Urgent Futures with Jesse Damiani Jesse Damiani

My guest this week is Landon Ross.
Landon Ross is a Los Angeles artist working primarily in painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Ross’s work explores the ontology of mathematics, consciousness, the self, and seeks to explore origin-stories of a distinct epistemological stance: those derived from nature. The artist’s once-central role in channeling the human inclination for the transcendent or the sublime is one that Ross seeks to continue from within the framework of naturalism.
As you can tell from his bio, Landon isn’t your “typical” artist! I met him through my work as a curator. Earlier this year I was fortunate to launch SMALL V01CE, an exhibition I curated for Honor Fraser Gallery, which examined the intersection of artificial intelligence and instinct, intuition, and feelings.
As I was refining that concept last year with Honor, and beginning to have conversations with artists, Honor connected me with Landon. Our studio visit was jam-packed full of ideas, not just about art but politics, media, philosophy, math, cosmology, evolution, the list goes on.
As I knew he would, Landon did create incredible work for the show, which we not only talk about in the episode, but which you can see for yourself in the show’s exhibition trailer on YouTube (hint, hint). But more importantly Landon has remained a friend and someone I’m always excited to dive into conversation with.
In a moment when it feels like many people who hold strong opinions are just ragebaiting or dunking online, Landon’s strong positions are deeply researched and deeply felt. I admire this quality in him, even—perhaps especially—in the moments where our perspectives diverge. In a highly polarized environment, it’s hard to go against what is perceived to be the party orthodoxy—in the U.S., that’s team red and team blue, and the various subfactions. A certain set of ideas is meant to “belong” to one group vs the other, or the group is meant to only discuss particular aspects of issues and not mention others.
Of course, there are bad faith takes here, and I don’t want to discount those. But what happens when your beliefs don’t fall neatly into those camps? Sometimes that’s the case with Landon—such as his opinions about free speech and why it’s vital for democracy, or the notion that beauty has an objective quality to it. The fact that he’s resolute enough to continue to voice them makes his voice a special one to hear from, especially in such a complex moment. So much more to say, but I’ll let you hear it from him.
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My guest this week is Autumn Breon.
Autumn Breon is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the visual vocabulary of liberation through a queer Black feminist lens. Using performance, sculpture, and public installation, Breon invites audiences to examine intersectional identities and Diasporic memory. Breon imagines her work as immersive invitations for the public to join in the reimagining and creation of systems that make current oppressive systems obsolete. Breon has created commissions for Target, Art Production Fund, Frieze Art Fair, and the ACLU of Southern California. Breon’s performance history includes Hauser & Wirth, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Water Mill Center. She is an alumna of Stanford University where she studied Aeronautics & Astronautics and researched aeronautical astrobiology applications. Breon is a recipient of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart Fellowship for Abolition & the Advancement of the Creative Economy and the Race Forward Fellowship for Housing, Land, and Justice.
Urgent Futures is no stranger to polymaths—folks who have idiosyncratic, hybrid expertise across domains—and Autumn definitely lives up to the term, from aeronautical astrobiology to arts and activism. This more recent expression of her practice encompasses many different forms, as you’ll see in this conversation. But what I so appreciate about her work is her commitment to equity, and using speculative futures, art, design, and performance to invite new imaginings for what contemporary reality could be. In some aspects this is super conceptual, such as in her use of Planet Esoterica as a storyworld from which she draws powerful metaphors, aesthetics, figures, and other artistic ideas. But in other aspects this imagining is rooted directly in the present, such as her groundbreaking Care Machine “Caravan,” through which she partnered with Plan C to provide free access to abortion pills for folks in different parts of the United States in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade.
Her focus on radical self-care feels like critical wisdom: it’s easy in the face of all the noise to throw ourselves into our work, whether that’s the grind of jobs and side hustles or activist causes. Either way, beginning from a place of self-care enables us in turn to genuinely care for others in our community—whatever form that community might take. It’s so simple and yet, speaking for myself, something that I forget so often. If you’re like me in that regard, this is definitely an important episode for you! And even if you have that all figured out, this episode is chock-full of insights across art, technology, activism, speculative fiction, and more, so buckle up!
If you’re loving the Urgent Futures podcast…
Please subscribe + leave a review on your preferred podcast platform! Both things help the podcast grow. Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, AI, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, journalism, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
Support Reality Studies:
NOTE: Thank you for supporting my work by purchasing these products through the links provided. I will only ever share products I actually believe in.
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My guest this week is Nita Farahany.
Nita Farahany is a pioneering changemaker and leading authority at the intersection of law, ethics, and technology. As the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law & Philosophy at Duke Law School, and Founding Director of Duke Science & Society, she drives transformative discussions on technology's ethical implications. Her seminal book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (2023), charts a pathway to cognitive freedom in an increasingly interconnected world. A highly sought after speaker, her insights resonate from TED stages to the World Economic Forum. Serving on President Obama’s Presidential Commission (2010-2017) and advising entities including the U.S. BRAIN Initiative and the World Economic Forum, her expertise influences global technology policy. With a JD and Ph.D. in law and philosophy from Duke University, an AB in Genetics from Dartmouth, and ALM in Biology from Harvard, Farahany's interdisciplinary background informs her role as a prominent voice shaping global discourse on emerging technologies. Her leadership has been recognized broadly, including by election to the American Law Institute, AAAS, appointment to the Uniform Laws Commission, and her advisory role for Scientific American.
I know everybody is still caught up on AI, and for good reason. But AI is far from the only technology that holds incredible promise and peril for our species. Another is neurotechnology. Neurotech is a broad, squishy category. On Wikipedia, it’s described as “[encompassing] any method or electronic device which interfaces with the nervous system to monitor or modulate neural activity.”
One form of neurotech that has garnered attention—or at least meme-able social media moments—is brain-computer interface technology. Remember the monkey playing pong with its brain using Neuralink technology? You probably know this already, but Neuralink is owned by Elon Musk. So let’s imagine for a moment that Neuralink succeeds in rolling out the first mainstream BCIs. How would you feel about that single company knowing your mental, emotional, and psychological responses to stimuli? Things you might not even realize about yourself?
Suddenly it makes a lot of sense why we need clear frameworks for protecting individuals now, rather than waiting until the technology is being rolled out to the public. This is why Professor Nita Farahany claims we urgently need to protect our fundamental right to “cognitive liberty.” She elaborates this idea in The Battle for Your Brain, what I see as the defining book on modern neurotechnology. Furthermore, she does an exceptional job in the book describing the state of affairs of neurotech as an industry and community, highlighting both the reasons to be excited and concerned about the technology, as well as sketching how we could begin incorporating legal protections through the human rights framework. And this week the book got a special paperbook release with an all-new chapter on—wait for it!—AI. So it’s a perfect time to go grab a copy, which I strongly encourage you to do!
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Please subscribe + leave a review on your preferred podcast platform! Both things help the podcast grow. Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, AI, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, journalism, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.
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Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
Cyborg. When you hear the word, you probably think of something like Blade Runner, Westworld, or the Terminator. Shiny tech with a dash of dystopia. But what if I told you there’s a totally different way of thinking about and understanding cyborgs? This other way of understanding cyborgs, cyborg theory, also seeks to understand the relationship between humans and machines—but it’s rooted in examining that relationship through real-world power dynamics such as race, gender, and disability. There’s nothing wrong with the Hollywood examples I mentioned! After all, they’re stories meant to entertain. They’re not necessarily concerned with putting forward a healthy vision of real-world cyborg futures—their focus is on telling compelling stories.
But cyborg theory gives us a lens through which to view technology as it actually exists today: asking critical questions about how it’s built, who it is (and isn’t) built for, and why.  This might sound a little conceptual, but it matters tremendously for our collective futures, and the great news is: this conversation is with the two perfect people, ahem, cyborgs to sensemake the subject with us: Professors Laura Forlano and Danya Glabau. They’ve just published the book Cyborg, out with MIT Press, which is both an excellent introduction to the subject and a foundational text for their notion of “critical cyborg literacy.” 
As you’ve probably gathered by now, there are a bunch of ways to understand the word “cyborg,” and competing ideas within feminist scholarship about how we talk about the subject, so instead of me trying to map it all out here, I’m instead going to direct us back to this illuminating conversation with Professors Laura Forlano and Danya Glabau.
MORE ABOUT LAURA & DANYA:
Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation-funded scholar, is a disabled writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is Professor in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University. She is the author of Cyborg (with Danya Glabau, MIT Press 2024) and an editor of three books: Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press 2019), digitalSTS (Princeton University Press 2019) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.
Danya Glabau is a medical anthropologist and STS scholar researching health activism, the medical economy, and how human bodies become valuable data. She directs the Technology Ethics undergraduate curriculum at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and teaches in the NYU Tandon Integrated Design and Media graduate program. She has authored two books, Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care (2022, University of Minnesota Press), and Cyborg (2024, MIT Press; co-authored with Laura Forlano, Northeastern University). Her latest research investigates how new parents use parenting advice, with a focus on how digital resources, apps, and devices shape modern ideas about what makes a “good” parent.
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My guests today are Eryk Salvaggio & Caroline Sinders.
What role do artists actually play in society? What about in the development of AI? It’s easy to speak in vague, grandiose terms about the power of art, but when do the actual actions, techniques, and interventions of artists amount to real-world impact? I’m not saying that art needs to lead to impact, but it’s important that we’re clear about the moments it does so that we can learn from the ways it did and to what extent it was successful. More broadly, it helps us see the unique ways that art can communicate ideas within society.
Across their multidisciplinary practices, Caroline Sinders and Eryk Salvaggio embody the possibilities of the arts—and artistic approaches—as agents for culture change, for producing new ways of thinking, seeing, and being. As you’ll see in the conversation, there are multiple topics I could have gotten into with each of them that would have amply filled an episode.  For this conversation, I was especially keen to get into the subject of AI with them, jumping off from their shared work in ARRG, the algorithmic resistance research group, which has as its goal to explore the creative misuse of Generative AI, Machine Learning, and other automated data analysis systems. This artistic “hacking” approach to AI feels vital right now—in which I and many others feel we’re at a foundational moment in collectively determining our values and policies around machine learning technologies. Efforts like ARRG, as well as so much other amazing stuff they each respectively do, offer necessary alternative ways of imagining, which—at least hopefully—help the rest of us orient ourselves toward realizing futures we actually want.
Eryk Salvaggio is an artist, writer and researcher interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work, which is centered in creative misuse and the right to refuse, critiques the mythologies and ideologies of tech design that ignore the gaps between datasets and the world they claim to represent. A blend of hacker, policy researcher, designer and artist, he has been published in academic journals, spoken at music and film festivals, and consulted on tech policy at the national level. He is the Emerging Technology Research Advisor for the Siegel Family Endowment and a 2024 Flickr Foundation Research Fellow. Eryk's website is cyberneticforests.com.
Caroline Sinders is an award winning critical designer, researcher, and artist. They’re the founder of human rights and design lab, Convocation Research + Design. For the past few years, they have been examining the intersections of artificial intelligence, intersectional justice, systems design, harm, and politics in digital conversational spaces and technology platforms. They’ve worked with the Tate Exchange at the Tate Modern, the United Nations, the UK’s Information Commissioner's Office, the European Commission, Ars Electronica, the Harvard Kennedy School and others. Caroline is currently based between London, UK and New Orleans, USA. 
Support Reality Studies:
NOTE: Thank you for supporting my work by purchasing these products through the links provided. I will only ever share products I actually believe in.
ZBiotics: Right now, get 10% off ZBiotics. Just head over to zbiotics.com and use code JESSEDAMIANI. If you have an evening with drinking and a morning you need to feel fresh, I strongly recommend these.
Genetically engineered by a team of PhD microbiologists, ZBiotics is a probiotic drink that breaks down the byproduct of alcohol responsible for rough mornings after drinking (acetaldehyde).
NordVPN: Right now, get up to 62% off + 3 months extra through this link. Some people tell me that “VPN” brings to mind ideas of hackers and the dark web, but honestly VPNs are just an extremely easy way to stay much safer online. I’ve used NordVPN for the past four years, and appreciate what they offer, including Threat Protect

Pollution is a massive problem—yet it rarely gets the kind of play other climate issues receive. But did you know that some scientists and mycologists are using mycelium to detoxify contaminated sites? It's pretty incredible stuff—and my guest this week, Danielle Stevenson, is a leading expert in this field of 'mycoremediation.'
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
My guest this week is Danielle Stevenson.
Danielle Stevenson is a multidisciplinary scientist, mycologist and environmental problem-solver who works with soils, fungi, plants and people to address wastes and pollution in creative and circular ways. She holds a Bachelors of Humanities from the University of Victoria and a PhD in Environmental Toxicology from the University of California Riverside. Her dissertation research focused on bioremediation of brownfields with fungi and plants. She also founded and runs D.I.Y. Fungi (est. 2012) for research, education and action around fungal food, medicine, waste management and remediation, and Healing City Soils (est. 2015) with the Compost Education Centre to provide soil metal testing, resources, and community bioremediation for people growing food.
She currently serves on the Department of Toxic Substances Control's Equitable Community Revitalization Grant (ECRG) Treatment Technology Council (TTC) and the Board of Corenewal. She is involved in many projects and organizations around the world supporting regeneration of lands and waters, environmental education and community-capacity building. Learn more about her work here: https://www.danielle-stevenson.com/ and https://diyfungi.blog/ and connect over: linkedin.com/in/danielle-stevenson.
Wow, this conversation with Danielle was so illuminating—and, in its way super hopeful. As I’ve mentioned before, I take the “urgent” in the title of Urgent Futures broadly—it doesn’t have to indicate a blaring alarm. There can be urgent play, imagination, and comedy, for example. But in this case there really is a blaring alarm: pollution is a major threat, and as Danielle discusses, it just doesn’t seem to get as much attention as some other climate change issues. I’m fascinated by possibilities of fungi for bioremediation—for bringing life back into contaminated sites, especially through Danielle’s focus in “mycoremediation.” Danielle is one of the leading minds working in this arena. These types of solutions show why ecological approaches to crisis hold so much more potential than trying to build a magical quick fix.
Support Reality Studies:
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Genetically engineered by a team of PhD microbiologists, ZBiotics is a probiotic drink that breaks down the byproduct of alcohol responsible for rough mornings after drinking (acetaldehyde).
NordVPN: Right now, get up to 71% off + 3 months extra through this link. Some people tell me that “VPN” brings to mind ideas of hackers and the dark web, but honestly VPNs are just an extremely easy way to stay much safer online. I’ve used NordVPN for the past four years, and appreciate what they offer, including Threat Protection against malware, 24/7 customer support, fast speeds, and more. One account can protect up to 6 devices (phone and computer), and they don’t track or share what you do online. Another benefit: you can always access the content/apps you have at home, wherever in the world you are.
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