on Twitter and www.mtflabs.net online. Thanks very much to Jen, Mars, Sergio, and the team, to airtone and Ziv Moran for the music today, as well as Run Dreamer for the MTF audio logo. And unless you’re – I don’t know – having breakfast right now or driving somewhere, go and grab yourself a glass of something nice if you haven’t already. Press whatever button you need in order to share, like, rate, review, follow, subscribe, or recommend, and you have yourself a great evening. We’ll talk soon. Cheers.

Transcript

Dubber      Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. So this is one of those episodes where introducing the guest might end up taking longer than the podcast interview itself, if I’m not careful, because Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stepanian does an awful lot of different things that all require some explaining but could, in short, be broadly categorised as the creation of experiences.

She’s a filmmaker, artist, designer, founder and namesake of one of the world’s top design studios, founder of an underground university, of an international space orchestra that’s worked with Prodigy, The Avalanches, and Sigur Rós. She works with NASA, the European Space Agency, Singularity University, Mattel, LEGO, Airbnb, Google, The Guardian, the SETI Institute, the BBC, Red Bull, WeTransfer, XL Recordings, MoMA, Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Museum of China… You get the idea. She has, she reckons, thirteen jobs, more or less – probably more – and at one point was so in demand for public speaking engagements around the world, she employed doppelgängers, look-alikes who she trained to mimic her mannerisms and delivery style so she could literally be in multiple places at once.

Dubber      Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stepanian, welcome to the MTF Podcast. It’s nice to see you again. How are you doing?

Nelly          Yes. It’s so nice to see you, Andrew. Hello listeners.

Dubber      It’s great to have you on. You do pretty much everything, and I feel like I’m just going to say “Tell me about this project. Tell me about that project. Tell me about this project.” because there are so many things that you do that are so much of interest to the people who listen to a podcast like this. So you’re more or less an experienced designer, but that doesn’t even begin to cover it. How do you describe what you do?

Nelly          Well, actually, I don’t describe myself as an experienced designer but as a designer of experiences, which basically means that, suddenly, when you start to speak about experiences, then you allow yourself to look at multiple different fields because if you want to make a meaningful experience for members of the public, then you need to know a bit about music, know a bit about architecture, know a bit about design, know a bit about academia, film. Basically all of the different realms of things. So if you want to say what I’m doing, I design experiences for members of the public to experience a rocket lift-off in their living room while dark energy is being produced in the kitchen sink, sonic booms are erupting in your bathtub, and then, as if it wasn’t enough, you have a volcano that is literally right there in front of you while someone is… I don’t know. Your auntie is experiencing stage one, two, and three of the rocket lift-off, the Soyuz rocket. That’s what I do.

Dubber      Okay. So I have to ask the question, why do you do this?

Nelly          Why do I do this? I do this because I feel like there is a part of our realities or part of science as we know it or part of the mystery of our world that a lot of us don’t have access to because we don’t have the right degree. If I’m too small, too fat, if I don’t have the right PhD, the chances that you’re going to make it to become an astronaut are really small. I found this so unfair. There is 250 astronauts up there. Why is it that you or I cannot go up there? Why is it that we cannot experience a bit of the magic of going in outer space?

So in order to give you that kind of magic experience or to give you access to that sublime that is a part of our world then I have to design a meaningful experience. I need to actually find a way to give you it as close as it can be experienced. So I’m not lying to you, and I’m giving you that as close as it can be experienced, but it’s not exactly like being an astronaut. But it’s working with an astronaut to actually give you the experience of a rocket lift-off in your living room. So that’s exactly my process when I work, Andrew. So I will develop this plural-disciplinary team that allows me to actually make an experience for members of the public that is as close as it can be to the reality.

And then I started to work in nightclubs, very much so, because I love nightclub and nightlife audiences because they’re the most difficult. The most critical, in fact. They will criticise everything that doesn’t belong in the realm of entertainment and education, because they want to be educated, as well, as they have a good time.

Dubber      Nightclub audiences want to be educated? Is that why they go to nightclubs?

Nelly          Well, I think when you go in a nightclub, you want to have fun, but you also want to learn something, whether it’s learning something on the dance floor with a new move or whether it is about learning about love and having your first sex experience in the toilet. I don’t know what that might be. But what I’m saying is, when you go…

The nightlife audience is the most difficult to please because there is so much out there. It’s such a brilliant innovative scene. I’m sure your listeners might know all of this, but I think a lot of policymakers and people from politics don’t understand that nightlife is really where it’s at when it comes to innovation, when it comes to new materials, when it comes to new techniques, sound system, experiential. Every single bit of innovation really happens inside this specific time of the day.

Dubber      Sure. And there’s a lot competing for attention when you’re in a nightclub, so you have to make an impact.

Nelly          Absolutely, yes. And you better not lie to a member of the audience, as well, during a nightlife experience. So if you tell them they’re going to experience something like a rocket lift-off then you need to bring them the astronaut, live, as part of the experience.

Dubber      Yeah. And you’re not just talking about astronauts. You’re bringing in NASA, and you’re working with actual people who do go into space.

Nelly          That’s correct, yes. That’s coming back to the fact that when I design a meaningful experience, it has to… The meaning comes from bringing this plural-disciplinary expert because, let’s face it, I am not an astronaut. I don’t know what it feels like to be inside the Soyuz rocket, which is a Russian rocket. It’s a very specific type of rocket. I don’t know the detail of the techniques and so forth, so I need to surround myself with the people that can provide this. Or when I tell you you’re going to make dark energy – which is five percent of the universe out there. We don’t know what sort of energy can allow the universe to be in permanent expansion. This dark energy – if I said to you “You’re going to produce it when you’re eating your pancakes.” or “You’re going to produce a bit of the unknown while you’re making your pancakes.”, who am I to actually produce dark energy? What does that even mean? I need to bring the best physicist in the world around me to design this thing so that you can then make your pancake face-to-face with the unknown. And that means finding myself in places where there is Nobel Prize for physics or at the Super-Kamiokande in Japan or the Large Hadron Collider, which is a place where they bombard protons at the speed of light to recreate the first second of the Big Bang. But all of us members of the public, often we don’t even know these things exist. We don’t even know that there is sixty worldwide scientists down below, a hundred meters underground, colliding protons at the speed of light. Think about it. The speed of light. Faster than the speed of light. So it’s all about giving you that experience.

So that’s one side of the story, Andrew. The other side of the story is also, for me, there is something extremely frustrating about systems. Politics, economics, sociology. Everything that comes within the mainstream or comes within the status quo of what you should do or what you should be or what is the right thing to do or not the right thing to do, and how politics or top-down approach or hierarchies or… All of these kinds of systems, for me, they are there to be challenged. And so, more and more so, my work is actually about developing collaboration within institutions, whether they are military institutions, whether they are policy-making institutions like the United Nations, NASA, you mention, but many others, and actually find ways and means by which I can design an experience, an event that is going to bring in critical thinking to that specific audience so that they don’t produce space the same way or so that they don’t do the work they’re doing the same way, or so that they start to think about borders differently or that we can start developing new visions for what the future of humanity might be.

Dubber      Not everyone can just dial up a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist or the United Nations or the military or a group of astronauts just to invite them onto a project. How did you go about setting up so that you were in such a position to be able to do something like that?

Nelly          To be really frank with you, I never got myself set up for anything, and I think that’s the beauty of it. So my mum is Armenian. My dad was born in Nigeria. They both coming from a family of immigrants that either survived… Have gone through the ill of colonisation or have experienced Armenian Genocide. And so when they arrived with absolutely nothing in France, they had to build it all from scratch. The more I think about it, the more I think I get my perseverance because it’s what it’s about, at the end of the day. It’s about perseverance.

I think most of us, our ultimate way of dealing with things is if someone tells us no or if an institution tells you that you cannot do this thing, then you’re going to be like “Okay. Well, if it’s no, it’s no.”, and then you’re going to move to the next thing. For me and for my family in general, it’s never been a situation that we could just say “Oh, yeah. Okay. Fine. Yes, okay, there is absolutely no Armenians in politics because Armenians are immigrants, and they don’t really belong to politics, or they don’t have the authority to be in politics.”. But for my grandad, for example, it wasn’t like that. He started in textile like most of the Armenians when they arrived in France, and then he thought “You know what? I’m going to get in politics.”. And then he became a maire adjoint to… And then he started to go in politics and started to… Actually got the Armenian Genocide recognised in France. And it’s like he came out of nowhere land. And I think this is something that I learned from him but I learnt as well from all the family in general, is you just have to persevere.

And I wasn’t set up to meet with Nobel Prize for physics. I’m not set up to meet with any astronauts, but one thing that I think is very important to me is that I don’t give up. So it’s not about stopping with one astronaut. There is 250 astronauts, so you just have to email 250 astronauts until you have one of them that’s a yes. It’s statistics, at the end. It’s mathematics. The more you seed all over the world, the more there is chances that you’re going to get an answer.

So that, I pushed to the gimmick aspect or to the… I will say the satire aspect, to some level, because I started to work for many different companies. I have more than thirteen different jobs, as you mentioned, whether it is working at WeTransfer… WeTransfer, sharing files all around the world. I hope all of your listeners are sharing files on WeTransfer, the best company in the world. But since 2012, I’ve been working at WeTransfer, and so I will either email through my WeTransfer email or I email through my United Nations email or I email through my SETI – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – email or I email through… I have about thirteen different jobs, thirteen different emails, and then I go at it on every single email, every single border.

And it’s the same with the agency, with NASA. When I started going there… I never went to the USA. I had no idea. I was twenty-three. I’d just graduated. My English wasn’t even good. But between that time and the moment where I turn up uninvited at NASA Ames Research Centre, I emailed for seven years, consequently, every single person inside this agency because it’s a public-funded agency, so all the emails are online, so you can go and start finding and understanding the organigram or the politics of that institution online and actually start to email every single person in every single department. So by the time you turn up uninvited and you say “I’m the director of The International Space Orchestra.”, which is an orchestra I then got to set up, then the door is open because they’re like “Oh, this is the crazy French woman that’s been emailing every single department.”.

Dubber      Tell me about the Space Orchestra because that’s absolutely interesting.

Nelly          So The International Space Orchestra was set up in 2012, and since then it’s still going. It’s a team of NASA scientists, but it’s also Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute scientists – basically, space scientists – and together, they are performing music. But they’re not performing just whatever random music. They are either re-enacting the drama of being a mission controller at this point in time or they are re-enacting everything to do with failures, everything that goes wrong in Mission Control. They are actually sharing, I would say, the humanities behind any form of impossible mission like sending anything into outer space.

And so since 2012, we’ve been performing with many different artists, whether it is The Prodigy, The Avalanches, Sigur Rós. They’ve been doing Hollywood Bowl, 17,500 people, sold-out show. So they are like NASA scientists become rock star. But they sound pretty bad, and I think this is the beauty of it.

We made a movie about it, about the entire process of doing it. And initially, they all sung horrible, but I think it’s a lot… After two months of intense training, they sound absolutely harmonious, and I think it’s a statement as to how this agency, NASA, functions, where when someone in a team or in Mission Control doesn’t perform well, you don’t just let them down there. You actually all, as a group, lift that person to actually achieve their goal or the mission or… And I think that is very visible from that documentary where you see the full story of The International Space Orchestra, but I think it’s also a statement to them, as in how they organise as an agency and as people in general to actually support each other in achieving something together.

And every single time, for me, every single year, it’s… We had our five-year anniversary barbeque at NASA, with sausages, performing during the total eclipse. But every time I watch them and every time there is a performance taking place, whether it is at Savages or when I get them to sing in Russian or in Icelandic… They’ve sung in every single language that is on this planet, pretty much, and every time I come up with the most insane challenge just to see if they can do it. And it’s always a statement to their endurance but also to their incredible beings that they actually always manage it toward the end, and that’s… But it never starts smoothly. And also, I’m lucky because I’m working with Evan Price, who is the musical director of The International Space Orchestra, and he’s a master of the story. Me, I’m the one shouting and [clapping] getting them in action, as you can hear. But Evan Price is very much the reason why they sound good.

Dubber      And in a way, you’ve turned a bunch of scientists into artists, which leads to another film that you’ve made which posits the idea that everyone is an artist. Are you, in fact, a monster?

Nelly          I don’t know if I say that everyone is an artist in ‘I am (not) a monster’. ‘I am (not) a monster’ is about the origins of knowledge. So it’s about trying to understand where knowledge comes from and what does it mean to think at this point in time, in this story where we had Trump at the time, where we have Putin, where we have many totalitarianism regimes around the planet, and where obviously there is a resurgence for the far-right all over the world, with popularism being the norm.

So this film is trying to unravel that and trying to understand from the perspective of a philosopher called Hannah Arendt, who is a political theorist that died in 1975 and survived the Second World War, and she survived, obviously, Hitler, and she survived Nazism. And so she wrote ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, and she tried to actually depict “What is a totalitarianism regime, and what does it mean in terms of critical thinking?”, and how as a society we’ve managed to actually stop members of the public from thinking so they can get indoctrinated into someone’s ideology.

So this film is actually trying to understand, at this point in time, why we are seeing the resurgence of such doctrines or such ideology. And because I was completely baffled by it, I thought I needed to actually take her writing into action and actually go all around the world to interview every single thinker or makers that I knew and actually ask them “What does it mean to think at this point in time in history?”.

So I’m not saying that everybody is an artist, but what I’m saying is that we are all capable of thinking, and what stops us or what could potentially stop us from thinking is systems and the way we have developed systems for ourselves and bureaucracy for ourselves. So basically, what I’m saying is we need to actually go and enter these institutions and actually completely reshuffle bureaucracy and the way we develop things. But not only that. The film is also saying that there is no such thing as nation states, and everything to do with borders or everything to do with ideology in general is just going to perpetuate history again and again and again until we break that altogether.

Dubber      Fantastic. Tell me about University of the Underground.

Nelly          University of the Underground. Well, look, I don’t know when your podcast is going live, but I will say to all of your listeners that we have, currently, a programme that is coming to an end which is a New Politics and Afrofuturism programme which was made and led by the political activist and former Lord Mayor, Magid Magid. And Magid has been running this programme which is really calling for black radical imagination in institutions and beyond.

But, having said that, the University of the Underground is a charity. We are free. We are pluralistic. We are cross-national, so we exist beyond borders. And plurality is really one of the core tenets of the University of the Underground in that we believe that we need to start bringing every single mindset around the table. We need to bring people that we agree with. We need to bring people that we don’t agree with. We need to go beyond this very bipolar way of thinking that is currently very much the norm in universities and in education and in the public opinion.

So we’re quite controversial for that reason because we will invite, for example, the co-founder of Tea Party, who is obviously a very populist party and I think it would be fair to say racist party as well, together with the leader of Occupy Wall Street and the leader of Black Lives Matter. We will invite all of these people on the same table to actually speak about their vision as to “What is nation states?”. So that, to me, is very important to the freedom of thinking, and so that’s the way that we also teach.

And we teach the students how to actually go into an institution, work with an institution, and try to modify them from within through events. So they design events, they learn how to make an experience happen, and then they bring that world of the experience – music, film, design, politics, and so forth – into the institution to actually challenge them from within, so build their own jobs doing all of that, write their own storyline as part of this institution, and actually pitch themselves in it.

Dubber      It’s interesting that in trying to give as broad a representation as possible, you give a platform to people that ordinarily wouldn’t get a platform in something that is professing to be diverse and inclusive and so on. How do you… Justify is the wrong word. How do you explain, for instance, bringing on somebody that you identify as racist into an environment like that and give them a platform to state views that you might not necessarily agree with?

Nelly          Well, I think you have to remember that when Hannah Arendt – who is this political theorist that I mentioned – when she wrote ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’… She survived Nazism. She survived Hitler and his ideology. But when she wrote ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, she went to read ‘Mein Kampf’. She had to go and read the thing. And throughout the entire book, she is making reference to the view from Hitler to actually build up an argumentation and actually explain why this is materially hell and why is there that this lead to the totalitarianism regimes.

So in order to break down systems and in order to bring down ideology the way that we know them, you need to actually unravel the things that make it happen in the first place. I think it’s so wrong to just say “Oh, that’s wrong.” and actually not look at the reason why it’s wrong and how this got to be there, because if this got to be there, it’s probably because there is a system there that allows for this to happen. So, therefore, in order to change it and in order to actually build change for good and rethink politics the way you know them then you need to be able to actually unravel what is wrong about the totalitarianism regimes or racism. You need to understand why systemic racism exists in order to break it apart.

Of course, one view – which is a utopic view which I wish would be the truth – is to say that racism never existed. But the reality is, right now, there is racism, there is systemic racism, and I think in order for us to fight it and in order for us to make it that it’s not part of our future history then you need to be able to acknowledge it and you need to be able to actually know who are the main leader that actually bring in that sort of ideology to members of the public. And once you have identified that, then you can start going into it, them, and their systems and actually break them apart. That’s the way we teach at the University of the Underground. That’s the way we function.

I think it’s very important, as well, to me to say that I’m not giving them and I’m not giving racists a platform to speak at all. For me, education is about… And that’s where I speak about plurality, because plurality is at the core of the thinking. In order to not maintain totalitarianism, in order to not maintain ideology, you need to allow for plurality to take place. Whenever there is one idea that rules it all… So whenever you, Andrew, define the rule or I, Nelly, define the rule on my own, there is a problem. So we should always have places where all of these ideas can be discussed. And they can be extremely uncomfortable, and I’m not saying racism is right, obviously, but I’m saying we need to actually find it and take it apart before there is a replication of what is basically happening right now in other territories like the moon, for example.

Dubber      Well, I guess these people who are invited know that they’re being invited to be taken apart.

Nelly          Well, if you come to take part in a panel discussion at the University of the Underground, by definition you already know – given the people there are on the board – that it’s going to be a challenging conversation. Yes, for sure.

Dubber      And you’re probably not going to convince anybody of anything while you’re there.

Nelly          Well, as in getting them some new followers, for sure not.

Dubber      It makes me wonder what the incentive is to turn up.

Nelly          The way we do things is there is always a panel, so it’s not just them being on their own to talk about…

Dubber      No, no. For sure. But I do wonder why they agree to come along and join the panel.

Nelly          Well, it’s a very good question. I think that’s a question to ask them, right?

Dubber      Yeah, I guess. Maybe there’s some sort of psychology in there that I’m not familiar with. But, yeah, it’s interesting.

But the University of the Underground, is it a place? Is it distributed? How do people go to it? How do they enrol? And what do they get when they’ve completed?

Nelly          Well, okay, so the University of the Underground is basically based in the basement of nightclubs. So you have, in Amsterdam and in London… So we are based under one of the oldest, actually, nightclubs in Europe called De Marktkantine, and then the other nightclub where we are based is called the Village Underground in London.

But we are currently online, and I think – like many universities – we had to make that shift happen because of the current situation, which, in a way, has been really interesting to us because one of the other tenets of the University of the Underground is to be transnational. So to actually see beyond borders.

So when you think about knowledge and when you think about knowledge beyond borders, so beyond the systems of nation states and the way that this political format ruling all governments and defines the agenda for education and so forth, if you start to develop a platform that is meant to exist beyond that, then, actually, the internet is a really interesting place to be because… But then, of course, you could argue that the internet is also having their own borders in the sense that we all know that the internet is far from being a free space, so there is quite a lot to be unpacked there. I don’t know if you want me to go in great detail about freedom of information, data, and all of that, but…

Dubber      I think that’s one of many topics that we could spend an awful lot of time on if we gave it the…

Nelly          But you see, this is the thing, Andrew, that is fascinating about university in general or knowledge in general, is there is no such thing as a simple answer. There is not a yes or no. There is a plurality of views, and there is nuances all over it. So ultimately, yes, we do have zero-tolerance against racism and everything that is extremely problematic about our societies, but we will invite people that have really controversial views that you could say are racist, even though they have not been taken to court for their belief systems, obviously. But one thing I’d say to you is, for me, it is important to have these conversations. That’s what is fascinating about that, about knowledge.

Dubber      Yeah, of course. And there is clearly a political dimension to what you do. Is it to a political objective? Are you trying to achieve something politically with all of these projects that you do? Is it collaboratively to achieve an end?

Nelly          Yes, definitely. The University of the Underground is obviously supporting students to define their own political agenda in their work and actually to bring it to life. So it’s about empowering others and counter-culture to actually exist within the realm of the institutions and actually modify them from within and rethink, completely, systems. So that’s one thing.

But then on a personal level, for the past ten years, I’ve been working in the space industry. I’m the vice-chair of the Cultural Peaceful Use of Outer Space Committee at the International Astronautical Federation. I’m doing a lot of things to do with actual decision making in terms of… Or I’m being involved with a lot of, I will say, platforms that actually will decide in the next two/three years what the moon might look like in terms of human settlements and so forth. So for me, there is definitely a political agenda that is one that I might not be able to see but the next generation will definitely see, which is the next generation of humans going into outer space and having this new cohort over there. And it’s an opportunity… At least space is an opportunity for me to engage members of the public with the urgency, as well, of rethinking completely what we could do but also acknowledging what we have done here on Planet Earth, and I think that kind of connection between Planet Earth and space is not often made.

But, ultimately, the people that are currently leading the next endeavour in space are the same people that are currently leading all across the board with technology or in politics across the planet, and these are… Sorry to… But white, heterosexual men, and for most I would say well educated as well. So there is an opportunity for us to start saying “Okay, well…”. I’m not against, obviously, white, heterosexual men, but what I’m saying is it’s a point in time where we realise that there is obviously a lack of diversity or plurality in all of the leadership, so, therefore, that is very much clear as well from the visions that are being brought to life as to the future of humanity in space and beyond. And that’s the real problem because, ultimately, we’ve not even figured out how to deal with colonisation, and post-colonisation is not even something that is being acknowledged, and it’s just… This world of decolonisation is only starting to be put into action, and, right now, it’s mainly a political word that is being used, but it’s not actually being used in action.

I will say that in a lot of community… And I work from the community. I do both works. I work in communities, but I also work on decision making and in politics. So ultimately, I have these two hats. And I can tell you that in the community, we are in a really good place where these shifts are starting to take place. But, obviously, on the top level, it’s still to be seen in terms of changes and there being a different voice. I’m working really hard on trying to bring the first drag queen or transgender or… The first person that does not fit the norm as per what a space scientist or a space decision-maker or policymaker looks like into the table, and it’s still to be seen when that’s going to happen.

Dubber      Well, speaking of political action, there’s none more visible on the world stage as Pussy Riot. Everybody knows who that is, but you work closely. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what that relationship is?

Nelly          With Nadya of Pussy Riot? Yes. Look, so Nadya is one of our board members of the University of the Underground. Her and I met in a conference, actually, and she was in a room surrounded by heterosexual white male politicians that basically were discussing with her about the future of politics in Netherlands, and she was stuck there, and they were throwing at her a lot of statements and not letting her talk. And this is where we met because I just happened to go and look for a bit of water backstage in that conference place, and this is where the meetup happens. And I was dressed up at the time with a big bomber jacket, black bomber jacket, and I think people thought that I was the security of Nadya of Pussy Riot, so that meant that I actually… We left that room, and I was like “I’m sorry, but…”, and then she came with me, basically. And then I took her to the University of the Underground. This is where she met the students. She started a jam session with the students because the students, they also do music and a lot of different things. And so that’s how I will say our friendship started.

So that was about three years ago/four years ago. And then through the years, I think we’ve met in different opportunities and through different projects, and then everything she does, I try to support the best I can. I think she’s a very special and unique human that deserves to be protected, loved, and her work is absolutely most urgent and most important. And I think if any of your listeners are aware… Like right now, as well, one of the co-founders of Pussy Riot, Masha, is currently under house arrest in Russia, and so we do a lot… We’ve done some events at the University of the Underground to try and share the message about that and also Navalny arrest. Navalny, who is also one political activist there in Russia, where obviously the regime there is what I would call a totalitarianism regime as per the words of Hannah Arendt.

And so, for me, there is a duty to support people like Nadya and others for the work they’re doing to fight against totalitarianism regime and ideology. And I think she’s doing it in a very unique manner. She’s using music. She’s using the popular culture to try and share a very complex message. And, in a way, she managed to annoy Putin pretty heavily, which is why she actually got put in jail for two years. So I have a lot, a lot of respect for her and for people like her.

Rose McGowan is also someone that I extremely respect and love dearly who is also on the board of the University of the Underground, and she’s one of the person that was a part of the Me Too movement. She’s the person that break down Harvey Weinstein. The reason why Hollywood is slowly, slowly changing. Many of these people, I think they’re just… They’re really courageous.

Dubber      I love that you were mistaken for her security, for Nadya’s security, because I was listening to your Worldwide FM show, and one of the things that you said was that you are a designer of experiences and a boxer, and I can absolutely picture it. And it makes me wonder, what sort of kid were you?

Nelly          Just like that.

Dubber      Were you a scrapper?

Nelly          As a kid, I think I wanted to do every single job. Sometime when you’re a kid, you say “I want to be a vet. I want to be…”, whatever. In my case, I wanted to do everything. I wanted to be a librarian, doing library. You know, the beep beep. When you beep beep when you go and take the library. I wanted to work in a shopping mall. I wanted to put tiles on the floor. I wanted to paint and be a painter. I wanted to do all of these things, and actually, I realise that I have been true to my younger self to this point because I actually have given her what she wanted to do, pretty much. It’s like if everything was written straight from age three, I knew I wanted to do all of these things, and that happened.

But, yeah, boxing is a big part of my life at least now, and I think, again, because I think it’s… Everything about boxing I find fascinating. The way that it is a choreography on the ring, the dance elements, the… If you’re talking about thinking in action, I think there is actually a lot of thinking involved with boxing. Some people might not know that, but it is. You need to make points in order to win, so use your jab, move around, try and assess how your opponent is and might be in the ring. And it’s also reconnecting with something that is very human, like fighting. As far as I’m aware, from day one we’ve been fighting for survival, for… So it’s allowing me, at least, to reconnect with that much more I will say animal side of myself.

But at the same time, also, I think it’s for the work I’m doing. You have to understand that because of the different jobs, the pressure level I can go through at some point in time can be extremely intense. Yeah, maybe we can say entertainment is not… But when you entertain someone or when you do a show with seventeen thousand people or whatever, health and safety, contracts, the stakeholders, the financial aspect of that… Even when you do a movie. The number of people, the teams, the responsibility you have. And with your students too. It’s sometimes really overwhelming, and boxing has been, for me, as well, a way to release that pressure too.

Lots is happening in this sport beyond that, whether it’s also trying to… We did a project with the University of the Underground where the students worked with Gleason's Gym, which used to be Muhammad Ali’s gym. It’s one of the oldest gyms of the USA, and it’s based in New York. Gleason’s. And we were looking at sports and how sport can build new politics. So we were actually trying to figure out if there could be a new sport that could be developed within the United Nations to actually get diplomats to start thinking about political borders differently. And that, to me, is really interesting, is when these disciplines like sports and others – music and so on – leak into other disciplines where you don’t expect them to be. So “What if the rules of music start to define the way that politics are taking place?”. Then you start to develop innovative formats and new formats, and that’s what I found fascinating and I’m excited about.

Dubber      And speaking of things that you’re excited about, I was going to say “What’s next?”, but we know what’s next. You’ve got a film coming out.

Nelly          Yes!

Dubber      In 2022.

Nelly          It’s called ‘Red Moon’, which is probably going to lift off or be coming to life at the same time as the first woman is going to make it to the moon to start the next human settlement. The Artemis mission, which is the NASA mission to launch this woman in outer space. So this film, ‘Red Moon’, is actually saying… And that’s part of also what I was saying to you, like being a part of the Astronautical Federation and realising that there is a whole side of history that is completely not acknowledged. And I don’t know if it’s to do with the fact that people ignore it on purpose or whether it is to do with the fact that the people that survived or have experienced colonisation or the ill of wars and so forth are just not being represented in this field and in these places where the field of space is being defined.

So for this film, ‘Red Moon’, what I’m doing is, basically, I’m reconnecting with some of my family heritage in Nigeria and in Armenia, and I cast two doppelgänger family of my family in France, and they really look alike. We all look like each other, so it’s quite confusing. It’s a documentary, so it’s not fiction. We all look like each other. Obviously, we are not the same people. And we are all tasked with trying to define the next human settlement on the moon. And one of the hypotheses of this documentary, which of course will reveal itself to be true or not, is that people that have experienced colonisation or people that have experienced genocide or wars, like in Armenia, will ultimately come up with a different vision as to what the next space or next realm of humanity in space might look like. And so that’s what ‘Red Moon’ is, in itself. That’s basically this experience that these three families are going to go through and we’re going through together. And it’s also about writing, as well, at the end of that, a paper that we will be presenting to scientists with the hope that, of course, history will not repeat itself.

Dubber      Sure. Because when you hear people talk about going to the moon or going to Mars or whatever, the language of colonisation is a really big part of that. And colonisation doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing to everybody who’s in the conversation, so I guess that it carries with it effects if you say “We’re going to go and colonise Mars.”. The colonised are going to bring something different to that story.

Nelly          You are absolutely right that I think at this point in time and also for the past few years, colonisation has been used again and again and again specifically in terms of the next space plan. And the one thing I’d say to you is that this word is being less and less used because of the connotation and because now the public opinion is saying “Colonisation, don’t use that word. You will be slammed as an institution if you do that.”. But the reality is it’s still happening. Even if you don’t call it colonisation, the visions that are being proposed as being the mainstream as to what we’re going to do in outer space are to do with colonisation. Even if you don’t use that word, the plan is to go on the moon to mine it for its resources to bring back the resources. And of course, these will be valuable resources because the metal that is there regularly, it is actually really rare on Planet Earth, so you build this… It’s like gold, pretty much. So it’s exactly the same system and the same reasoning behind colonisation in the first place. When the colonsists went all over the world, whether it’s in India or whether it’s in Africa, they went to dig the minerals, take the oil, whether it’s in the Middle East and so forth.

So there is this imperialist idea that is there and has never moved or been questioned and discussed and challenged, and everybody is chill very much is at my side. And when you ask any space scientist or anyone in the space industry “What’s the next vision in space?”, like “Who is, to you, the person that represents the most visionary in this realm of space?”, people are going to reply Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, the guy behind Blue Origin and Amazon. And what is their vision, exactly? Tell me. What do they propose that is currently not what we have already done on Planet Earth and what we are currently having to deal with right now?

Dubber      Yeah, for sure.

Nelly          So what we are trying to do with that film is to try and define new visions. And for me, they come down to actually giving the voice to people that have actually experienced the stage one of this imperialist endeavour that has been set up for the past hundred years.

Dubber      It’s interesting that you’ve deployed doppelgängers in this because it’s something… Last time we spoke, you were telling me about how you’ve sent doppelgängers to go and give public speeches as you, and for some reason, that doesn’t surprise me in any particular way because you strike me as somebody who needs multiple versions of themselves to go out and have these sorts of conversations. How do you go about doing something like that, and what was the thinking behind it?

Nelly          I’m someone that doesn’t believe in nation states. I don’t believe that borders should be defined by politicians or by a piece of paper or… I don’t believe in that, and probably because my family has always been into movement. They’ve been crossing, pretty much always, lands before they eventually landed into France where they eventually got their papers there. But I think this idea to be stateless, which is very core to the philosophy of Hannah Arendt as well, to always be a migrant wherever you go, and this idea that… That, to me, is the freedom of thinking.

We use the doppelgängers. And with this film, my hope is that to some level, because we look alike, the viewer… And I don’t know if this is going to work or not, but the viewer might actually get lost into these places and actually not know when I am in Nigeria and not know when we are in Armenia and not know when… And actually perhaps question, as well, this idea of borders or this idea of connection between people, and that’s something I’m investigating in this film. So that’s why, for me, it was important to have these doppelgängers in the film.

But then also, in general, I find this idea that you can be one person and at the same time many others absolutely fascinating and something that actually excites me a lot about life. The idea that maybe there is another person of yourself. It just makes it way less human-centric and egocentric. When you start to think that there is no such thing as nation states, then if there is no such things as nation states, if there is no such things as politicians as we know them, if there is no such things as all of that, then what is there? There is territories. There is geographies. There is species. Animals. There is sounds that connect different animals together, like whales communicating between each other. There is the wind. There is the sand. There is a complete new realm of things that is non-human-centric, and that, to me, is where… That’s where the future is and where the future has always been, in some ways, maybe, but we’ve never been smart enough to see it.

Dubber      Well, you strike me as someone who is smart enough to see it, and you strike me as multiple people with multiple, multiple jobs, so you seem to have achieved your objective. Nelly, it’s been an absolute blast. I hope we get to do this again soon. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Nelly          Thank you so much, and thank you to all of your listeners. Bye-bye. Thank you so much. Have a lovely day, you all.

Dubber      That’s Dr Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stepanian, and that’s the MTF Podcast. You can check out all of her many activities at www.nellyben.com or follow her on Twitter @NellyBenHayoun. My name is Dubber. You can follow me @dubber on Twitter, and MTF Labs is @mtflabs pretty much everywhere. Click whatever button you need to click in order to keep getting these each week, and press on the thing that shares it with other people. Thanks very much. Cheers to the team – Jen, Mars, and Sergio – to Bamtone and airtone for the music, and Run Dreamer for the MTF audio logo that you’re going to hear in just a second. Stay safe. Talk soon. Cheers.

Transcript

Dubber      Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. I think I first came across the work of Aram Sinnreich in 2013. I’d already come on board as part of Music Tech Fest by then, but my day job was still as Professor of Music Industries Innovation at Birmingham City University. I was researching, writing, teaching, blogging, and speaking about music online, the digital music industries, digital copyright, and all the ways in which music culture and music commerce were changing as a result of the internet, and vice versa, and so Aram’s book ‘The Piracy Crusade’ was required reading. I think I even assigned it to my MA class. I certainly recommended it to a whole bunch of people.

So just a few months later, as we were running MTF in Wellington, New Zealand and simultaneously organising MTF Boston, in a year where we had five Music Tech Fests in as many countries, Aram’s name popped up again. He was going to be joining us thanks to the brilliant Nancy Baym. See episode nineteen of this podcast for more on her. As part of the after-party, as we called it – a one-day academic symposium that followed a full-on three day Music Tech Fest at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, MA – Aram was one of just over twenty hand-picked international high-level thinkers who brainstormed and contributed to what became MTF’s manifesto, which says, among other things, “Music technologies make worlds. Let us make better worlds. Let music technology do good, serve public interest, foster belonging, justice, collaboration, and sharing, enable greater access to positive musical experiences and personal connections, and create durable objects and practices.”. That was from the MTF ‘Musictechifesto’, collaboratively written in 2014.

And while we’ve exchanged tweets on occasion since then, and maybe an email or two as part of the day-to-day work, I hadn’t really sat down and had a proper talk with Aram since then, which is a shame because, as you’ll hear, there’s a fairly significant overlap in the Venn diagram of our respective interests. And these days, I have a podcast, so I thought I’d give him a shout.

Dubber      So, Aram Sinnreich, thanks so much for joining us for the MTF Labs Podcast. How are you doing?

Aram          I’m doing great. Splendidly. How are you, Andrew?

Dubber      I’m very well. You’re looking exactly as I last saw you, which I just calculated was pretty much, to the day, seven years ago at MTF in… Well, we called it MTF Boston. Strictly speaking, it was Cambridge.

Aram          It was. It was on the ground floor of the Microsoft complex.

Dubber      Yeah, absolutely. And I remember one of the things that you were central to was what became known as the ‘Manifesto for Music Technologists’ or the ‘Musictechifesto’. Do you want to tell us a little bit about how that came about and your role in that?

Aram          Sure. I was not an organiser, I don’t think. It was the brilliance of Nancy Baym and a couple of other people. Basically, there is this weird nexus which you live at the juncture of between people who think musically and understand tech and care about civil liberties, and that tribe includes technologists, academics, artists, writers, everyday people. And Nancy essentially pulled us all together and said “Look. There is this insipient problem which is that music is always at the bleeding edge of new technological… Not only innovations, but epistemologies, ways of thinking about the role of tech in our lives, for a variety of reasons. And we can see problems coming down the pike as our society becomes more technologised, as data becomes a more vital commodity, as we spend more and more of our days and intimate hours in the embrace of Silicon. What can we learn from the ways in which we have and haven’t adapted to digital music in order to make sense of this world that’s coming down the pike at us? And furthermore, how can we develop a set of basic principles for a more ethical life from our understanding of how we’ve failed to do so in the music world?”. And I thought that was a great call to action, and we ended up having a day-long conversation and a lot of arguments and debates. And I’m not sure that we solved any of the problems, but we certainly put them out in the open.

Dubber      Do you think that music serves as a canary in the coal mine for all of industry or all sectors for this sort of thing?

Aram          Oh, yeah. More than industry. When I started out as an internet industry analyst in the ‘90s, we would routinely talk about music as the canary in the coal mine. And part of that was just the tech affordances. An MP3 was three megabytes, and a movie file was half a gig, so obviously people were doing things like file sharing and streaming with music long before they were doing it with video.

But more than that, the more that I’ve researched musical culture and musical history over the past twenty years as an academic, the more I realise that the reason for that is intimately tied to the history of our species and the fact that – if you believe certain archaeo-anthropologists – we were a musical species before we were a linguistic one, and that the sonic entrainment of our nervous systems was the germ that led to the creation of organised human society. And because of that, music continues to play this really unique, foundational role in creating consciousness and culture and social organisation. If you know how to read the tea leaves, or how to listen to the tea boiling, I guess, it becomes this really incredible carrier wave for very subtle changes in our social architecture that end up manifesting into much larger changes that are totalising.

That was part of the argument that I made in my book ‘Mashed Up’, which started as my doctoral dissertation, was that this new architecture of music which was emblematised by the mash-up was really the operating system for a new social architecture that would tear down traditional binaries – gender binaries, political binaries – that would also erase lines between work and leisure, between war and peace, between public and private, and that if we looked closely at the ways that people at the front lines of those tensions – namely DJs and mash-up producers – were navigating that and trying to make sense of this newly blurred world that they were living in, we would be able to do a lot to prepare ourselves for these broader social changes.

Dubber      The world has become more split, though. It’s become more diverse, clearly, but it’s also become more split into polarities. Do you think that’s reconcilable?

Aram          I’m not sure I believe that. I think that’s true politically, but that is an artefact of basically a two-party system that was put in place in the US in the 18th century. I don’t see that happening culturally. I have two children. One of them is non-binary – an eleven-year-old – and the other one’s best friend just came out to their parents as non-binary, and this is a normative subculture for people my children’s age. And I think that tendency to explore these spaces between binaries is much more the hallmark of the era that we’re living in than the political polarities that you see written about in the weekly news tabloids.

Dubber      And as a significant part of our culture, music plays a role in… Whether it’s the shaping of that – whether it’s cause and effect – or reflecting that. Which do you think it is?

Aram          I think it’s a feedback loop. So music is, like I said before, the operating system for human culture and human consciousness. And, literally, the reason that we’re conscious is because of these synaptic signals that travel through the different subregions of our brains and correspond to these cultural signals that travel between us via media, from air to the internet. And so when there’s a change in the music… Plato very famously said “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.”, or something to that effect. And I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand whether that’s true, and I think the answer is almost always yes, and if so – exactly what you ask – what’s the cause and what’s the effect? And it’s neither, because music is not separate from the human experience. Music is the audible dimension of that experience. And so the changes that we hear in music are always not symptomatic of or causal of, but rather the perceptible leading edge of social change.

Dubber      We should probably talk a little bit about your job and why that’s something that leads you to think about these sorts of things in this way. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do and where you do it?

Aram          Yeah, sure. I’m a Professor of Media Studies at American University in Washington, DC.

Dubber      And communication studies department.

Aram          Correct, yeah. I’m the chair of the communication studies department. Comms studies and media studies are flip sides to the same coin. The nice thing about the comms studies framing is that you can include things like policy and industry studies in the mix, whereas media studies tends to look more just at the social role of media. But I call myself a media studies person because that’s my home base.

Dubber      Sure. And being a media studies person in the 21st century means you very much look at digital technologies. Is there a continuum from communication and media studies from radio, from newspapers, from television that has continued, or is there a distinctive break when the internet comes along?

Aram          There’s no short way for me to answer that question because I’ve done a lot of theory building recently about what I see as this five-step endless cycle between technology and markets and culture and laws and basically social imaginaries, and I’ve published some research recently that shows one example of how the past five hundred years of musical and cultural history can be understood through this never-ending cycle. But, yeah, of course it’s a continuum. The commonality between all of these platforms and all of these techno-social moments is the human spirit. We have certain psycho-social needs. We have certain inbuilt affordances as a species. And all of our tools reflect those needs and those capacities in various ways.

This week, the social-tech de jure is Clubhouse. And so I just did an interview with The Hill a few days ago where they were saying “Tell us. Does Clubhouse change everything?”, and I was like “No. Of course Clubhouse doesn’t change everything.”. I’m old enough to remember when telephone party lines were a hot thing for people to do. It’s essentially an identical technology because human beings like to get together in rooms and talk with each other. That’s part of what we like to do, so of course we build tools using whatever technologies are available to us at the time to do that. And during COVID, when we’re all locked down in our houses, of course we’re going to look for a way to do that remotely and as frictionlessly as possible.

So one of the cool things about working in comms studies is that you get a sense of the history of the interactions between these cultural behaviours, technological platforms, and legal environments and economic environments, and so we’re always thinking in terms of historical metaphor. You get somebody like Tim Wu or Nancy Baym or Victor Pickard, and they’re always trying to understand emerging technological behaviours through the lens of “How does this correspond to the birth of radio or to the printing press?”. And the interesting thing isn’t how those metaphors fit. You see a lot of Buzzfeed article headlines like “This exact thing happened in 1922 with the Federal Radio Commission.”, and while there’s some truth in that and I appreciate that publicly accessible media historiography, what I think is really interesting to those of us who study this is those moments where it breaks.

So, again, going back to when I was an internet industry analyst before I figured out that academia would be a fun place to play, I was fascinated in digital music – we’re talking about 1998, 1999 – because it broke the techno-historical distinctions between broadcasting and retail. “Is music on the internet more like a radio broadcast or is it more like a record sale?”. That question took the music industry fifteen years to figure out, and there were a handful of us back then, at the turn of the century, going “It’s neither! It’s both! Here’s what you have to do about it.”. Arguably, the ‘what to do about it’ was about half settled by the birth of the modern streaming services ten years ago, but is still highly contentious.

Dubber      Yeah. Well, ’99 would have been an interesting year to be having that conversation.

Aram          It was amazing. All of my clients were the major record labels, the major movie studios, the major software publishers. And I actually remember going to my boss circa summer of ’98 and saying “I think music on the internet is going to be really interesting.” – and this was the age of Liquid Audio and RealNetworks, back when it was called Progressive Networks. Those were the dominant players – and saying “I think this is going to be super transformative.”, and I remember my boss saying to me in a very kind way “Don’t get your hopes up. This is not a thing that’s going to happen.”. And then, I think it was June of 1999, Napster hit, and the way that people thought about the internet’s capacity to serve musical culture and to break musical industrial economies just [click] overnight changed. It was the greatest thing that ever happened but also the most terrifying to certain people.

Dubber      Yeah. A technology like Napster, to what extent is that something that happens to us as a society, and to what extent is that something that we can negotiate?

Aram          We’re always negotiating. A technology like Napster doesn’t take off the way that it did if there’s not a latent social need among people for what the platform allows you to do. And of course, platforms never end up being used exclusively the way that their designers imagine them to be used. Facebook was supposed to be used to find hot girls on campus, and now look at what it is. It’s the surveillance capitalism infrastructure on a global basis.

At that moment in time, the music industry had become very ossified because of deregulation in the 1990s. And I’m talking about the US here. Obviously, things are very different elsewhere around the world. But in the US, you’d had this deregulation which allowed companies like Clear Channel to go on a buying spree, and every radio station in the world was playing exactly the same thirty songs every single week because they all had the same corporate owner who were getting the same payola from the same handful of record labels, which dwindled from six majors in 1997 to three in 2002, or thereabouts. I don’t remember exactly the year. So the music had this stultifying sameness to it. This is the era of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. And I know that everyone’s nostalgic for that now because the millennials grew up on that stuff, but, god, it was really boring. For those of us who were real music heads… It was the first era in which you could turn on the radio and just never hear something that was remotely unexpected, and that’s painful to people who are really invested in their sonic environments. So I think there was this building, unrecognised resistance to that ossification and a need to diversify our sonic landscapes.

And the brilliance of Shawn Fanning and the Napster platform was that it compelled you to share as you were listening. Previously to that, you had websites like www.mp3.com, which were great, but on sites like that, you would upload an MP3 and then someone else could download the MP3. Those were two separate actions. With Napster, for the first time, the act of participating in the musical network was simultaneously giving and getting, which much more mimics the way that we experience music in our social lives, I think. It’s never a one-way transaction. So I think that that made intuitive sense to a sufficient number of people that it became massively adopted in a very short time. And of course, that had ripple effects in terms of economics and law and public perception, and ultimately, I think, helped to deossify music. It started to make music interesting again.

Dubber      Right. So shortly before we met, you put out a book called ‘The Piracy Crusade’. Two things. One, define ‘piracy’, and, two, is it still a thing?

Aram          Well, I have to be very careful because I have certain obligations to certain parties who would prefer that I speak circumspectly about this subject in certain fora. Piracy… I think, actually, the best thing on piracy I’ve ever read was Adrian Johns’ book that came out… I don’t know. Maybe a decade ago. It’s just called ‘Piracy’. The subtitle is something like ‘A Short History’, or something like that. But the basic insight of Adrian Johns – and I’ve certainly found this in my own research, not only on P2P but on pirate radio and on piratical behaviours by early publishers in Scotland and everything in between – is that piracy is the frame, a rhetorical device employed by legacy stakeholders in order to delegitimise new entrants and threats in their marketplace, and the accusation of piracy always precedes changes in the laws that structurally exclude certain new ideas from the marketplace.

So, for instance, famously, the very first proto copyright law was The Stationers’ Company charter in the mid 16th century in London. And part of the way that the publishers in London petitioned the Crown at the time to create this proto copyright law, which gave them a monopoly over the permission to decide who published what, was by accusing these Scottish publishers who were underselling them of piracy. You can go back even further, as Adrian Johns does, and point out that ostensible piracy in the Ancient Mediterranean wasn’t even really piracy. It was a framework that if the Genoese accused the Tunisians of piracy, that meant that they didn’t view Tunisian profiteering as being politically legitimate. It was a way of saying “This person does not have official sanction.”.

The second half of your question was “Does piracy still exist?”. Yes. Of course piracy still exists because the framework that allows existing players in a marketplace to say “This new person, this new company with this new idea is threatening us. Let’s make them illegal.”, that’s never going to go away. It’s such an effective framework. And we’ve seen a lot of interesting new copyright law come out in the US in the last two years – the Music Modernization Act, the CASE Act which just got passed in this huge omnibus bill in December after failing several times on its own – that basically erect new boundaries to the flow of information on the internet, and in the case of the Modernization Act, specifically with music. And those are all based on the presumption that piracy is a thing and that it is bad and that it can be stopped, but that’s an ever-receding goal line. You’re never going to stop piracy because people are never going to stop having new ideas, and people who are threatened by those new ideas are never going to stop accusing them of being pirates.

Dubber      If there’s a more culturally loaded word than ‘piracy’, ‘crusade’ would be up there. Do you want to talk about that choice of word in the book title?

Aram          Yeah. It’s interesting. I ended up doing a lot of reading about the original Crusades when I was working on this book because I thought it was more than just a useful metaphor. I thought there were strange historical reverberations between the two. The Ancient Mediterranean – which is where the concept of piracy originates and where the Crusades took place – during the entire four millennia of maritime global trade was the crux of… The place where East and West met. Overland, you had the Silk Road, but you can carry a lot more in ships than you can on the back of a horse or on a cart. And so the Mediterranean was this essential thoroughfare between the Middle East and the eastern markets that it served, and northern Africa and southern Europe and the markets north and south that they served.

So if you actually look at the history of the Mediterranean, the battles between empires – including the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire and various other empires that controlled portions of the Mediterranean for periods of centuries between ancient times and modernity – most of the wars that were fought in the name of religion were actually trade wars and were gussied up in the dress of religion in order to legitimise them in the minds of citizens, soldiers, and leadership.

So in the beginning of ‘The Piracy Crusade’, I talk about one specific one. One of the last crusades. It was called the siege of Mahdia. I think it was 1390. And basically, there were two European states that had serious political problems internally. One of them was France, where they had basically taken a break in this hundred-year war with Britain, and so all the soldiers had come home, and the soldiers were hungry for glory and power and money and were running rampant. And the king couldn’t do anything with them, and they were just destroying… Imagine if the US recalled every soldier stationed around the world to Washington, DC. It would just be a nightmare. That’s basically what France was like at the time. And then in Genoa, which was an independent state in what’s now Italy, you had this long-standing political battle. And basically, all of their wealth was based on them being a port city that brought goods into Europe from the Mediterranean, but they were getting their lunch eaten by Venice which was on the other side of the country and had much better access to the Eastern Mediterranean. So the Genoese needed basically to clear out the North African profiteers from the Mediterranean, and France needed someplace to send its soldiers. So the heads of both countries were like “Hey. Chocolate, peanut butter. Let’s find a really good excuse to send these soldiers to clear out the Mediterranean. How about Jesus?”.

And they actually went, and they laid siege to this city in North Africa called Mahdia. This walled city. And they completely fucked it up, strategically. Walled city. They didn’t bring any battering rams. Hundred-degree heat. They laid siege in the middle of summer in full body armour, and a double-digit percentage of them died from thirst and getting bitten by flies and… It was just horrible. And it lasted for months and months and months. And when they sent their negotiators out to talk, the Mahdians’ leaders were like “Why are you laying siege to us? Sure, we go after your ships, but you go after our ships. Game recognise game.”, and they were like “Oh, no. It’s not about that. It’s because of what you did to Jesus.”. And the Mahdians were like “What are you talking about? That was the Jews.”, because, obviously, Islam didn’t even exist in Nazareth in the 1st century. And so despite the biblical accuracy of that claim, the siegers didn’t back off, and they ended up just losing everything on that.

Then they went home, and they told their constituencies that they had won, despite the fact that they had lost. And based on that, Europe went into what turned out to be its last crusade in Constantinople, I think, and it ended up just basically losing control over the Middle East more or less permanently. Losing control over Turkey and the rest of it. And because of that – I know this is a way longer answer than you wanted, but this is fascinating to me – Europe lost control of the access to the Orient, and so that’s when they started funding colonisation and the African slave trade and the discovery of the Americas by Europe.

So the entire history of the West is based on this one lie based on this one failed crusade based on political needs that were gussied up as religious beliefs. And I think that that is such a great metaphor for the ham-fisted ways in which we’re trying to regulate these new and emerging digital spaces, is that the internet… Do you remember being optimistic about the internet in the 1990s? This notion that…

Dubber      Very much so. In fact, I remember being optimistic in the early days of Twitter.

Aram          Truly. Actually, I just posted on Twitter today. I said something along the lines of “‘What I had for lunch Twitter’ was the best Twitter. Don’t @ me. I miss that.”. There’s no question that if we somehow avoid global climate catastrophe, we are going to be entering into an era of AI-augmented humanity that is qualitatively so different from what human beings have experienced since the birth of civilisation that it’ll be virtually unrecognisable, and in relatively short order. This stuff is happening really, really quickly. More quickly, I think, even than those of us who pay attention to it for a living can wrap our heads around. And that world could look like anything. It doesn’t have to be dystopian. It doesn’t have to be ‘The Matrix’. It doesn’t have to be ‘eXistenZ’. It doesn’t have to be ‘Black Mirror’. We can literally build whatever we want with it.

Dubber      We tend not to, though, right?

Aram          No. We get caught in these cycles. That’s what I’m saying, is that we’re creating the conditions for permanent techno-fascism based on the flimsiest of excuses in the same way that Europe ended up having to create… Not having to. That Europe ended up seeing a necessity to create the Atlantic slave trade based on their own failures based on these flimsy premises. And that’s what I’m worried about. It’s not just that person X is going to get sued for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and go bankrupt or that person Y would really like to participate in the music economy and is going to get excluded from it. Those are bad, but the first-order consequences are the least of it. To answer your question… I don’t know if you can use any of this. I’m just rambling.

Dubber      No, no. I like a long answer.

Aram          But the reason that I put this in terms of the Crusade is precisely in order to point out that there are long term, tectonic consequences for the kinds of policies that we’re arguing for today. They end up building on themselves and getting embedded into techno-social systems in a way that produces a dystopian outcome, and I would really like to avoid that. I would like to think that when my children are a hundred years old, they’re going to live in some kind of eutopia free from want and of perfect participation and equity and justice and creative expression, and not in some universe where you have to watch an ad before you’re allowed to release dopamine into your bloodstream.

Dubber      So I guess, in a nutshell, while piracy might be seen to be antisocial, regulation against piracy took place in full body armour in the height of summer against some very high walls and led to slavery.

Aram          That is a shorter TL;DR version of what I said, yes.

Dubber      But you have a stake in this. As well as being an accomplished, acclaimed academic on these matters, you’re also a musician. And not just a dabbler. You’re somebody who does it for real. So what is your experience, and how has that changed as digital technologies have progressed?

Aram          Well, let me push back against that for a second because I don’t like the framing of dabbling and amateurism. I think that that frame is a kind of self-hatred that humans inflict on themselves. And I meet people all the time who are like “Well, I play guitar, but I’m not a musician.”, and like “Well, what the fuck do you think a musician is? Of course you’re a musician.”. If you make music, you’re a musician. If you listen to music and clap along, you’re a musician. So, yes, I participate in the music economy as a performer and a composer and a recording artist, but that doesn’t make me more ‘real’ than somebody who doesn’t. Music belongs to them just as much as it belongs to me.

I’ll tell you, I think the internet is one of the greatest things that’s ever happened in music. I fucking love it. I’ve been locked down… I married my lead singer. She hired me back in 1995 to play in the band, and…

Dubber      “She married her bassist.” is what you mean to say.

Aram          I do mean to say that. “I married my boss.” is really what I’m saying. She hired me back in 1995 in New York to play in what was then a very popular downtown band called Agent 99, and we ended up outlasting the band by several decades. And the two of us have been in several groups together and, of course, have had separate projects as well over the years.

And it’s been so wonderful to be locked down… If you’re going to be locked down, be locked down with your creative partners, because she and I have had the opportunity to do all kinds of songwriting and online live-streaming together, and we are also doing a tonne of recording. And our collaborators are in South Korea, they’re in Europe, they’re in New York and California. We’re playing with people all over the world and developing really wonderful music in a way that twenty years ago, we’d all have to be in the same studio together at the same time. And the ability to connect to people on that basis… I don’t think I would have survived this past year with a shred of sanity if I had not been able to do that. So technology, to my mind, has been great for that.

The danger of it, of course, is that we come to see the simulation as being the thing that’s simulated and that we lose track of the somatic, geographic qualities of music as well. There’s no substitute for playing music in a room full of people.

Dubber      Is that a latency thing, or is that just a physicality thing?

Aram          That is such a smart question. It’s not just latency because music is not just one signal, and it’s not just physicality because those signals are not merely physical. To me, the most compelling and meaningful musical experiences are multimodal. You can smell it when people are excited by the music that you’re playing.

I’m a rhythm instrumentalist. I play the bass. I love to see people dance while I’m playing dance music. Not all the music I play is dance music, but when I’m playing dance music, I like to see people’s bodies because I learn things about the music from watching people move, and I integrate that into the way that I’m playing. Not in a super over-the-top corny and obvious way, but in a subtle way, like the way that you feel an eighth note or the way that you feel the relationship between the bass and the drums, which is out in front of the other. Those kinds of issues.

So my favourite definition of music comes from Jacques Attali, who I’m sure you’ve read inside and out many times through. But in his book ‘Noise’, he calls it a dialectical confrontation with time, and I really think that plus sociality is the best definition of music that I can think of because it is… There’s this trope about living in the moment. And I’ve meditated and done all kinds of things to try to be in the moment, but I’ve never been more in the moment than when I am actively playing music with other human beings, in a room full of even more human beings. I am paying attention to every single microsecond and every fluctuation, not just of sound, but visually, olfactorily, conceptually, and that… I think the reason why it’s so satisfying is because it allows you to be the most of yourself. You’re inhabiting the most of the human experience simultaneously. And not only are you inhabiting all of your own senses and paying attention to them at a super granular temporal level, but you’re also inhabiting other people’s subjectivities simultaneously and doing the work that your nervous system was made to do to reconcile other people’s subjectivities with your own and to achieve a kind of collective consciousness.

To go back to what we were talking about before – the million years of music framework – we are hardwired to connect to other people that way. And I don’t care if it’s a trick of evolution. I’m not a big believer in intelligent design because I know people who are much less intelligent than a god who would have designed things a lot better. But we’re hardwired by evolution to respond well to these kinds of stimuli and to take pleasure in those kinds of connection.

So is it possible that some kind of technological mediation that had no latency, that was multimodal, that had smell-o-vision baked into it, that that could serve the same function? Sure. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But I wonder whether it’s just squaring the circle. Let me put it in a different way. To me, the most exciting uses of technology aren’t to reproduce what we have in our organic lives, but to provide options that don’t exist in our organic lives. That’s why I like mash-ups or dub reggae. I spend so much time trying to explain this to my students when I teach my musical cultures and industries class.

The brilliance of a dub reggae producer like Scientist or Lee “Scratch” Perry is that they make impossible spaces. So the snare drum might be in this little echo chamber, but the hi-hat is in this giant room that’s reverberating all around you and panning at the same time. And your brain, which evolved in order to use sound to create a map of the world that you’re in, for evolutionary reasons, can’t help but try to reconcile these impossible spaces into one coherent understanding of the world that your body is in. And your higher mind, your capacity for abstraction, recognises that your ears are failing to do that and takes pleasure in the game of it.

And so playing with the limits of embodied organic experience through exploiting the unique affordances of technology, to me, that’s where tech adds something to music, not putting us in the Matrix where we can’t tell the machine apart from real life. Take the machine to augment real life. Create new spaces to explore that you can’t explore in your physical life.

Dubber      Is this an argument for art plus science, and therefore music is at the apex of human experience?

Aram          Man, I don’t know what any of those words mean. I have no idea what the apex of human experience is. All I can say is that music and sex are the two experiences that I am aware of that bring me closest to a totalistic, integral experience of being a human being, but I know that that’s not true for everybody. For some people, it’s food. For some people, it’s… Who knows what? People are into all kinds of stuff. So I won’t get into superlatives like ‘apex’. As to art and science, I’m not even sure what your question is. What is it exactly that you’re asking me?

Dubber      Is it the case… A lot of people talk about music as being this really ideal place at which art and science coalesce, at which, for instance, musicians are great mathematicians or that the brain does something that brings together not just the cerebral and the visceral but also the left and right brain metaphor, if you like, and that being the… All of the bits of being human come together in one place.

Aram          Yeah. I think that’s true. Art and science are these categories that we’ve created for social and economic reasons that are not, to me, very valuable. I hate the concept of art. I fucking hate it. Larry Gross, a comms scholar who was my doctoral advisor when I was a grad student, wrote this great article where he talked about the concept of art being like a reservation. In the same way that a reservation that Native Americans are sequestered on by the federal government in the US, that artists get shunted off to this little side place that’s ancillary to human experience, and that the very concept of art is really intimately tied to that process of sequestration. That resonated with me so much. Really helped me to think through what I had been sensing inchoately for my whole life when I read Larry’s work on that.

But the broader point that you’re making that we have these dual epistemologies, one of which is very intuitive and integral and the other of which is very analytical and logical, and that music can unite those things, I think is very true.

I listen to a lot of Indian classical music. I’ve been on a real Carnatic flute kick lately for some reason – Carnatic flute and mridangam and sometimes violin – and that’s a great example of music that does that, that’s so mathematical, but it’s not like prog rock in that it’s just being mathematical for the sake of it. It’s more like John Coltrane. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that amazing… It’s this heuristic that Coltrane drew of the relationships between all of the different…

Dubber      The ‘Giant Steps’?

Aram          Yeah. Well, he uses it in ‘Giant Steps’ when he goes through that cycle of fourths all the way through, but it’s basically like the roadmap for ‘Giant Steps’. So it’s all of the chromatic tones arrayed in this circle and then these lines between them showing different kinds of relationships between different tones in the chromatic sequence.

What I love about John Coltrane’s music, as well as about certain kinds of Indian classical music and other styles too, is the sense that… I don’t know about you, but I get so… I don’t like most music visualisers that I see. If you have iTunes on and you press ‘visualiser’, it just goes “Woo, it’s music!”. But when I hear music, I hear it as these concentric rainbows. It’s a spectrum. And it’s not a two-dimensional space. It’s like a four-dimensional space where you can create shapes that evolve within these concentric rainbows. I know I sound like a total hippy, but I’m actually just trying to be accurately descriptive.

So I do think there’s truth in that. It’s not that it’s art meets science. It is more the recognition and the experience of an epistemology that is large enough to encompass both intuitive and deductive forms of knowing. It’s a larger space in which to think and feel in a way that does not require you to distinguish between those terms.

Dubber      Interesting. The way that I would articulate that would be that I like it when the music that I enjoy does something clever.

Aram          For sure. I don’t know if you ever read Leonard B. Meyer, the music theorist.

Dubber      No, I don’t think I have.

Aram          He’s a mid 20th century music theorist who’s really thinking about classical music, the way that most ‘serious’ music theorists did in the West at that period of time. But his whole schtick is that meaning in music comes from… It’s almost like humour, like stand up comedy. It comes from establishing expectations based on convention and style and then defying those expectations.

The most playful composer of the Classical era was Mozart. Mozart’s like [imitating music] “We’re going to go over here. No! We’re over here now.”. And it’s not romantic like Beethoven, like “I have to express my pain at being in the world.”. It’s more just like “Come on this journey with me. We can play. You think I’m going to resolve here, but I’m actually resolving to this totally different key.”.

And I agree with you. I think all the music that – in any style, in any genre, from any place and any time – really excites me is the music that defies my expectations and plays. Acknowledges that there’s a listener and creates this dialogue with the imagined listener through its playfulness, in a way of saying “Hey, I’m not just doing this for me. I’m not just expressing myself or saying something that is true or putting something out there. I am playing for you, Andrew. I’m going to make this music and set up expectations in your mind, in your body, and then I’m going to fuck with them. And you’re going to recognise that I’m doing that, and we’ll have some naches. It’ll be I and I.”, to use Martin Buber or Rastafarianism.

Dubber      I have to ask, were you a mixtape kid, growing up?

Aram          Oh, for sure. Are you kidding? I was born in 1972. I grew up during the peak years of tape culture, and all I ever wanted to do from the first moment I got my hands on a cassette recorder was to make home recordings of mixtapes. And all of us who were into music and sound did exactly the same thing. I still have mixtapes that my girlfriend made me in tenth grade. Not because I listen to them, but it was such an expression of… It was a way of telling somebody that you knew who they were, that you could curate a collection of music for them. And that power to re-record, within a techno-social environment that encouraged you just to be a passive consumer, was such a resistant and liberatory act. So it was like “We’re in this together. We’re actually taking the detritus of this industrial landscape that we were handed and we’re turning it into a playground where we can make things for each other.”.

Dubber      Interesting. In the light of that, it’s interesting that we have gone on to be a generation of people who also get really interested in the sorts of things that you talk about. Piracy and Napster and… And your new, well, newer book ‘Intellectual Property’, or it’s an ‘Essential Guide to Intellectual Property’, what is… Let’s unpack that. What’s intellectual and what’s property, and how do those two things relate to each other?

Aram          Oh, yeah. Well, that title was chosen by the publisher. In fact, that’s the book that they asked me to write. They were like “We need a book about intellectual property.”. I’m far from the first one to point out that that is a weighted term and an inaccurate term and a term that does a certain amount of historical damage, and the reason that it does damage is because the concept of property is a binary and totalising concept. I think it’s an idea that speaks to some of our oldest and most atavistic impulses. This mug – which has music on it – is my property. I own this. And you want this mug, but you can’t have it. And economists use these terms like ‘rivalrous’, which means that if I’m using the mug then you can’t use it at the same time, and ‘excludable’, like if I locked this mug in my private safe, you’ll never get access to it. So things that we think of as property tend to be rivalrous and excludable, but, of course, culture and the products of our intellection are not either rivalrous or excludable. And this was very famously pointed out in a letter that…

 Oh, hold on a second. Hey. Doing a podcast interview. Can I call you back in a few minutes?

Jesse         Sure.

Aram          Okay. That was my co-author, Jesse Gilbert, and sometime musical collaborator. You can snip that, I suppose.

Dubber      I can, but I might not.

Aram          Okay. That’s fine. Yeah, so Thomas Jefferson wrote this letter where he says, basically, “I think intellectual property is a very dangerous thing to build into our legal system because ideas don’t behave like coffee mugs. Ideas are more like the flames of candles. I can light your candle with my candle, and that doesn’t lessen the light on my candle. It just increases the amount of light.”. So that observation has been integral to the discussion of intellectual property as long as there’s been intellectual property.

What it does do is it allows the world of culture and expression to enter into the marketplace and to become commoditised. And so in practice, the statutes, the judicial decisions, the executive enforcement, and even the contracts and day-to-day interactions and business models built around IP are all these ongoing negotiations about “Under what circumstances can this thing that naturally wants to travel from person to person like a flame be frozen into a market-ready commodity and protected from competition and unlicensed use in the same way that a coffee mug or a car or a pair of shoes might be?”.

It’s a double-edged sword because, on the one hand, it’s a bait and switch operation. If you ask people how they use music in their lives, they’ll tell you about Spotify, but they won’t tell you about humming in the shower. So they’re thinking about their musical experience through the lens of commodities, which are defined by what can be propertised and what can’t. But on the other hand, of course, IP creates a kind of structure and predictability that allows industries to emerge around musical expression and other forms of cultural expression and basically creates confidence for powerful institutions that have money to invest in building tools for those of us who would like to share our ideas.

Dubber      Right. I suppose you’d very quickly get into the weeds of how law works in this place at this time. It does seem to be as soon as you start talking about what intellectual property is, you do start to talk very quickly about “Well, it’s a legal thing, and the law works like this, and there are these cases. Here is the legislation.”, etc.

Aram          Yeah. So legal categories, unless you believe in the God of Abraham who hands down truth on stone tablets to humanity… If you believe in any kind of version of the Rousseauian social contract, laws exist as this way of mediating social power between wealthy and poor, between aristocrats and peasants, between Global North and Global South, between any groups with disparate power that you can point to. The law is a system that circumscribes social behaviours in a way that permits certain kinds of actions without consequences and assigns dire consequences to other kinds of actions to keep people from doing them. There are laws against murderers. I probably would have killed ten people this year if there weren’t laws against… That’s a joke. But let’s just say, there would be a lot more murders if there were not laws against murder.

Dubber      Sure. Not necessarily perpetrated by you.

Aram          Probably not. I’m a lover, not a fighter. But I certainly would have slapped a couple of people, let’s put it that way. But when it comes to something like murder, at least there is a moral intuition that predates the law. I’m not going to murder anyone because I recognise myself in you, and I don’t want to kill myself, so I’m not going to kill you. I’m not interested in burning someone’s house down. I think that would make me sad, not happy. But laws like intellectual property don’t have the same kind of moral preconditions to them. We do have a moral intuition about property and a moral intuition about creative expression, but they don’t really match the contours of the law in a direct way, the way that, say, our feelings about murder match laws about murder. So what IP laws do is they basically say “These are the circumstances under which you are allowed to put creative ideas and expressions into the marketplace, and these are the circumstances under which other people can’t.”.

And in the US, there is a very specific reason for this social contract for this law, and it’s enshrined in Article One, Section Eight, Clause Eight of the US Constitution. Article One, Section Eight is a really interesting piece of the US Constitution. Basically, what it says is this: “All Americans”… And obviously, that was a very limited conception at the time. It did not include African Americans. It didn’t include women. Lots of other people. But the basic idea being “All Americans are free to do whatever they want without the government telling them not to, except for this list of things because we can’t have a functional democracy unless congress has the ability to make laws that limit people’s freedom in these specific ways.”. And it lists a bunch of different stuff, and one of them is even though we have free speech and everybody can say whatever they want and publish whatever they want – we have a free press. People can believe in whatever religion they want. First Amendment – Congress can still limit our First Amendment freedoms by creating a law that creates a copyright or a patent, but it can only do it for one reason, and that one reason is advancing the progress of science and art. And so to the extent that copyright is constitutional, to the extent that patent law is constitutional, in the United States system, they are only constitutional to the extent that they limit people’s free speech for the purpose of increasing the number and diversity of people speaking, that it incentivises authors to share their work with the public and incentivises inventors to share their innovations with the public.

Dubber      And how effective is it at doing that?

Aram          That’s the hundred trillion dollar question. Academics differ. It’s a question that I ask in this book, in ‘The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property’, and one of the ways that I address it is by looking and seeing… Well, to begin with, Jefferson himself pointed out “Listen. We just got through the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, and before that, we had the Renaissance, and we did all of that without copyright. So you don’t need to propertise ideas in order for people to come up with new ones and share them with each other. That’s what we do.”, to which Madison said “Yes, but England’s been doing it since 1710 when we created the first real copyright law, the Statute of Anne, and they published a lot of stuff since then, so maybe we should do it also.”, because ‘money talks and bullshit walks’ was basically Madison’s approach to governance.

So when I look at creative industries, one of the things that I did in the book was I looked at “How good are they at actually incentivising creators with money?”, and the answer was really interesting to me. I got a bunch of government data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and I got a bunch of industry-level data. What I wanted to know was “For every dollar that’s spent by consumers or advertisers on a form of creative expression, how much ends up in the pocket of the people who are actually doing the creative expressing?”, and the answers across a range of industries is about three percent, including the music industry. Three percent. Three cents on every dollar ends up incentivising us to create more music. That’s not a very efficient system. Ninety-seven percent of it burns off in the form of friction that goes into corporate profits. That’s bonkers. There’s got to be a better way than that.

And, for that matter, as you point out, I’m a real musician. I’m a musician who participates in the marketplace. I get royalty checks. I play gigs.  I can tell you right now, I would be really incentivised if someone wanted to pay me a million dollars to write a song, but I’ve never written a song because I anticipated making money from it. I write songs because it gives me great pleasure, and it gives me an excuse to play music that I like with people that I like, and as a way of giving people things.

I have a friend who’s making a movie right now. She’s a professor where I work named Brigid Maher. She’s making a documentary about this woman, Sally Dixon, who’s the doyen of the independent documentary scene in the US in the late 20th century. And I wrote a couple of songs for her to use in her movie, soundtrack songs, and then my wife and I wrote a more elaborated vocal song for her to use over the closing credits. She’s going to pay us a couple hundred bucks for it, but we didn’t do it for the money. We did it for our friend, to make our friend’s movie better. If I have a friend who’s feeling down and out, I might write him or her a song to help them feel better.

So while I won’t deny that market mechanisms do incentivise people to create, I think that they do a pretty shit job of it, and I think they don’t account for most… Most of the dollars spent don’t incentivise, and most of the incentive doesn’t come from dollars.

Dubber      That’s a nice way to put it. You were incentivised to write this book because this is a book that your publisher wanted you to write. What’s the book that you want to write?

Aram          That is an interesting question. I’m tenured, and I’ve already got plenty of citations in publications, so I’m basically at the “Fuck it.” point of my career. So there are two kinds of books that I am excited about writing, and I’m doing both. One is my new non-fiction book which I’m writing with Jesse Gilbert, who just called me while we were talking a few minutes ago for our book meeting. It’s called ‘The Secret Life of Data’, and it uses some of the ideas that we’re talking about today, but it’s looking at all of the ways in which data can be extracted from cultural objects in ways that the people who created them didn’t expect. It could be tomorrow, ten feet away, or it could be a century from now around the globe, or it could be a millennium from now in a different galaxy, but we are constantly developing new technologies and epistemologies to extract knowledge from objects that people did not earlier understand was carried by those objects. And so what we’re interested in is “How can we think proactively about this when we’re creating new technologies, new laws, new cultural practices, and think not only about the first-order consequences of the media that we make but about those nth order consequences as well?”.

Like this conversation that you and I are having. Presumably, it’s going to be archived on some kind of website. Somebody could choose not to use the archive of this conversation to learn something from the words that we’re saying to each other, but they could do a histogram on all the words and all the books behind me and infer something about my interests and my perspective from that. They could do facial recognition on my children and see where else they’ve appeared in public photography archives. They could analyse the sound of your and my voice and establish whether we have any insipient medical conditions that we should be concerned about. Those are just the kinds of things that theoretically could be done right now with this piece of media that we’re producing. So what Jesse and I are thinking through is not only “What are the implications of knowing that as we rush to fill every cubic centimetre of the human experience with data?”, but “What would a supervillain do with that power? What’s the worst-case scenario, and how can we avert it?”.

So that’s the non-fiction, but also I’ve been writing fiction. And specifically, I wrote a novel about New York at the turn of the century, the 21st century. That was how I made it through the first year and a half of Trump, was by working on this novel and living in New York of summer of 2001. It’s very much about music and about technology, but other stuff too. Race and gentrification and sexuality and magic.

But this past year, my sister, who’s a historian, a history professor, she and I have written two speculative fiction books together. One is a time travel semi-romance about this software coder in 2045 who gets stuck in this glitch and starts going back in time, falls in love with somebody who’s going forward in time, and it’s so much fun. And we have an agent right now who’s trying to sell that. We’ve gotten some very encouraging rejections. Really praiseful rejections. It’s very frustrating. And then after we were done with that, we wrote a mid-grade young adult novel about a girl who lives in an unnamed city whose mother goes missing, and she goes to find her mother and discovers this underground magical world populated by talking crustaceans. And that has this ecological crisis happening, and she has to solve the ecological crisis, which she does – spoiler alert – with music. So I would love to be incentivised by enough dollars to be able to continue to write speculative fiction. That would be great.

Back when I was an internet industry analyst, back in the ‘90s, people would ask me what I did, and sometimes I would glibly say “I write science fiction.” because I’d be writing five-year projections. And I remember, I once met… Actually, I met this guy, Spalding Gray.

Dubber      Oh, wow. ‘Monster in a Box’.

Aram          ‘Monster in a Box’, yeah. ‘Swimming to Cambodia’. That’s me and my wife and him and his wife. And he asked me what I did for a living, and I tried to explain what being an internet analyst meant. And he looked at me puzzled for about five minutes, and then he went “Oh, you’re a futurist.”, and I was like “Yeah. I’m a futurist. That’s what I am.”. It’d never occurred to me to use that term. But I would like to find other creative ways to do futurism that’s not the kind of punditry and prognostication that I’ve done for a living before.

I’ve become a worse subject for interviews. I pity any journalist who calls me for a quote now because, just like with this Clubhouse story we were talking about before, I’ll launch into a diatribe. I’m not interested in short, easy answers right now. I’m not interested in telling you what’s going to happen. I’m interested in talking about what could happen and what we can do about it and with it and through it, and in trying to use what little foresight and juice I have to try to nudge the world away from the precipice of disaster and towards some kind of better future in which we live more fulfilling collective lives.

Dubber      Right. Is there a metric that you could look at at which point you could say “And my work here is done.”?

Aram          I know people who can’t wait to retire from their jobs, but I’ll never… I love being a professor. I love playing music. I love writing books. I’d like to travel more because COVID has got me cooped up, but what better way is there to spend life than just trying to learn and teach and make beautiful things and connect with people? What else is life for?

Dubber      Living the dream.

Aram          Yeah.

Dubber      Brilliant. Aram, thanks so much for your time. It’s been really, really fascinating.

Aram          Thank you. It’s nice to have the opportunity to ramble with a smart person who cares about what I care about.

Dubber      Fantastic. Cheers.

Dubber      That’s Aram Sinnreich, and that’s the MTF Podcast. Aram is just @aram on Twitter, and I’m @dubber. That’s easy. Even easier, MTF Labs is @mtflabs across all the different social media bits and pieces and www.mtflabs.net on the web. Don’t forget, you can share, like, rate, review, follow, subscribe, download, comment, link, tweet, repost, and recommend. We appreciate and reward any and all of those sorts of behaviours. Thanks so much to the MTF team – Jen Kukucka, Sergio Castillo, and Mars Startin – Borrtex and airtone for the music, and Run Dreamer for the MTF audio logo. That’s us for this week. Stay safe. Talk soon. Cheers.

Transcript

Dubber      Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. If this is not your first encounter with MTF, then it should come as no surprise to you that the idea of combining art and science is something that’s of particular interest to the MTF community. If this is your first encounter with MTF, then welcome. We’re really glad to have you with us. You join us at a really good moment.

I want to introduce you to Ariane Koek. She’s very much part of the MTF community and has been at the forefront of that intersection of art and science that’s so important to us for quite some time. I first knew her as the director of arts at CERN, the European organisation for nuclear research, home of the Large Hadron Collider and some what you might think of as very science-y research and activities. Ariane created the Arts at CERN initiative, she initiated Collide, a residency for up to three months for artists to work with the researchers at CERN, and a whole host of art commissions and exhibitions that brought painters, dancers, composers, writers, sculptors, video artists, and more to collaborate with particle physicists, nuclear engineers, and computer scientists. Ariane’s a consultant and cultural strategist, producer and curator, science communications specialist, writer, speaker and lecturer, leadership advisor and coach, and a member of advisory boards and policy groups. She’s someone who, to me, always seems filled with both wonder and purpose.

Dubber      Ariane Koek, thank you so much for joining us for the MTF Podcast today. You’re looking well. How’s the pandemic treating you?

Ariane        It’s treating me like everybody else, I think is the answer to that. Everybody else in the sense of emotional swings, not everybody else in the sense of everybody’s got different concerns and different parameters and different social conditions. But I would say, like everybody else, it’s a… No, not like everybody else. But, for me, it’s a seesaw, basically. Sometimes you’re really loving being alone and having the chance to explore and discover and study and read. I’ve been doing so much reading. It’s fantastic. And other moments, you’re like “Where are the humans? Where is the human connection?”. It’s really odd.

It’s very odd to be reduced to the digital and the flat. So being reduced to one dimension on a screen. And for humans to become one dimensional is very odd. So you leave out all the senses except for sight and listening, obviously, so what does that leave us? Who are we without the other senses?

Dubber      Well, it’s interesting that you pose these giant philosophical questions based on the technologising of human life because that is kind of your job. You’re an international strategic consultant, curator, writer, but all at the intersection of science and art. The big question is, how does one become that?

Ariane        Just curiosity. I’ve just got phenomenal curiosity about the world and how it’s shaped and works, and I’m always interested in the latest knowledge, the latest technology, and also the implications, in particular for humanity. What are the implications for humanity? Is it taking us further, or is it a retrograde? And what is our role within new knowledge? Are we the victims, are we the co-partners, or are we the drivers? And if so, what are our drivers? So it’s all those questions, again, which motivate me to be in this area. I just love new knowledge and new things.

Dubber      Do you have to bump up the science credentials with the arts credentials in parallel, or can you focus in one direction and look at the other one across the divide?

Ariane        I’m like you because I come from a broadcast background. So I was a broadcaster. I worked at the BBC. I was a producer for sixteen years. A staff producer. So I was used to effortlessly moving across different ways of knowing and enjoying the different ways of knowing and enjoying the exploration of one day talking to Sarah Blaffer Hrdy about the latest anthropology and the next day talking to Michio Kaku about his latest ideas regarding physics and some of the controversy that raised, to… So I’m used to that. And because I see arts and science and technology as being new forms of knowledge and knowing and it’s driven by ideas which are then implemented, I’m fearless because I love moving across them, and I treat them all equally. So I’m an amateur, really, of everything. I’m definitely an amateur of everything. Physicist… My god. It takes twenty-five years to be a physicist. But it’s the ideas. For me, the ideas are the nexus of what I do.

Dubber      Well, all things nuclear seem to be a theme. You made a radio documentary about Chernobyl, and you worked on nuclear testing in Australia, but you ended up at CERN, which is where I originally know you from. 2013, 2012 – somewhere around there – we first encountered each other, and you were the first arts director at a nuclear research facility. How does that become a thing?

Ariane        Again, it’s because I’m fearless, I think.

Dubber      Was it a job that you applied for, or did you go and say “What you really need is an arts director.”?

Ariane        Well, basically, I won a Clore Fellowship for my work in culture for the work I’d done at the BBC and also for the work I’d done at the Arvon Foundation for creative writing, and as part of the Clore Fellowship, they said “You could go anywhere you like in the world for three months.”. And I got offered wonderful three-month stagiaire posts in the US, in Canada, in the UK, and turned them all down. They were all with arts organisations. And everybody was like “Why have you turned these all down? You’re almost at the end of your fellowship. What are you doing? Why? You’re mad.”, and I thought “Oh my goodness.”.

So I literally took a bike ride. I did a bicycle ride from my home to The British Library and thought “Why have I turned all these amazing places down?”. As I cycled, I did this deep inward look and went “What inspires me?”, and I went “Oh, it’s new knowledge. What makes me weird? I’m really into nuclear history. What haven’t you done? I’ve never gone subatomic. Where in the world is at the cutting edge of all knowledge and technology at the moment?”, and I went “CERN!”. And then I remembered a conversation I had with an amazing artist called Chris Drury who’s a land artist, an ecological artist. And he said he’d gone to CERN on the way back from Antarctica and realised the connection between Antarctica and CERN in a print where he showed the heartbeat of the ice in Antarctica, the frequency, and the frequency of the Large Hadron Collider which is recreating the conditions of nature. And he said “I think something wonderful there could happen.”. And literally, it was an epiphany on a bicycle.

And I jumped off my bicycle, ran two floors up The British Library stairs, looked up CERN to see what they’d done with the arts, and they had done a concert with Philip Glass to mark the first turn on of the Large Hadron Collider. I could see people had gone in and out, but there was no structured programme. And literally, I wrote a ten-page pitch to CERN saying “You’re at this amazing point in your history. You’re just about to switch on the LHC to discover the Higgs boson. Physics, basically, in the 20th century really framed culture in terms of anarchists, in terms of Virginia Woolf, the whole idea of subjectivity being up for question thanks to Heisenberg and Einstein. So you’re at this seminal point again, and to be a real cultural force in society, you need to join up with art. So it’s art plus science plus technology equals culture.”.

I literally wrote that, didn’t know anybody, sent it to the head of press, James Gillies, on the Friday, and then on the Monday I got a phone call saying “Fantastic. When can you start?”. And what I’d proposed to do was do a feasibility study for three months, funded by the UK government because they were the funder of my fellowship, and I was just going to go there. And I just jumped on a plane, and there I was for three months.

And I suppose at the end of the three months, I’d done a really in-depth dive into the people, place, and culture of CERN, so I understood what was feasible and what wasn’t feasible and how the organisation worked and gave them a proposal a week before the second switch on. All the directors were around the table. I’d been told that the LHC director was particularly fierce, and I should be warned about that. Anyway, they all loved it and literally went “We love this. It’s at the right time. It’s wonderful. There are only two catches. One, we won’t fund it – the programme – and number two, we want you to do it.”. And that’s how it began. So I created my own job, basically.

Dubber      But one that they wouldn’t fund. And so how was it supported?

Ariane        Well, the director-general funded my salary. As long as he was director-general, he funded my salary out of what is known as ‘special projects budget’, which all director-generals have as a gift for doing the world’s most impossible job. Basically in charge of 680 institutions around the world, 120 different countries. So to do the most impossible job, that is the carrot. So I was his special project. So I was the first cultural specialist at CERN. The first one to be connected. And so that’s how that happened, and then the rest which happened was me fundraising. So basically, I was fundraising and partnership building very intensely for my first year. 2010 to 2011. So I started in April 2010.

Dubber      So that was the main day job, was “I’ve got this idea for an arts project that could be done at CERN. First, I have to go and finance it somehow.”.

Ariane        Yes. So 2010 to 2011, that’s what I was doing. I was working out the finances, seeing what would land, raising… So in the first year, I got the interest of Ars Electronica Linz to be a co-partner in the Collide programme, which I designed very specifically to meet the needs of artists but also to meet the needs of physicists. And I got the City and Canton of Geneva. They stepped forward to be funders, even though at that stage, my French was appalling. And I was pitching to them, and you could see they were thinking “Oh. Who is this person?”, but I always began with a piece of French saying “I am like a snail in a forest. Please forgive me. My French is so bad.”. And I think because I was so humble but also I was so passionate because I really felt, believed, knew that this programme needed to happen now, at that point in time… It needed to start in 2010.

And to do it, I’d actually turned down a path which was going to be a writer. I was on the verge of getting a book deal. And I remember when I got the phone call from CERN saying “Can you start in April?”, I was thinking “Oh, so I have to choose between being a writer and this project. Which one do I do?”. The book was going to be about nuclear history, based on my experience in Maralinga but in other places around the world. And then I thought “Hmm. These chances to create the thing which you have devised and know can work never happen that often, so take it.”. So that’s what I did.

Dubber      So the big question would be the way in which art and science can work together. Obviously, you have a vision for that, but I imagine most people when they think of art and science, particularly bringing artists to an institution like CERN, would be that the artists could respond to the science in some way, or they could interpret and communicate the science in some way, or they could critique technologies and science. Is there anything beyond that? Is there any way, for instance, in which the art is contributing to the science or those sorts of things? Is there more of a dialogue than “Let’s do some science over here, and then we’ll get artists to respond to that in some way.”?

Ariane        Well, yes. That’s a question which comes up quite a lot. “How much do the artists actually contribute to the science?”. And they do because they give you different ways of looking and ways of looking at what you’re doing. When you’re within a culture – a very fixed culture which is very predetermined, which is going in one direction – if you get outsiders in, they give you different ways of looking at your practice, your work, and also your ways of observing because both physics and art are ways of observing as well as ways of knowing the world, and I think that’s really super important.

All the physicists I ever worked with always said “We know this is having an impact on us. A, it’s making us more human and aware of the outside world, and a bit more humane and thinking a bit more about humanity.”. So that’s fantastic because they’re very cloistered, in a way, because they’re so passionate about what they do. They’re very, very cloistered and fixed, even though they’ve got multiple skills and multiple interests. And they also said… Some scientists like James Wells said to me “I know this is going to impact on my theory later down the line, but I can’t quantify it. I can’t say what it is, but I know it’s impacted and influenced me, and it will express itself in some way.”.

Dubber      So to what extent do the clichés and stereotypes about both artists and scientists hold up in the real world? Are they like you imagine them to be?

Ariane        How do you imagine them to be?

Dubber      Well, you imagine scientists as, like you say, very focussed, very… Completely analytical. Let’s go in that respect. So the scientists are all very analytical, and the artists are all very interpretive and creative and… Is the world divided neatly like that, in your experience?

Ariane        No, the world isn’t neatly divided like that. The artist Ryoji Ikeda, who is the final artist in Collide residence who I worked with – the international one – he’s so analytical. Super analytical as well as poetic. And equally, you can get very poetic and extraordinary physicists, particularly in the theory end because they’re the ones who think beyond the paradigm. And talking to them about other worlds… They will literally say “Yeah, there are other worlds. We can’t disprove it, therefore there can be other worlds.”. So you’re taken into this major philosophical and theoretical world which is really fascinating. So, like everything, it’s much more complicated. Of course, you’ll meet stereotypes, but equally, you will meet the things outside.

Dubber      Sure. So what’s the value in this for an independent observer? If I’m not the scientist and I’m not the artist and I’m coming along and I’m experiencing this as a member of the general public, what do I take away with me from that?

Ariane        So as a member of the general public, it’s all about learning about the world. How are we discovering the world, and who does it, and how do they do it? There was a photograph which was done by Gilles Jobin who did an intervention in the physicists’ library where he turned a somersault in front of a physicist who was studying, and the amazing thing is the physicist never moved. Never looked up. Never saw him, in inverted commas. And, for me, that shows the passion of scientists. And I think that’s also the magic of learning that these scientists are so passionate about discovering the beginning of the universe and the nature of nature which forms us and the particles which form every piece of matter in this world. That for the general public to get in touch with that, rather than for it to be something lofty, remote, abstract, disconnected, humanises it for them and puts them in touch with what science really is. It’s a mode of discovery. A really beautiful mode of discovery.

Dubber      And so, in these days, we hear a lot about science and the search for truth being devalued in our culture as something that is not perhaps as highly revered as it might be, particularly in establishing facts about the world and what we believe about the world, and the idea that facts can be differently held between different groups of people. To what extent does art need to come in and go “No, no. Let me communicate this in a way that everybody will understand.”, or even to be a cheerleader for, in inverted commas, science and truth?

Ariane        That’s an interesting question because artists traditionally question the scientific truth and the notion of truth. So that’s what they do in terms of contemporary artistic approaches. And they often have that role of being the canary in the coal mine who calls things out as well as looking at the implications for humanity. I’ve always argued that, in a way, artists are the great humanitarians because they’re looking at things, okay, from their own particular ego, but they’re looking at the implications in terms of “What are the implications on society, and how can this be?”. So I would turn that around.

In terms of being cheerleaders for the idea of the truth and science, that would be communication. So that’s a communication and illustration job. That is as old as the hills, basically. That is as old as the history of art and science, that art has played that role in the past of illustrating and communicating science and being its handmaiden. But what I do is doing it in a different way. That’s all. There are many different strands. That’s something which I’ve also said. There’s no one way of doing art and science. So, yes, there is a role for artists to communicate science and what it’s doing, and that is important, but that’s a very different one from the one I do.

Dubber      There is a flip side to this impulse as well which I guess you’d characterise as the ‘Black Mirror’ impulse, which is basically “Science scary. Technology bad. Future terrifying.”, and that as the artistic creative media response to all of the developments that are happening at seemingly an increasing rate. Is the critiquing role of art, I guess you would characterise that as, an important aspect of your work as well, to go “No, wait. What does this mean if AI can X, Y, Z?”?

Ariane        Yeah. So there’s different ways of looking at that. So the recent show I co-curated at HeK, the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, very much was looking at the implications of technology from a particular angle. The rise of technology and surveillance culture and what it is potentially going to do. And we did it with the help of twenty artists.

So, for example, the wonderful artist Lucy McRae built this extraordinary – it was a new commission for us – contraption called the ‘Survival Raft’. So it was in the colours of a life-saving raft, and it was a raft you crawled into, and then it inflated and then deflated and hugged you. And the purpose of this piece really is to say “Here we are with technology. We are isolated at this moment.”. She was creating it in her studio in LA during COVID. “What happens if at the end of the day or the end of the universe, the only thing we have left to hug us is technology?”, because the raft, in the end, hugs you. “And how does that feel? And what is it like to be without human touch?”.

So the show, the exhibition, explored many questions, and that’s one of them. And I think that’s one of the roles, as I said, of artists, to raise those questions in people’s mind. To actually start humanising technology and the implications of technology so the public can understand what the implications are. When they go to an art show, they feel it through their senses as well as their intellect, and then they can think about what the implications are.

Dubber      It’s really interesting because the way that you’ve been talking about it sounds like the role of the scientist is to find answers and the role of the artist is to come along and then generate questions from those answers. Is that fair, and is there a cycle to that?

Ariane        I think that’s probably my approach. So, as I said, my approach is that one. Very much so. But there are other art-science approaches where the artists and scientists work together to find solutions for global issues and global problems, and that, again, is a great art-science strand, just as important as the illustration and communication art-science strand. But this is the one I’m particularly interested in. As I said right in the beginning of this interview, I’m so interested in the implications of science and technology and any form of new knowledge, which can come out of the humanities as well, whether it was post-structuralism or whatever. Implications for humanity and what it means for us now and in the future. So I’m ethically driven, I suppose, in my approach to art-science. I’m interested in the impact and the ethics behind things.

Dubber      Well, it’s interesting that you raise that there are different threads of this. You curated the Entangle exhibition at the Bildmuseet here in Umeå, and there was a book that came out with that in which you talk about how science and art are not a coherent, single movement. What are the main threads, do you think? Are they identifiable? There are movements within science or SciArt, as some people call it?

Ariane        Yeah, there are multiple movements. As we’ve just discussed, there’s art as communication and illustration of science, art which is inspired by the science and uses the science as a jumping-off point, artists and scientists working together to solve a common problem. There is science which is used as art by artists. So they create installations based on scientific apparatus. You could go on.

I did a lecture about it at the Exploratorium, which is the museum of art, science, and human perception in San Francisco. It’s the granddaddy of all science museums. And I gave a lecture and said “There are twelve.”, and I listed the twelve, and then people ran up at the end and went “No, no. We’ve got another eight.”. And that makes you realise and know that the art-science field is actually broad. It’s not a coherent movement. It’s got many, many strands. It’s a network. It’s probably like a rhizome. It just spreads and spreads and spreads, and it just depends which branch you stand on.

I’ve stood on multiple branches in my time. So I have stood on the communications and illustration side, but I’ve also stood on the ‘finding a solution to a common problem’ side, as well as the other one which is the ‘science is the jumping-off point of the imagination’ which is probably the one I’m best known for, and that’s certainly what Bildmuseet, the exhibition Entangle, showed. How physics, in particular, has inspired those twenty international artists – but there are many, many more – in their practice, in their approach to their practice, but also in what they do and how they look at the phenomena of the world.

Dubber      Right. Bildmuseet is… Essentially, it’s an art gallery, art museum, and you also work at science museums. Is there a different approach when you go to these spaces, knowing what the context has been, for what is to come? Do you take the science in an art direction or take the art in a science direction? Or is the thing that you do the thing that you do, and you turn up and go “Actually, regardless of that context, this is my thing.”?

Ariane        No, no. Totally adaptive. It’s all about being adaptive in terms of approach. So different contexts have different needs entirely, and that’s the point. That’s literally the point. It’s like Arts at CERN. That had a particular approach because of the organisation. CERN: fundamental research centre. Therefore, what better than having a fundamental research centre for artists as well?

So work at Bildmuseet was fascinating because I wanted to have things which explain some of the physics. So there would have been physicists describing the phenomena in writing on the wall so you could reflect on it. And very much they said, very directly, “No, we don’t want that approach.”, and I thought “Hmm. I can understand that. It’s a contemporary art gallery. It’s white cube.”. Therefore, to honour both and show how things happened, I created an audio diptych where as you walk around, you can hear artists and scientists describing light from their different perspectives.

So you have, for example, Sou Fujimoto, the architect, talking about what space means to him as an architect and talking about how outer space, in particular, is his ultimate terror because there’s no density of air. And then you’ve got the physicist Bilge Demirköz saying space, for her, was always a dream as she was the child on the swing, swinging up to the stars, but then she goes into the physics of space.

And I actually think that made something much more beautiful for the exhibition. It showed, again, what I’m really obsessed with: different ways of looking at things. And from that, you, the public – whether you’re reading it in the book or listening to the audio cloud – can see points of connection and also disconnection. And that’s the importance, really, of arts and science. The disconnects, the connections, the gaps. The spaces in between where you can jump into new territory as well.

Dubber      There were a couple of pieces in that exhibition that really appealed to me, and maybe because there’s a joke in them as well. There’s at least a sense of humour about it. One of them was the office desk and chair suspended as independent pendulums. I stared at that for such a long time. And I didn’t know, if there was a message to be had from that, what that message was, but it was such a compelling thing to look at. But it was also humorous, in a way. It was an office desk and chair independently suspended from the ceiling as pendulums and never quite connecting and always missing and always in motion, and I thought that was really interesting.

But the other one was the actual neon sign that said ‘entanglement’ on two floors with a switch below it. And you approach it, and you switch the switch on and off, and eventually, it dawns on you that what you’re turning on and off is the sign on the other floor. And that engagement between those two things I guess says something about this idea of quantum entanglement and action at a distance and all those sorts of things. But actually, it was that you could almost tell a joke in a physical way that dawns on the audience as they engage with it, and I like that as the humanising aspect of what you do.

Was there this deliberate bringing of a sense of humour to things that are very, very seriously taken by very serious scientific minds to knock them about and go “No, no. There’s joy in this. This is not just cerebral. It can also be emotionally engaging.”?

Ariane        Well, I think playfulness is so important in human beings. Play is the way we learn and the way we discover, so having art pieces which tap into your inner child again… Which we should all be in touch with all the time. That amazing playfulness. So, yes, the Julius von Bismarck piece of ‘Freedom Table & Democracy Chair’ is fantastic because it is so playful. You’re like “What the… What is going on here with these things swinging in space? What is this about?”. And then you read the title of the piece and you go “Oh, yes. It’s about democracy and freedom. Oh.”, and then you think. But it really touches the heart as well, in a way, as well as the mind, and the same with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s ‘Entanglement’ piece. Heart and mind touched through the senses, which art does, and also playfulness. Perfect. And equally, Lucy McRae’s piece ‘Survival Raft’, just as playful. Intriguing you. Tapping into your sense of curiosity.

Dubber      Well, we’ve talked about the relationship between art and science and that art can bring something to science and artists can respond to the work of scientists, etc. What’s the value in collaboration? Putting them in the same room together, getting them to work together, getting them to do this process of discovery. What’s the value in that?

Ariane        The value is literally different ways of knowing and different ways of approaching things, and I think that is fantastic. It’s always about multiplicity of approaches, multiplicity of understanding, and also the experiences you bring and your engagement with technology. You have different appreciations and different ways of relating with technology. So it’s totally super important, and I think more and more as we become much more… Well, as we carry on within our climate emergency as well as all the other emergencies, the works between arts and scientists collaborating together will become… Is. Is now, actually, and should be now even more prioritised.

Dubber      Yeah. It’s interesting because a lot of the rhetoric that we have at the moment is about this idea of ‘essential jobs’. You’ve probably seen, in a study in Britain, people were asked “What are the essential jobs? And rank them.”, and artist was the least essential of all the jobs. And it seems like what you’re saying is “No, no. This is becoming really, really important in this moment of catastrophe in all sorts of directions.”.

Ariane        Yes, in terms of invention and coming up with ideas and approaches to solving the issues, whether it’s surveillance or whether it’s… And raising public awareness, let alone coming up with solutions. Artists and scientists working together can move in that direction together.

And I think the reason for that, why artists are particularly important, is because they have… They’re allowed, even, to use their imagination. And scientists do use their imagination and do have an imagination, and, in fact, they’re becoming a bit more explicit about the role imagination plays in their work. For the last two/three centuries, it’s been derided to talk about or admit it. But artists, they’re allowed to use their imagination, and this is where artists are crucial because they are the imagineers. And I use imagineer as a purposeful word, with engineering fused with imagination, because they are looking at ways of going beyond where we are in the world and changing the world or expressing things in a way which haven’t been expressed before in that particular way. And I do believe, from my own background – I did my postgrad degree in Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley – I am probably a total Shelly because I do believe in the imagination as a place of revolution, as a place of change, as a place of innovation.

Dubber      It’s interesting Mary Shelley being one of the archetypes of creativity critiquing science and technology. But all of these things sound very compelling and convincing to me, and I guess that’s because of the things that I’m interested in and so on, but you have to make these arguments at a policy level. You’re advising to the European Commission and things like DG Connect and the Joint Research Centres, the JRC. How do you make these sorts of arguments at a policy level? Is it something that is warmly received, or is it an uphill battle? Is this something that people get when you’re speaking at that level?

Ariane        Most recently, I’ve been working with the JRC, which are the Joint Research Laboratories. There’s seven environmental science research and policy laboratories across Europe, and they’re the driver of environmental policy for the EU. And it’s absolutely fantastic that they have embraced a cultural programme and believe in the role and the importance of artists in working with them.

And in terms of convincing, they were actually convinced by CERN. So they actually saw the CERN project and came to me and went “Ariane, we really want to create something here at the JRC, and we can see how it works. We can see how it has raised awareness within the public about CERN, actually, and physics and what they’re doing and the specialness of doing it in a different way, in a creative way, and we want to do something like that here.”. So in terms of policy, they had already seen how it had made those changes. And I think these examples of how things work luckily ricochet through our culture and stand as a witness of their own persuasion, so I didn’t really need to persuade. I didn’t need to persuade because they’d been persuaded.

Dubber      Sure. And by your own work, to a large extent.

Ariane        Yeah, which is great. My work with the scientists and artists at CERN. It’s all of us together. It’s a community. I always believe it’s everybody working together. However much one person is, in inverted commas, the leader of it or initiator of it, it’s always about people working together, and I couldn’t have done it without the scientists and the artists at CERN and all the people who supported the network, everything.

Dubber      Well, you’re working at the top level of all of these things, as far as I can see, unless… Is there, in your ambitions, another step up that you would like to take?

Ariane        There’s always some new adventure, and there’s always something beyond. Yes. So I’m that spirit, basically. So I’m one of those people who I always define as explorers. You always want to go beyond. Always curious. So, yes, there are things I would love to do and which I will do, so we will wait and see.

Dubber      Sure. It sounds like there’s something in there you’re not quite allowed to talk about, but we’ll skip lightly over that. There was a job advertised at Aalto University recently, Head of Radical Creativity. Are we going to see more of these sorts of things? Is that now a job that exists in the world?

Ariane        I thought that was my dream job.

Dubber      You have to speak Finnish, unfortunately, don’t you?

Ariane        Yes, you have to speak Finnish. And I even wrote to the dean and said “Do you really have to speak Finnish?” because I thought, yeah, that is the best job in the entire world, Director of Radical Creativity, because, as I said, that’s what I believe in. I believe in creativity and the imagination and the radicalism it can do. So hopefully, yes, we will see more of those jobs. And hopefully, Aalto’s leading the way by being the first one to put its flag in the sand and say “Look, this is needed. This is what society needs.”. And Aalto’s brilliant at being ahead of the curve. Again, that’s another ‘watch this space’.

Dubber      Sure. So no thoughts of returning to the book?

Ariane        Returning to the book? Oh, gosh. That was funny. When you said the book, I couldn’t remember what the book was. There’s another book, unfortunately, which has preceded the nuclear book, has taken over, so the nuclear book is somewhere in the past at the moment. Will probably turn into a novel at some point. But there’s another book which I am interested in doing which is much more about art and science, so, again, it’s a ‘watch this space’ on that one.

Dubber      Fantastic. Well, I’ll look forward to it. Ariane, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking and really fascinating, and I hope we get to do this more often. Really good to talk. Thank you.

Ariane        Well, lovely to see you as always, Andrew, and thank you so much for everything. Till the next time.

Dubber      That’s Ariane Koek, and that’s the MTF Podcast. You can find Ariane online at www.arianekoek.com. That’s A R I A N E K O E K dot com. And you can find MTF Labs at www.mtflabs.net, spelt how it sounds, and @mtflabs all over the social universe. As usual, thanks to the team, Jen Kukucka, Sergio Castillo, and Mars Startin, Sivan Talmor and airtone for the music, and Run Dreamer for the MTF audio logo you’re about to hear again. You have a great week, stay safe, and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.