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Recent EU law now allows citizens to complain if they have been harmed by AI, but what if they have co-conceived your offspring without you even knowing it?For Future Artefacts 20th Episode we’re welcoming back Nina Davies with her new work SubScanners, alongside guest co-host Rebecca Edwards. This is the fourth work in a series of fictional traditional dances which loosely follow the structures of western folk dance; agricultural, spiritual, war and courtship. Set within a 15 minute fictional podcast from a nearby future, the characters discuss InterReproduction in the space sector, a reproduction research program for deep space exploration. They share InterRepro’s "counterfeit labour scandal", resulting in the emergence digital offspring and of new courtship rituals called SubScanning.Davies presents questions on relationships with digital personhood inside and outside of a phone screen, and how reproduction and labour might exist outside of the body. Together we imagine what types of digital kinship might exist for these offspring, how we could care for them as children, and what their material connections to us might be.SubScanners warns us about the corporate consumption of public law, presenting a fiction where digital persons are co-opted by corporate guardianship and the only way people can regain control of their digital selves is to play these companies at their own game and settle the matter in family court.Working primarily with video, performance, writing and installation, Nina Davies considers current dance phenomena in relation to the wider socio-technical environments from which they emerge. Previous research projects have included; the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices. Her work has recently been exhibited and shown at Matt’s Gallery, London; Transmediale, AdK, Berlin; Seventeen, London; Pradiauto, Madrid; and, Chemist Gallery, London. Her work has been selected to partake in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2023; Circa x Dazed Class of 2022 and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. In 2021 she co-founded Future Artefacts FM with artist Niamh Schmidtke and was awarded an Arts Council Project Grant to produce their 2022 programme and in 2023 they produced a mini series for Het HEM’s online programme The Couch.Rebecca Edwards is a London based curator, writer and producer. Her interests include cultivating experimental curatorial methods, interweaving fluid approaches to production, dissemination and representation of artwork, and exploring the nested fields of technology, digital aesthetics and internet culture.Artist: Nina DaviesHosts: Rebecca Edwards and Niamh SchmidtkeMusic: Joe Moss and John TrevaskisProducer: Mat JennerBroadcast through Radio Thamesmead

What would you do at the end of the world? For the third part of our collaboration with *The Couch, we are thrilled to share David Blandy’s work, The End of The World, a 13 minute audio piece, originating from a larger video installation made in 2017. Revisiting this work, we explore the ends of multiple worlds; family illness, the foundations of a political system shattering and the end of a 17 year old magical gaming world, Asheron’s Call. When reflected in the present moment, we hear from Blandy about collective grief, and where places of solidarity, like that in Asheron’s call, can help us come to terms with the endings of multiple worlds. From online MMORPG’s to table-top role-play, together we discuss the rules that allow these games to exist by defining a space for worldbuilding or escape, parameters to enter and leave worlds, and to destroy them. The similarities of this logic to embodied magical practices further connects the community of spell making in Asheron’s Call, to the broader realities witchcraft or ritual suggest. These rules could also be a set of fictions, enabling us to review which worlds around us are ending, and what the end of one world might impose on another. *The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse. Image credit; Images by Damian Griffiths, courtesy the artist and Seventeen Gallery Artist Bio;David Blandy (1976, Lives & works in Brighton) makes work that slips between performance and video, digital and analogue, investigating the stories and cultural forces that inform and influence our lives. Collaboration is central to his practice, examining communal and personal heritage and interdependence. With research spanning multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject.Blandy’s projects involve complex installations, performance, writing, gaming and sound.Artist: David BlandyHosts: Nina Davies and Niamh SchmidtkeMusic: Joe MossProducer: Mat JennerBroadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)

During this festive season, we invite you to celebrate with the epic adventure mix, A Bell is Tolling, by Jan Berger. This 12 minute mix, composed of RPG* soundtracks, including selections from fantasy epics in late 90s and early 2000s, is the second work featured as part of our collaboration with the Couch**. Together we discuss what magic looks like in game worlds and the limitations of magical tropes and expectations, such as their preference for mediaeval villages, steampunk gadgetry or queer-coded villains. We question, who are the typical protagonists, how do these games enforce gendered and heterosexual stereotypes, and how can magic and fantasy enforce these rigid identities in RPGs? Collectively we consider the counter-culture found in online gaming spaces, such as Roblox, as a testing ground for different identities, constructing social orders mimicking contemporary cultural production and what kinds of subversive techniques these games can show us about the virtual and meat worlds we occupy. *Role-Player-Games**The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse. Jan Berger (1993) is a visual artist and platform designer based in Berlin. His practice is primarily occupied with ludic simulation, subject formation and the emergence of cultural mythologies in online spaces. He is the founder and attending curator of the Mythical Institution, a digital project space and art school. As StJennifer, he streams gameplay on twitch.tv.Artist: Jan BergerHosts: Nina Davies and Niamh SchmidtkeMusic: Joe Moss Producer: Mat JennerBroadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)

How can rituals guide, mislead or comfort us? For the second episode of our collaboration with The Couch*, Bea Xu’s piece EsƨƎ-1 invites us to follow the leader of an anthrax death cult. Made in collaboration with Markéta Skalková and formed by Xu’s research into melting permafrost, their work imagines a post-anthropocentric future where anthrax spores have become objects of fascination and obsession, containing magical properties, transforming skeletons into talismans and forests into autonomous actors against climate devastation. Together we delve into how the occult can provide tools to process extinction beyond nihilism, a means to navigate death in organic or organised ways and how rituals can engage with technological advancements, through both individual and collective means of relating to the planet. This episode contains themes of death and suicide. *The Couch, is a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.Bea Xu is a Chinese-British psychic worker experimenting with reality production. Using collaborative play, speculative fiction and therapeutic intervention they design and means-test integral, post-Anthropocene cosmologies with live participants and fellow accomplices. Often foregrounding blood magic, decolonized time and non-binary logic with an EcoGothic focus, their work engages with archetypal shadow and is informed by their training as an integrative, transpersonal psychotherapist. A studio resident at London’s HQI, Bea is a member of oiioiooi collective and completed the 9th Alternative Education Programme at Rupert, Vilnius. They are the creatrix of ritual laboratory LUNARCHY 2.0 and have collaborated with Furtherfield Gallery, Omsk Social Club and Ittah Yodah – with work selected for Solo Show, Plague Space, Arts of the Working Class, amongst others, and shows in Prague, Oslo, Seyðisfjörður, Berlin, NYC and Milan.Artist: Bea XuHosts: Nina Davies and Niamh SchmidtkeMusic: Joe Moss and John TrevaskisProducer: Flo LinesBroadcast through Radio Thamesmead, and released with The Couch (Het HEM)

For this episode we are bringing together three special guests to introduce our new collaboration with Het HEM. We’ve brought back artists Rebeca Romero (Ep.3) and Akinsola Lawanson (Ep.7) together with curator Maia Kenney to discuss magic and technology within their works and research. Romero’s exploration of trance in The New Worshipers and Lawanson’s spirit world in Bosode each examine the intersections of these themes, how they influence each other, and how might magic in the present influence technological futures. Hear Romero, Lawanson, Kenney, and of course your hosts, examine how our relationship to talismans, phones, and worldbuilding can be more entangled than you might think. Collectively we consider the materiality of known and unknown worlds, the politics of witchcraft and what ethics might be necessary before engaging in scientific fact and mystical forces. For this extended conversation we will also be introducing Het HEM’s The Couch, a digital editorial and arts platform to continue these debates through texts, screenings and online discourse.Rebeca Romero is an interdisciplinary artist born in Peru and based in London. Through a range of media that includes sculpture, ceramics, textiles, sound, performance and video, she explores concepts of diasporic identity, truth, fiction, and their relationship to the digital age. Often combining Pre-Columbian iconography with advanced scanning and printing technologies and materials ranging from clay to plastic, her works swing drastically between the past and an alternate future. Examining the story-telling potential of artefacts, Romero looks into the intervention of the digital archive as a history-making technique. Online museum archives become an excavation ground for the collection of data that she later recontextualizes, reassembles and re-presents.Akinsola Lawanson is a British-Nigerian multidisciplinary artist living and working in London. He works in moving images, installations and video-game engines in projects that examine relational systems, digital technologies and process philosophy. Akinsola’s video works are inspired by the alt-Nollywood movement, which borrows narrative, stylistic and visual conventions of Nollywood but with politically subversive ends.Maia Kenney is an art historian, curator and critic specialised in the feminist underpinnings of modernist art movements (and a proponent of the destruction of Modernism as a Eurocentric storytelling device). She is the curator and editor of The Couch, Het HEM's digital artistic platform, and teaches theory in the Master of Contextual Design at Design Academy Eindhoven.

Please join us for this special episode of Future Artefacts FM with Joe Moss’ audio piece Infinite Customisation. In this 17 minute audio-book style work, we meet the ghost of J. Thaddeus Toad, transported from the 1908 novel, The Wind in the Willows, and risen in the future. Following Toad’s perceptions, the work draws contrasts between the linear perspective of industrial England in the 1910s to a far different reality of revolving subcultures, nostalgia and technological beings. With Joe, we unpack the connections between nostalgia and progress, where Toad’s opinions may come from and where the idea of modernity still haunts the present day. Together we consider Toad’s legacy, how he implies capitalistic growth, and what economic alternatives that throws up, while considering the impact these larger models have on our cultures and connections with one another. For our regular listeners, you’ve been hearing Joe’s amazing work since episode one, as he is one of our music producers on the show!Joe Moss makes work with a vast appetite for pre-existing cultural and material references. Connected by the logic of collage, Moss’ works weave together the contemporary logics of a variety of fictions, examining cultural threads from high-fantasy to streetwear with entertaining and slightly sinister results. Moss’ diverse output ranges from solo presentations to radio production to collaborative exhibition-making. Recent projects include Model Village at NN Contemporary, Homegrown on the Hauser & Wirth website, residencies at Eastcheap Projects UK and Stokkoyart Norway, and The London Bronze Editions Foundry Fellowship. Moss graduated with a BA from Central Saint Martins in 2015, spent three years on the Conditions Studio Programme between 2019 and 2022 and is currently enrolled on the MFA programme at the Slade.Artist: Joe MossHosts: Nina Davies and Niamh SchmidtkeMusic: Joe Moss and John TrevaskisProducer: Flo LinesBroadcast through Radio Thamesmead