Human Entities Podcast
18 episodes - English - Latest episode: 12 months ago -Human Entities is a series of public talks focused on technological change and its impacts – the ways in which culture and technology shape and influence each other.
Organised by CADA, the programme takes place annually in Lisbon.
Listen to recordings from 2023 to 2022.
In partnership with the Lisbon Architecture Triennale
Funded by: The Dir.-Gen. for the Arts of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture
Supported by: Lisbon City Council, NOVA-LINCS
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Episodes
Human Entities 2023: Joanna Bryson
June 06, 2023 15:40 - 1 hour - 235 MBHuman Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Seventh edition, Wednesday 17 May 2023 Authorship, Agency, and Moral Obligation Joanna Bryson Professor of Ethics and Technology in the Centre for Digital Governance at Hertie School in Berlin How much of our individual human experience can we absorb into machine models when we use machine learning and a huge amount of data? Will AI become sentient? Sovereign? Ambitious? How will living with AI change our daily experience? ...
Human Entities 2023: Orit Halpern
June 06, 2023 15:32 - 1 hour - 167 MBHuman Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Seventh edition, Wednesday 3 May 2023 Smart Power Orit Halpern Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic volatility have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, scientists, and governments towards computational technologies as sites of potential salvation from a world consisten...
Human Entities 2023: Manuel Arriaga + Pedro Magalhães
June 06, 2023 15:31 - 1 hour - 135 MBHuman Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Seventh edition, Wednesday 26 April 2023 Rebooting democracy Manuel Arriaga + Pedro Magalhães Manuel Arriaga is a university professor and one of the founders of the Fórum dos Cidadãos; Pedro Magalhães is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon Democracy is a technology of collective decision-making that aggregates intentions and defines a course of action. However, according to the diagnosis ...
Human Entities 2023: Mark Leckey
June 06, 2023 14:51 - 1 hour - 134 MBHuman Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence Seventh edition, Wednesday 19 April 2023 Artist talk Mark Leckey Mark Leckey is one of the most influential artists working today. Since the late 1990s, his work has looked at the relationship between popular culture and technology as well as exploring the subjects of youth, class and nostalgia. He works with sculpture, film, sound and performance – and sometimes all four at once. In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Ma...
Human Entities 2022: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
November 08, 2022 13:52 - 1 hour - 130 MBOrganized in partnership with the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, Communication Design and of Multimedia Arts departments Discriminating Data, a conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Canada 150 Chair in New Media, Director, Digital Democracies Institute In Discriminating Data [2021], Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and iden...
Human Entities 2022: Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
July 29, 2022 16:43 - 1 hour - 70.3 MBArtist Talk Paola Torres Núñez del Prado Artist Somewhat similar to what it is commonly said about migrants, autonomous machines are taken to be a potential threat to some human labour. In military environments, these systems and their efficiency can, in fact, be more lethal than those controlled by people. This idea allows us to roll back to the core definition of intelligence which, since the Industrial Revolution has been deeply linked with efficiency-as-productivity, and subsequent av...
Human Entities 2022: Bram Büscher
July 29, 2022 14:56 - 2 hours - 119 MB#NatureTruthPower: Política ambiental na era da pós-verdade e das plataformas digitais Bram Büscher Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University How should we share the truth about the environmental crisis? At a moment when even the most basic facts about ecology and the climate face contestation and contempt, environmental advocates are at an impasse. Many have turned to social media and digital technologies to shift the tide. But what i...
Human Entities 2021: Jennifer Gabrys
November 19, 2021 13:07 - 59 minutes - 37.6 MBSensing Smart Forests Jennifer Gabrys Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge Forests are increasingly sensorized environments. Whether in the form of camera traps to monitor organisms or the Internet of Things to detect wildfires, there are an array of sensor technologies that observe and constitute forests in relation to scientific inquiry, Indigenous land claims, environmental governance, and disaster prevention and mitigation. ...
Human Entities 2021: Alexandre Estrela
November 19, 2021 13:07 - 1 hour - 43.1 MBArtist talk Alexandre Estrela, Artist A conversation about the parallel communication (or the lack of it) between Art and Science in the context of the work of Alexandre Estrela. This includes the collaboration with Moita Lab from the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, the Company Orange and the Human Language Technology Laboratory INESC-ID/IST. Bio Alexandre Estrela’s work is an investigation into the essence of images that expands spatially and temporally through different media. In ...
Human Entities 2021: Inês Cisneiros
November 17, 2021 18:00 - 1 hour - 51.2 MBThe European Union’s regulatory framework for Artificial Intelligence Inês Cisneiros Lawyer On her appointment as President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen made regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) a top priority. In her view legislation is fundamental to safeguard the European Union’s citizens’ fundamental rights and encourage investment in safe innovation and technological development. As a result, in April 2021, the European Commission presented a proposal which ...
Human Entities 2020: Julia Steinberger
December 05, 2020 14:55 - 1 hour - 86 MBGreen growth or Degrowth: climate action and human prosperity Julia Steinberger Professor of Ecological Economics, University of Lausanne Lisbon, 26 November 2020 New research from ecological economics shows that we need to rapidly physically degrow our economies to avoid the worst effects of climate breakdown. Green growth might have been at best a dream, at worst a narrative designed to delay action. What does this mean for human well-being and political action? Julia Steinberger Prof...
Human Entities 2020: Joe Paton
December 05, 2020 14:54 - 1 hour - 121 MBOn minds and machines Joe Paton Computational neuroscientist, director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, Lisbon Lisbon, 19 November 2020 Brains and computers both perform computations, yet for the most part, their similarity ends there. Nervous systems have evolved over the last several hundred million years to support the survival of organisms in which they are situated. Man made computers exist due to theoretical and technical innovations of the 20th century, and are powerless...
Human Entities 2020: Margarida Mendes
December 05, 2020 14:54 - 53 minutes - 60.9 MBRiver systems and the molecular body Margarida Mendes Curator, researcher and activist Lisbon, 12 November 2020 Can we actually trace the exact perimeter of a river’s molecular cartography and the extent of the consequences that these systems of catalytic flux have within and outside living bodies? River systems and their surrounding infrastructures are enormous hydrogeological, chemical and electromagnetic systems that connect their surrounding inhabitants and ecosystems through an irrev...
Human Entities 2020: Andrea Pavoni
December 05, 2020 14:53 - 1 hour - 98.5 MBnavigating the urban fog: on urban adaptation Andrea Pavoni Research fellow at DINÂMIA’CET, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa Lisbon, 4 November 2020 The talk dives into the impalpable atmosphere of everyday urban life, through which we breathe, experience, and feel the city. In times of aesthetic capitalism, politics of fear, ubiquitous computing, and airborne diseases, this inconspicuous background has become the battleground of urban politics. Digital technologies, branded imaginaries ...
Human Entities 2019: James Bridle
November 20, 2019 17:09 - 1 hour - 188 MBOther Intelligences James Bridle Artist and writer Lisbon, 27 March 2019 We have spent the last hundred years attempting to master the world with calculation, with mathematics, physics, and digital technologies. We have come to believe that the world can be reduced to data – and only data matters. And yet the world still teems with life and our algorithms seem incapable of capturing its complexities; our supposedly logical worldview seems to lead us to fear, distrust, and polarisation, an...
Human Entities 2019: Stephanie Hare
November 20, 2019 17:08 - 2 hours - 81.8 MBFacing Up to Biometrics Stephanie Hare Researcher and broadcaster Lisbon, 17 April 2019 Our face, voice, DNA, fingerprints and other data about our bodies (also known as our biometrics) are increasingly being used by governments and companies to identify and monitor us, and to analyse, predict and control our behaviour. The risk to our privacy, our civil liberties and our democracies is so grave that even technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon are asking for regulation. What ...
Human Entities 2016: Alice Benessia, Sara M. Watson
July 06, 2016 15:00 - 1 hour - 70.8 MBAlice Benessia Do we really want and need to be smart? Can we? The imaginaries of the Internet of Things and their inherent contradictions Emergent information and communication technologies (ICT), such as the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), constantly redefine the texture of our culture, society and lifestyle, raising a number of fundamental epistemic, normative and ethical issues, in a constant co-evolution. These technologies are constructed, named, offered, and ultimately regulate...
Human Entities 2016: !Mediengruppe Bitnik
May 09, 2016 16:00 - 1 hour - 50.4 MBArtists’ group !Mediengruppe Bitnik will present recent works exploring internet subculture, surveillance and bots. They will talk about their recently completed work Random Darknet Shopper which directly connected art spaces with the darknet via an automated online shopping bot. With a weekly budget of $100 in Bitcoins, the bot went shopping on the deep web where it randomly chose and purchased one item and had it mailed directly to the exhibition space, creating a landscape of traded goods...