The Culture & Technology Podcast Vienna Business Agency

The Culture and Technology Podcast explores how technology is rewiring the future of cultural production and experiences.

Host Severin Matusek has spent the last decade researching how technology transforms culture, communities and society. In this virtual salon, together with Vienna's Business Agency, he brings together Vienna’s creative thinkers with international experts to offer insights into the way culture is changing – and the new communities, spaces and experiences emerging along the way.

Keiken is an interdisciplinary artist collective exploring our relationship to technology through immersive and sensorial experiences. Through their work, the group asks questions about how societal constructs are shaping the construction of virtual space and how we might better relate to an unfamiliar virtual environment. Together with Eva Fischer and Martina Menegon, curators of Vienna’s CIVA festival, we explore the work of Keiken and talk about how these experiences can equip us to build a more emancipatory future.

What feelings does technology evoke? Thanks to pop culture, Hollywood, and the media, technological narratives tend to swing between the utopic or dystopic – the glorious or the terrifying.

For Episode 1 of The Culture and Technology Podcast, we invite Professor of Anthropology Shannon Mattern and media theorist and curator Paul Feigelfeld to deconstruct the concept and explore its intersections with culture.

What if technology could help us transcend the limits of our own brains and bodies, and connect us to the experiences of other living beings? That’s precisely what artist Barnaby Steel and his studio Marshmallow Laser Feast invite you to do through their multisensory installations and virtual reality interfaces.

For Episode 2 of the Culture and Technology Podcast, Eva Fischer, curator and initiator of CIVA Vienna’s new media art festival, talks to Barney about how VR can help us to reconnect with the world beyond our filter bubbles.

When an object consists of bits instead of atoms, how do you preserve and display it for future generations?

For Episode 3 of the Culture and Technology Podcast, two pioneers of digital culture curation, Natalie Kane at London’s V&A and Marlies Wirth at Vienna’s MAK, discuss the digital objects and share the challenges and rewards of collecting art that tells the story of our current moment – from Amazon Echo to the Women’s March Pussyhat.

When we’re unable to gather in person, unable to experience the magic of encounters and exchange in physical proximity, what is lost?

For the bonus Episode 4 of the Culture and Technology Podcast – recorded in German – two friends and doyennes of theatre, actor Mavie Hörbiger and costume designer Aino Laberenz pick up the phone to consider how the pandemic’s restrictions have cast new light on their metier. By calling into question the relevance of art in times of crisis, they find its role to be of existential importance.