Disintegrator

Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean
  • 5.0 (19)
  • Technology
  • Updated Weekly

What does it mean to be human in an age where experience and behavior are mediated and regulated by algorithms? The Disintegrator Podcast is a limited series exploring how Artificial Intelligence affects who we are and how we express ourselves. Join Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean as they speak to the artists, philosophers, scientists, and social theorists at the forefront of human-AI relations.  Disintegrator is produced by Rubén Bañuelos.

  1. 47. Invocation (w/ E. Elias Merhige and Gavin Gamboa)

    7h ago

    47. Invocation (w/ E. Elias Merhige and Gavin Gamboa)

    E. Elias Merhige is the experimental filmmaker behind Begotten (1989) and its sequels Din of Celestial Birds (2006) and Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022), as well as Shadow of the Vampire and Suspect Zero. Gavin Gamboa is a composer, pianist, and video artist who wrote the music for Polia & Blastema and works in local-first "digital gardens" and the piano repertoire. What began as their shared film becomes, here, a way into a single question Elias poses at the top: what is being born through us - and is that thing digesting us on its way out? From there the conversation moves through desire and digestion as the engine of creation, and what happens when the interval between the wound and the poem collapses to nothing. Merhige treats AI as atavistic rather than alien: a dark mirror, an artificial unconscious, a "necromantic bureaucracy" of dead expressions made responsive, and reads the manuscript and the personal library as older machines through which the dead already speak. Gamboa holds a more skeptical line, defending manual effort and drawing on Marshall McLuhan's "auto-amputation" and his own experiments training models on his audio.  The guests & their workGavin Gamboa: composer, pianist, video artist  gavingamboa.netE. Elias Merhige: filmmaker; his 1989 debut Begotten anchors the "Begotten trilogy" -  Begotten on WikipediaPolia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022) — premiere Q&A with all three (Vimeo)Books & essays citedThomas Moynihan, “The GASTRULATION of GEIST: or, an Extended Meditation upon the World-Historical Connection Between Digestion and Simulation,” Vast Abrupt, 8 February 2018, link.Kate Crawford, "Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop,"  e-fluxFederico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018), Bloomsbury

    1 hr
  2. 46. Building Doors (w/ Yancey Strickler)

    Jun 29

    46. Building Doors (w/ Yancey Strickler)

    We're joined by Yancey Strickler: writer, cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and the person behind a string of projects that try to give creative life a workable economic form: Bentoism, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, the Dark Forest Collective, and now Artist Corporations and the Dark Forest Operating System. The episode is timely. We recorded in late May, days before Governor Jared Polis signed the Colorado Artist Company Act into law on June 2, 2026 - the country's first "A Corp," a company type where the artist keeps majority control, intellectual property reverts to its maker if the company dissolves, and an artistic mission sits above profit. More than 4,000 creators have already signed up, and several states are drafting their own versions. Where this show usually works by critique, Strickler builds working alternatives and writes them into law. Our running question throughout: when criticizing the system is the admired move, is building something real the more radical act, or does anything built inside the system end up serving it? Yancey Strickler's projects Yancey Strickler — ystrickler.comBentoism — bentoism.orgThe Creative Independent — thecreativeindependent.comMetalabel — metalabel.comNew Creative Era (Strickler's podcast with Joshua Citarella) — metalabel.comArtist Corporations & the lawArtist Corporations — artistcorporations.comThe Colorado Artist Company Act (SB 26-133), annotated full text — artistcorporations.com/law/annotatedStrickler's TED talk, "Forget hustle culture. Behold the Artist Corporation" (2025) — ted.comNews coverage of the signing: The Colorado Sun · The Art Newspaper · ARTnewsFrieze, "Can A-Corps Save the Struggling Artist?" (skeptical take, also previews DFOS) — frieze.comThe private internet, AI & IPDark Forest Operating System (DFOS) — app.dfos.com · protocol spec at protocol.dfos.com · code on GitHubStrickler on DIDs, the AT Protocol and Bluesky ("Antienshittification") — ystrickler.comHolly+ (Holly Herndon's voice model / licensing experiment) — holly.plusBooks & ideas citedThis Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World (Viking, 2019) — thiscouldbeourfuture.com · Penguin Random House"The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" (essay, 2019) — original on ystrickler.com · The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (Metalabel, 2024) — GoodreadsSamuel W. Franklin, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History (University of Chicago Press, 2023) — press.uchicago.eduVenkatesh Rao's "cozyweb," — Ribbonfarm

    1h 3m

  3. Jun 9

    [LIVE AT INDEX] The Datacenter Does Not Exist (Q&A w/ Dena Yago)

    Disintegrator's spring tour lecture, love to watch this continue to unfold in real life. Thanks to Index, Montez Radio, Hugh, Elie, the Disintegrator team and especially Dena Yago for joining us. For the visually hxc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xbWCcHbtWY (good slides).

    1h 15m
  4. [NECROLECTURE] The Excarnated Angel: On AI and the Impossibility of Touch

    Apr 28

    [NECROLECTURE] The Excarnated Angel: On AI and the Impossibility of Touch

    Marek solo ep. To be released on Nuda Mag 3 later this year in text form. Piece starts like 17 minutes in hahaha.

    41 min
  5. 45. El Apocalipsis Ya Está Aquí (w/ no.investigues)

    Apr 23

    45. El Apocalipsis Ya Está Aquí (w/ no.investigues)

    This episode is entirely in Spanish. English translation is here: https://marekpoliks.com/noinvestigues_transcript.  We are delighted to be joined by the algorithmically contagious memetic research project no.investigues. If you are chronically online, especially if you are familiar with the Spanish-speaking corners of the internet, you must have already interacted with one of the echoes of no.investigues —probably through their wonderful Substack, or in conversation at their Discord book club, or through the 28.research cluster, or most likely through monumental Instagram meme carousels. Their voice flows through online algorithmic inertia, yet the substance of their discourse exists in the shadow of virality. In this conversation, we talk about what it means to understand the apocalypse as an asymmetrical phenomenon: no one experiences it at the same time, and clearly not with the same intensity. This polyphonic nature of the apocalypse is amplified by the increasingly atomized and homogeneous global distribution of violence. Even so, the apocalypse is already here, and we might be better off learning how to inhabit it. Through an extrapolated reading of Ernesto Oroza’s visual archive Desobediencia Tecnológica (Technological Disobedience), documenting repurposed technology in Cuba, we talk about repurposing salvaged discourses into newly assembled modes of thinking that would allow us to confront the roughness of our apocalyptic situation. This invitation resonates with a thread that runs through our conversations ever since Exocapitalism came out: the premise that perhaps the apocalypse and capital are forces not to be treated as enemies, but as inertias of History. Both demand a nuanced engagement with their diverse local articulations of violence. Under this framework, the apocalypse feels like an ineluctable situation, one that cannot be won by fighting. Instagram: https://instagram.com/no.investigues/ Selected no.investigues substack posts: Pensamiento apocalíptico, una aproximación: https://substack.com/home/post/p-192881638 La Torre: https://substack.com/home/post/p-191289547 Desobediencia Tecnológica de Ernesto Oroza: https://substack.com/home/post/p-179603849 References: Valencia, Sayak. Capitalismo gore. Barcelona: Melusina, 2010. ISBN: 978-84-96614-87-1. Oroza, Ernesto. Desobediencia tecnológica: La permanencia de lo temporal en Cuba. Ciudad de México: FIEBRE Ediciones, 2025.

    1h 14m
  6. 44. The Grid (w/ Molly Taft)

    Apr 8

    44. The Grid (w/ Molly Taft)

    Molly Taft, Senior Writer at Wired, joins us to talk datacenters, AI, US power infrastructure, and big energy. You've almost definitely read her work, especially if you live in the US. This episode absolutely ROCKS and is maybe the most grounded and realistic assessment of the role that all of those above forces play together in our social and political moment.  A couple really relevant pieces, including some very very recent pieces. https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-google-funded-data-center-will-be-powered-by-a-massive-gas-plant/ https://www.wired.com/story/senators-demand-to-know-how-much-energy-data-centers-use/ https://www.wired.com/story/new-bernie-sanders-ai-safety-bill-would-halt-data-center-construction/ https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use-statistics/  https://www.wired.com/story/data-centers-are-driving-a-us-gas-boom/ https://www.wired.com/story/trump-energy-industry-ai-fossil-fuels-pittsburgh-summit/ https://www.wired.com/story/ai-carbon-emissions-energy-unknown-mystery-research/ Seriously, like, this is the only person I've found to be consistently trustworthy with respect to the intersection of energy reporting and tech. Follow her on X: https://x.com/mollytaft.  She also reccomends a few other pieces that we touch on a little bit:  Tina Nguyen's recent piece on the Pro-Human Declaration (right-wing populism X AI backlash) https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/888841/pro-human-ai-declaration-fli Gaby del Valle on the forefront of environmentalism and the right: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/04/state-of-nature-gaby-del-valle-acc-conservative-environmentalism/ Anti-renewable energy protests and anti-data center movements: https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/spotlight/data-centers-renewables-opposition

    1 hr
  7. 43. The Soft (w/ Laura Tripaldi)

    Mar 11

    43. The Soft (w/ Laura Tripaldi)

    We're joined by Laura Tripaldi: material scientist, writer, and researcher at the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai. You probably know her from Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), an essay in book form that became a phenomenon in theory and art circles.  Tripaldi's work challenges one of the strongest contentions within the philosophy computation: that intelligence is substrate-indifferent, that it can scale and migrate independent of what carries it. She argues the opposite, that you cannot separate intelligence from the materials through which it is conveyed. This becomes experimentally clear in her recent essay Substrates Unbound (Antikythera, 2025), where she tracks biocomputing systems like DishBrain — living neuronal cultures interfaced with silicon chips that don't execute pre-given code but reorganize, learn, and adapt. Mouse neurons and human neurons perform differently under the same training conditions. This reframes a central question of the moment: not 'can we scale intelligence,' but which matter are we asking to think, under what energy regime, and at what cost? References: Tripaldi, Laura. Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022).Tripaldi, Laura. "Substrates Unbound" (Antikythera, 2025).Tripaldi, Laura. Soft Futures (newsletter, Substack).Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto (1985).Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum, 2004) — source of the concept of hyper nature.Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China (Urbanomic, 2016) — source of the concept of cosmotechnics.Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke, 2007) — onto-epistemology and intra-action.Irigaray, Luce — referenced as an influence on Tripaldi's feminist materialism.Pasquinelli, Matteo. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023) — discussed in relation to technology as captured labor; Tripaldi pushes back via the history of automata.Laschi, Cecilia. Soft Robotics Lab, National University of Singapore — pioneer of octopus-inspired soft robotics.Hookway, Branden. Interface (MIT Press, 2014).

    56 min
  8. The Teachings of Salesforce Child

    Mar 2

    The Teachings of Salesforce Child

    Salesforce Child is our favorite artist. More here and on her instagram @salesforcechild. We're on TOUR see us: NY Sat 3/7: https://luma.com/k3ffx3ze YALE Sun 3/8: https://exocapitalismthedatacentr.rsvpify.com MIT Mon 3/9: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf4Jh4UAS4ZehWgZWHhlEWyMZNBvzcML-vWdBHOkcxHaA9Bhw/viewform?usp=header

    44 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
19 Ratings

About

What does it mean to be human in an age where experience and behavior are mediated and regulated by algorithms? The Disintegrator Podcast is a limited series exploring how Artificial Intelligence affects who we are and how we express ourselves. Join Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean as they speak to the artists, philosophers, scientists, and social theorists at the forefront of human-AI relations.  Disintegrator is produced by Rubén Bañuelos.

Information

  • Creator
    Roberto Alonso Trillo, Marek Poliks, and Helena McFadzean
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    64
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso
  • Show Website
    Disintegrator

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