Restless Grounds

Slow AI

Restless Grounds is a podcast about the ways in which computational technologies shape the way we see, make, and relate to the world. Hosted by researcher, artist and writer Mariana Fernández Mora, it brings together artists, designers, and researchers whose practices open up other ways of thinking about AI and the systems that sustain it. Each episode is an invitation to explore these ideas from the margins and to engage with practices that challenge the way we relate to technology.  Restless Grounds is part of Mariana’s Professional Doctorate research, Entangled Machines, with the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The podcast is funded by CoECI (Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation).

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    Vera van der Burg: Reflective AI, neuroscience, being emotional in art school, text to clay and existing between practices

    What can training an AI model teach us about the way we see?In this episode of Restless Grounds, Mariana Fernandez Mora speaks with artist and researcher Vera van der Burg about Reflective AI, a practice she developed during her doctoral research at TU Delft. Moving between neuroscience, design, machine learning, and ceramics, the conversation traces how a cup with twenty handles, a dismantled foam chair, and photographs of clay objects became ways to explore how we give meaning to what we see. Together, they consider what choosing and labelling images reveals about a maker’s tastes and habits, how the pace of working with clay changes the way Vera works with AI, and what it means to build and share her methods with other artists and designers.A conversation about perception, patience, and the choices that shape what we make. Recommended reading:Kazuo Ishiguro — Klara and the Sun (2021).James Bridle — Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (2022).References mentioned:Vera van der Burg — The Material Gaze: Reflective AI as a Design Practice (2026 doctoral dissertation, TU Delft).Vera van der Burg, Gijs de Boer, and Studio Digital Native — Objective Portraiture (2023 workshop at Design Academy Eindhoven).Vera van der Burg and collaborators — Ceci n’est pas une chaise: Emerging practices in designer-AI collaboration (2022).Vera van der Burg — From Text to Clay (exhibited at Dutch Design Week in 2025).

  2. 2d ago

    Chinouk Filique de Miranda: Webrings, feminist citation as a love language, AI-fashion pipeline, where my girls @ and performing the self

    What does it take to keep making yourself visible online?In this episode of Restless Grounds, Mariana Fernandez Mora speaks with Professional Doctorate researcher and critical fashion practitioner Chinouk Filique de Miranda about what fashion can tell us about life on platforms. Moving between influencer culture, the idea of a dead web, and AI shopping agents, the conversation explores how platforms shape what we see and what it takes to keep showing up in their feeds. They return to the webring as a form of resistance and a way to imagine how we might find and support each other online.  Drawing on Chinouk’s teaching in Online Fashion Systems, they consider how the concept of the girl can be used to play with being underestimated, how cuteness can make technologies feel familiar or desirable, and whose labour goes unseen when digital tools are designed to feel effortless.  A conversation about visibility, performance, and the room we have to play with what’s expected of us online. Recommended reading and viewing:Anjet Daanje — The Song of Stork and Dromedary (2022 Dutch original, 2026 English translation). Michelle Cotton (ed.) — Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 (2024 exhibition catalogue). Eugene Rabkin — Torn: Fashion and Postmodernism (2026). Ellen Ullman — Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology (2017). Mariana’s pick — BBC News’s Global Women interview with Meredith Whittaker (October 2026). References mentioned:Chinouk Filique de Miranda — softwear.directory, an online directory of practices working with and beyond digital fashion.Chinouk Filique de Miranda — Online Fashion Systems at ARTEZ, the course discussed in the episode.The dead web and the Living Web Institute.Lisa Nakamura — The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet (2026). Tiqqun — Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999 French original, 2012 English translation by Ariana Reines).

  3. 2d ago

    Metahaven: Everything is quantum, poetry, why we should care about art and transitional objects

    What happens to art when the ways we perceive the world begin to change? In this episode of Restless Grounds, Mariana Fernandez Mora speaks with Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven about their latest book, The Hard Question of Art: Cognitive Futures. Moving between filmmaking, absurdist poetry, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics, the conversation explores how art takes shape through our encounters with it, and questions the expectation that artists should be able to change the world.Together, they consider what poetry reveals about language and AI, how technologies influence which cultural forms survive, and whether art can act as a transitional object, something we invest with meaning that helps us navigate the relationship between ourselves and the world.A conversation about curiosity, attachment, and the shifting boundaries of art. Recommended reading: Yoko Tawada — Scattered All Over the Earth (2022 English translation by Margaret Mitsutani).David Z. Albert — After Physics (2015).Eugene Ostashevsky — The Feeling Sonnets (2022).Benjamín Labatut — When We Cease to Understand the World (2021 New York Review Books edition, translated by Adrian Nathan West).References mentioned: Metahaven — The Hard Question of Art: Cognitive Futures (2026).CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and the discovery of the Higgs boson (2012).Sean Carroll’s Mindscape, episode 36 — David Albert on Quantum Measurement and the Problems with Many-Worlds (2019).David Z. Albert — Quantum Mechanics and Experience (1992).GPT-2 and experiments in writing with AI.Tyna Eloundou, Sam Manning, Pamela Mishkin, and Daniel Rock — GPTs are GPTs, research on AI and occupational exposure (2023 preprint).Nina Beguš, Metahaven, and Gašper Beguš — Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans (2026 journal publication).David Hockney’s research on optical aids in painting.Albrecht Dürer’s lute-drawing illustration and Anthony van Dyck’s paintings.Daniel Dennett and Johann Sebastian Bach.Donald and Clare Winnicott’s work on transitional objects.

  4. Season 2 Trailer

    Welcome to season 2 of Restless Grounds

    In this introduction to the second season of Restless Grounds, Mariana Fernandez Mora shares how the podcast grew out of conversations she wished others could listen in on. This season, she speaks with artists, designers, and researchers whose work opens up other ways of thinking about AI and computational technologies. Their conversations begin with questions about how we see, what we value, what we make, and how we relate to one another. Mariana also introduces her doctoral research, Entangled Machines, and the questions it brings to the season. Taking the Clarion–Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean as a case study, she asks how the expansion of computational technologies is driving interest in deep-sea mining, and what gets lost when we understand the ocean through the resources it can yield. An invitation to eavesdrop, follow someone else’s thinking for a while, and see where it takes you. Mariana Fernández Mora is a researcher, artist and writer working at the intersection of artistic research, technology and critical theory. She traces the historical and ongoing connections between algorithmic systems, knowledge production and extractivism. In her Professional Doctorate with the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Entangled Machines, she develops the concept of “Planetary Somatics” to reflect on how computational systems reshape bodies, ecologies and forms of perception. She initiated the Slow AI project and is the host of the Restless Grounds podcast.

  5. 12/20/2025 ·  Bonus

    Season finale with Angelo Custódio on Technosomatics, collective listening, and resisting algorithmic determination

    In this bonus, uncut conversation, host Mariana Fernández Mora explores, in conversation with Angelo Custódio, the presence of the body in technological environments, its capacity for listening, and its role in collective emergence. Together, they discuss his work with voice, sound and somatic practice, where technology becomes a relational object rather than a tool of detachment. The discussion considers technosomatics as a way of keeping the body active inside technical systems, and how amplification, algorithmic effects and improvisation can open spaces of play that unsettle anxiety, expectations and default modes of expression. Listening emerges as a shared and negotiated form of attention, while vulnerability is understood as a condition for co-creation that requires continuous care. The episode reflects on how sound, embodiment and micro-resistances might interrupt the extractive logics of algorithmic design and invite alternative ways of sensing, relating and staying with complexity. At the end, you’ll be able to listen to “Something Older”, an audio piece created during the Material Playground Everything Evaporates in the spring of 2025. This piece was guided by Angelo and created in collaboration with the participants. The soundscapes in this episode were also created during this session. Thank you for listening, and see you next season!

  6. 12/08/2025

    Speculation, storytelling and the joy of earlier glitchy AI models

    In this episode, host Mariana Fernández Mora explores, in conversation with Janine Armin, Andy Dockett, and Sabine Niederer, how AI can act as a collaborator in collective imagination and storytelling. Returning to early experiments within the research group, the discussion examines how machine-generated text once introduced unruly narrative structures, fluid pronouns, and unfamiliar relationships between subjects, objects, and environments. Together, they reflect on why unpredictability felt so engaging and how early models enabled forms of co-creation that resisted closure, efficiency, and fixed hierarchies. The conversation considers the narrative assumptions embedded in contemporary AI systems, and how alternative, messier exchanges might reopen space for other voices, perspectives, and ways of telling stories. Soundscapes in this episode were created by artist and researcher Angelo Custódio during the Material Playground Everything Evaporates.

  7. 11/04/2025

    Technologies of Care and Resistance

    In this episode of Restless Grounds, host Mariana Fernández Mora is joined by Sabine Niederer, Flavia Dzodan, and Janine Armin to explore how storytelling, imagination, and artistic practice might offer resistance to extractive and colonial technological systems. The conversation moves through feminist, ecological, and anti-colonial frameworks, asking what it means to design, read, and live with technologies otherwise. Together, they consider how technological imaginaries might shift from instruments of control to carriers of shared relations, becoming small, situated, and/or attentive. The discussion touches on data feminism, carrier bag theory, and interspecies communication, tracing how alternative modes of knowledge and relation can unsettle dominant logics of automation, productivity, and mastery. What does it mean to treat machines as agents rather than tools? How can we practice care without reproducing extractive or gendered forms of labour? And what happens when we think of technology not as a project of mastery, but as a shared carrier bag, gathering histories, myths, and relations into new forms of collective life?The soundscapes in this episode were created by artist and researcher Angelo Custódio during the Material Playground “Everything Evaporates” (2025).

  8. 09/13/2025

    Translating Worlds, Dreaming Non-Capitalist Futures, and the Counter Human

    In this episode of Restless Grounds, host Mariana Fernández Mora is joined by Andy Dockett, Carlo De Gaetano, and Zachary Formwalt to reflect on what it means to consider yourself a storyteller, the importance of imagining alternative futures, finding joy and opening up new narratives that resist capitalism. Together, they explored the role of storytelling and imagination as resistance within the context of algorithmic systems and their entangled ecologies. From narrative as a site of refusal to the politics of speculative world-building, the conversation considers how creative and collective imaginaries offer tools for resisting extractive technological logics.Soundscapes in this episode were created by artist and researcher Angelo Custódio during the Slow AI Material Playground “Everything Evaporates.”

  9. 05/14/2025

    Unicorns, Forgetting, and Algorithmic Histories

    In this opening episode of Restless Grounds, we dive into the entangled histories of magic, technology, and capital. Our conversation explores how belief systems—from Enlightenment science to tarot, commodity fetishism to algorithmic “intelligence”—shape not only how we relate to technology, but how technologies are designed to relate to us. Host Mariana Fernández Mora is joined by Flavia Dzodan, Zachary Formwalt, and Carlo De Gaetano to think through magical thinking as both a historical foundation for Western science and a critical tool for deconstructing algorithmic systems today. Together, they ask: What does forgetting have to do with AI? What makes a dataset “magical”? What does a unicorn fossil tell us about the myth of objectivity? From tarot cards to financial systems, from emotional agents to algorithmic affect, this episode weaves together personal histories, critical theory, and artistic practice to confront the social, historical, and material dimensions of artificial intelligence and how AI systems reflect and obscure our histories. The soundscapes in this episode are courtesy of artist and researcher Angelo Custódio and were produced during the Material Playground he hosted, titled “Everything Evaporates.”

  • 1 Trailer
    8 Episodes

Trailer

About

Restless Grounds is a podcast about the ways in which computational technologies shape the way we see, make, and relate to the world. Hosted by researcher, artist and writer Mariana Fernández Mora, it brings together artists, designers, and researchers whose practices open up other ways of thinking about AI and the systems that sustain it. Each episode is an invitation to explore these ideas from the margins and to engage with practices that challenge the way we relate to technology.  Restless Grounds is part of Mariana’s Professional Doctorate research, Entangled Machines, with the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. The podcast is funded by CoECI (Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation).

Information

  • Creator
    Slow AI
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    9
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright Slow AI
  • Show Website
    Restless Grounds