The Culture & Technology Podcast

Epizódy

• 
  Bernhard Günther: The Great Learning 07.07.2026 56min

  Bernhard Günther is a cultural manager, curator, musicologist and the artistic director of Wien Modern, one of the world's largest contemporary music festivals held in Vienna since 1988. As a passionate visitor and organizer of concerts across diverse genres and formats, and as an occasional musician, he has been intensively engaged with new music and its context for over 25 years. In this episode, Bernhard and Severin discuss how Wien Modern evolved from its 1980s origins as a response to Vienna's nostalgic classical music scene into a deliberately confusing, friction-generating platform that challenges narrow definitions of what contemporary music can be. Günther explores the festival's 2025 theme "The Great Learning," which responds to Vienna's 37% population growth and increasing diversity by actively addressing questions of representation, discrimination, and who gets heard in classical music spaces. He discusses the tension between data-driven curation and human taste, why festivals must resist becoming "elite things," the dangers of AI in understanding discrimination, and why bringing people together to physically experience music—even when it provokes disagreement—matters more than ever in an age when social media promised connection but delivered polarization instead.
• 
  Simon Denny: Memories of the Future 09.06.2026 1h

  Simon Denny is an artist living and working in Berlin, known for his conceptual work examining technology, power, and contemporary culture. His practice spans diverse media including paintings, sculptures, installations, and exhibition-making, often investigating the cultural footprint of influential technology figures and companies. Denny has exhibited internationally and gained recognition for works addressing tech industry aesthetics, from early pieces about Kim Dotcom and Peter Thiel to recent explorations of defense tech and AI. In this episode, Simon discusses his latest exhibition "Forces of the Unknown," which uses AI-generated imagery and plotter-painted canvases to draw connections between Italian Futurism and contemporary Silicon Valley ideology. The conversation explores how Marc Andreessen's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" inspired the work, the shift from consumer tech to defense tech ("hard tech"), and Silicon Valley's evolving relationship with weapons manufacturing. Severin and Simon also examine AI as an artistic tool, the ethics of technological labor displacement, and the role of artists in capturing cultural moments without prescribing political solutions.
• 
  Günseli Yalcinkaya: Internet Folklore 17.04.2026 59min

  Günseli Yalcinkaya is an artist, curator and writer based in London. She is a Contributing Editor at Dazed and the former host of Dazed’s podcast, Logged On, and has appeared in talks and panels at the Architectural Association, BFI, Somerset House, Sónar+D, Serpentine Galleries, Unsound Festival, Vienna Digital Cultures and X Museum. Her essays have been published in CURA, Dazed Magazine, Spike Art, Vogue, Zora Zine and 032c, as well as in books for Aksioma, Julia Stoschek and LAS Art Foundation. In this episode, Günseli discusses her concept of 'internet folklore,' which connects advanced technologies with cultural practices like folklore and mythmaking. The conversation delves into the ways internet culture influences society, the impact of AI on human interaction and creativity, and the emerging significance of quantum culture. Severin and Günseli also explore her collaborative AV performances and the intriguing parallels between AI and psychedelia.
• 
  Mercedes Bunz: How Not To Be Governed (Like That) 02.03.2026 53min

  Dr Mercedes Bunz is Professor of Digital Culture and Society at King's College London's Department of Digital Humanities, where she researches how digital technology transforms knowledge, communication, power, and society. Author of "The Silent Revolution" (2012), an early exploration of how algorithms shape our world, she co-founded the Creative AI Lab with Serpentine Gallery to help artists engage critically with AI technologies on their own terms.. In this episode, Mercedes and Severin discuss how AI represents a fundamentally different technological shift from previous digital revolutions. She demystifies how large language models actually work, explores why we need public AI and open data sets to counter corporate dominance, and challenges the binary thinking around AI—neither savior nor devil—arguing that our fear of machines replacing human work is actually masking deeper anxieties about an out-of-control financial system.
• 
  Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: What Would You Do? 10.07.2025 40min

  Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist living and working in Berlin and London. Her work aims to archive the experiences of Black Trans people by creating video games and interactive experiences. Influenced by early gaming history and personal experiences, her work aims to make audiences reflect on their choices and emotions rather than simply consume art passively. In this conversation with Severin, she discusses her journey from early experimental games to complex social installations such as Soul Station, 2024. Her upcoming show at Serpentine London explores how interactive spaces can help strangers connect emotionally in an increasingly polarized world, challenging traditional gallery experiences while making art more socially functional.
• 
  Rebecca Merlic: Games as Reality Engines 11.06.2025 36min

  Rebecca Merlic is an artist and architect who uses 3D scanning, game engines and virtual reality to create alternative worlds. Her work emphasises co-creative processes with subjects and innovative uses of data, from biometric tracking to spatial mapping. In this episode, Severin is joined by Rebecca to discuss her project Kissaten Vienna, a documentation of vanishing coffee house cultures across Vienna, Japan, and Zagreb using 3D scanning and game engines. Together, they explore how emerging technologies can document and reimagine traditional social spaces while raising questions about accessibility and preservation.
• 
  Claire L. Evans: Wild Information 06.05.2025 40min

  How can we rethink computing systems to be more in tune with nature? In this episode of The Culture and Technology podcast, Claire L. Evans (author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet) joins Severin to explore the intersection of life, technology, and the environment.
• 
  Claudia Larcher: AI and the Art of Historical Reinterpretation 09.04.2025 35min

  How is gender bias and discrimination coded into history, reality and AI models? Claudia Larcher is an artist, filmmaker and AI researcher in Vienna. Her work spans video animation, collage, photography, and installation, and in particular explores the impacts and experimental uses of artificial intelligence. Severin met with Claudia in her studio to dive into her most recent work: AI and the Art of Historical Reinterpretation, a growing fictional image archive that injects inclusive and diverse representations into historical images and manipulates future AI training data as a form of activism.
• 
  Sean Bidder: The Art of Collaboration 12.03.2025 34min

  As the creative director at The Vinyl Factory, Sean shares the process behind curating Reverb, a multimedia exhibition exploring the intersection of art and sound. In this conversation, Severin and Sean look at the importance of physical context in music consumption, the value of dedicated listening spaces, and how digital platforms can enhance rather than replace analog experiences.
• 
  Eva Jäger: The Making of a Model 19.02.2025 46min

  How can we reimagine AI as a collaborative technology? Eva Jäger is a Curator, Arts Technologist and Creative AI Lead at Serpentine, a contemporary art gallery in London. She recently curated The Call, Mat Dryhurst’s and Holly Herndon’s solo exhibition which proposes new cultural, legal, and technical rituals for art in the age of AI. Severin and Eva peel back the layers behind The Call, where they discuss the transformation of training data production into a new art form and how cultural institutions can take active roles in shaping emerging technologies through initiatives like data trusts.
• 
  Penny Rafferty: New Forms of Organisation and Decision Making 16.10.2024 36min

  Penny Rafferty is an independent writer and theorist based in Berlin. Together with Ruth Catlow she edited and published “Radical Friends: How DAOs Could Change the Art World” in 2022, a seminal book that explored the potential of decentralized autonomous organizations through essays by leading voices in the NFT, crypto-art and web3 spaces. Now that the initial hype around DAOs has cooled off, Penny and Severin took the opportunity to meet in Penny’s Berlin studio to discuss what worked, what didn’t and what’s next for using blockchains and other emergent technologies as a tool for radical imagination.
• 
  Alice Bucknell: Ways of Worlding 05.09.2024 43min

  Alice Bucknell is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their work mixes elements of architecture, anthropology, ecology and science-fiction to imagine alternative worlds. In this conversation, Alice and Severin discuss the creative process of building worlds and the political and ecological dimensions of worlding as an artistic medium.
• 
  Paula Strunden: Touching, Licking and Tasting the Virtual 10.07.2024 32min

  Paula Strunden is an XR artist & PhD researcher exploring multisensory and embodied spatial computing. In this conversation, Paula shares how she creates unique, multisensorial experiences in response to extended, virtual worlds.
• 
  Dragan Espenschied: Archiving as Resistance 28.05.2024 36min

  Dragan Espenscheid is the director of digital preservation at Rhizome, the world’s leading art organization dedicated to born-digital art and culture. A first generation net artist and 8-bit musician, Dragan has pioneered Rhizome’s Digital Preservation Program since 2014 where he stewards its ArtBase collection of more than 2000 pieces of software and net art.
• 
  Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne: Eccentric Engineering 28.04.2024 33min

  Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne are artists whose work subverts dominant power structures and explores alternative systems that work in harmony with their surrounding environments; such as a smell-based dating app, solar powered computer networks and sleeping pods that explore dreaming as a potential climate engineering technology.
• 
  James Bridle: Beyond Human Intelligence 11.03.2024 38min

  James Bridle is an artist and author best known for their groundbreaking work on technology, ecology, and more-than-human intelligence. In this conversation, James and Severin discuss AI and other ways of knowing and seeing the world.
• 
  The End of a World 17.01.2024 31min

  In this episode, we think about the planetary and a version of history that doesn’t just include humans. We do this with the help of our guest, Patricia Reed, who specializes in world modelling, helping to visualize complex data models that broaden our perspective on the world around us.
• 
  The Right to Breathe 02.10.2023 32min

  The language we often use to detail laws doesn’t relate closely enough to the physical processes that are happening within our world every day. What does it mean to have a right to breathe if the quality of air we consume is different for everyone? Together with Daniela Gandorfer, a legal and media theorist and co-founder of investigative research collective Logische Phantasie Lab, we discuss how digital technologies, philosophical approaches and legal concepts come together to shape our sense of reality.
• 
  Senses 11.07.2023 25min

  Think about a museum or an exhibition that you’ve been to that really stood out. What made it great? What sparked your imagination? What was it about the experience you had that really stuck in your mind? Often the exhibitions and spaces that captivate us most use a variety of different technology and storytelling methods to bring ideas, that are otherwise difficult to imagine, to life. Our guest for this episode is Dan Koerner, creative director at award-winning experience design studio Sandpit. Whilst the last few episodes of this season have focused a lot on technology that takes us out of our everyday surroundings, this episode is all about technology that helps us engage closer with the physical spaces around us.
• 
  Portals 29.03.2023 22min

  For many of us, the concept of ‘Entering the Metaverse’ has this classic Alice in Wonderland-type feeling of falling down the rabbit hole. It’s a digital gateway into an alternate reality, detached from many of the physical laws and structures that our world is subject to. Anything is possible once you step through the gateway into this alternate realm. Together with Lara Lesmes and Fredik Hellberg from architecture and design studio Space Popular we explore how portals function and can help us create better infrastructures in our future virtual spaces.