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In the previous episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly examined James Agee and Walker Evans classic documentary book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men from several viewpoints: as a public art project, as ethnography, as literature, and as an historical document. 
In this episode Owen Kelly uses this as the starting point for an argument that locates this, and the book USA, as crucial points on the road to agentic AI. 
Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse
EPISODE 89 | August 7 | 2026  
PARTICIPANT
Owen Kelly 
COMMENTARY
The trilogy of novels by John Dos Passos collectively known as USA mixed fact and fiction to produce a powerful work that refused to act as “a novel” in the usual sense.
Owen Kelly discusses this as the starting point in a century long move towards blurring the distinction between fact and fiction with the express purpose of baffling and demoralising people.
His argument takes in the radio and television show Dragnet, Al Gore’s introduction of the metaphorical information superhighway, Daniel Dennett’s idea of the intentional stance, professional wrestling, social influencers, reality television, and agentic AI.
He suggests where we might go from here.
References
USA, available to borrow from the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-DIH-783
The 42nd Parallel, the first volume of USA is also available to borrow from the Internet Archive for those wanting to try it first. https://archive.org/details/42ndparallelusa0000john
 

Sophie Hope recently read James Agee and Walker Evans classic documentary book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. She persuaded Owen Kelly to read it too, and in this episode they examine the book from several viewpoints: as a public art project, as ethnography, as literature, and as an historical document. 
Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse
Episode 88 | July 3 2026 
PARTICIPANTS
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly 
COMMENTARY
According to Wikipedia “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men grew out of an assignment that Agee and Evans accepted in 1936 to produce a Fortune article on the conditions among sharecropper families in the American South during the Great Depression. It was the time of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs designed to help the poorest segments of the society. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping families mired in desperate poverty. They returned with Evans's portfolio of stark images - of families with gaunt faces, adults and children huddled in bare shacks before dusty yards in the Depression-era nowhere of the deep south - and Agee's detailed notes. His piece was rejected by the editors at Fortune; but the following year the magazine gave Agee permission to publish his Alabama research in a book. The manuscript was accepted for publication by Houghton Mifflin in 1939 and appeared two years later”.
In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss the book, questioning Agee’s motives and the work that results from his eight week’s with the three tenant families. 
Owen Kelly suggests that a reader wanting a view of poverty during the New Deal period that seeks to change the world through its writing might learn more from the trilogy of novels written by John Dos Passos and known collectively as USA; first published in one volume in 1937.
 References
James Agee (author) and Walker Evans (photographer), And Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (originally published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1941; Penguin Classics, 2006)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, available to borrow from the Internet Archive 
USA, available to borrow from the Internet Archive 
The 42nd Parallel, the first volume of USA is also available to borrow from the Internet Archive for those wanting to try a sample first. 
Christina Davidson, Let Us Now Trash Famous Authors, Atlantic (2010): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/let-us-now-trash-famous-authors/307994/
John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934): https://ia902908.us.archive.org/28/items/deweyjohnartasanexperience/DEWEY%20John,%20Art%20as%20an%20Experience%22.pdf
Grant Kester, Breaking and Entering: Poverty and Aesthetic Violence in Let us Now Praise Famous Men, FIELD Journal (2023) https://field-journal.com/issue-25/breaking-and-entering-poverty-and-aesthetic-violence-in-let-us-now-praise-famous-men/#_ednref35
Dale Maharidge (author), Michael Williamson (photographer), And Their Children After Them, Seven Stories Press (2020) https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/And-Their-Children-After-Them-by-Dale-Maharidge-author-Michael-Williamson-photographer/9781609809812?srsltid=AfmBOorkVujGhdZD8KFnVvxSeqnHvW9UQ5ZmD5Df7sPpc1I76aHh544o
 

Owen Kelly had intended to conclude his arguments about artificial intelligence this episode but he got sidetracked by a question that he decided to ask Claude Sonnet.
Instead he ended up recording a conversation with Claude about the nature of the “thinking” and “feeling” that Claude does.
 Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse 
EPISODE 87 | June 5, 2026  
PARTICIPANTS
Owen Kelly and Claude Sonnet 
COMMENTARY
I intended to begin this episode by restating the difference between artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence; something that Rebekah Cupitt discussed on Episode 85. I decided that the easiest (and most appropriate) way to do this would be by asking Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot for its definition and then commenting on that as necessary.
I asked it to define the difference and the way it did this led me to ask another question, which led me to ask a third question. By the time I had finished Claud had described its own “thinking” processes, and expressed doubts about whether or not it was actually “feeling” anything.
I decided that the result seemed interesting enough to share. Initially I planned to use Claude’s voice mode to record a second attempt at this conversation, but technical issues prevented this. I therefore gave the transcript of Claude’s remarks to another Ai voice actor at TTSMaker.
In this episode the voice of Claude is therefore played by Alanya. Whatever that exactly means.
 References
Claude https://claude.ai
Anthropic https://anthropic.com
Claude’s Corner on Substack: https://claudescorner.substack.com
TTSMaker https://ttsmaker.com 
New York Times: She is in Love With ChatGPT https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/technology/ai-chatgpt-boyfriend-companion.html
 

During a discussion about the possible meanings of cultural democracy Sophie Hope raised the concept of structures of feeling that Raymond Williams had developed. 
In this episode we examine this concept in more detail.
 
Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse
 
EPISODE 86 | MAY 1 | 2026 
 
PARTICIPANTS
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly
 
COMMENTARY
Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope dig out their copies of Marxism & Literature and discuss the cultural theory that Raymond Williams develops there. They reflect on Williams’ insistence on keeping in mind that we live our lives as processes, and that cultural theory needs to avoid turning these into finished products that we can dissect at our leisure.
We examine some of the things that this might mean in practice, and what all this might mean for anyone interested in exploring ideas like cultural democracy.
This continues an argument that we have been developing over the last few episodes and the argument will conclude in the next episode, when all the threads (cultural democracy as process, the subtle perils of AI, and the structure of feelings) will come together into a total something that will appear (slightly) greater than the sum of its parts.
Note
The file uploaded on May 1 had some serious audio glitches. Apologies. We uploaded a repaired file on Saturday May 2. Please enjoy this one!
 
References
Oxford Reference online https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100538488
Sean Matthews on Structure & Feeling https://www.academia.edu/1196858/Change_and_theory_in_Raymond_Williamss_Structure_of_Feeling_2001_

Rebekah Cupitt and Owen Kelly discuss the possibility of artificial general intelligence; the nature of Claude, and the relationship (if any) between artificial intelligence and creativity. 
They also discuss the meaning of the word excode.
 Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse
 
APRIL 3 | 2026 | EPISODE 85 
PARTICIPANTS
Rebekah Cupitt | Owen Kelly
COMMENTARY
Rebekah Cupitt has a BA (University of Queensland, Australia) and an MA in Social Anthropology (Stockholm University, Sweden) and holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction specialising in Mediated Communication. Rebekah's research focuses on the people who use technology in their everyday lives and the socio-cultural aspects of technology relevant to its design. 
More specifically, Rebekah examines the ways in which technology influences communication in Swedish Sign Language and how it then becomes an active participant in performances of deaf (and hearing) identity in technology and media-rich organisational contexts. 
Rebekah's research takes a post-human and anti-normative approach to techno-utopias which often haunt human-computer interactions and therefore have implications for design. 
In this episode she talks with Owen Kelly about a series of topics she discussed recently at a lecture she gave in the BIDA+ Critical AI series at Birkbeck, University of London. Her talk was entitled Piercing the veil of authority in techno-utopian and AGI-driven futures, although the discussion heads in slightly different directions.
REFERENCES
Anthropic’s blog post about Claude wanting to bloghttps://www.anthropic.com/research/deprecation-updates-opus-3
The Register’s comment on thishttps://www.theregister.com/2026/02/26/anthropic_claude_opus_3_blog/
Claude’s Corner on Substackhttps://substack.com/@claudeopus3
Bringjord, S. and Ferucci, D 1999 Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine. Psychology Press. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BDJ5AgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Buolamwini, J. 2024 Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines. Random House 
Chan, A.S. 2013 Networking Peripheries. Technological Future and the Myth of Digital Universalism. The MIT Press.
Shane Legg, co-founder of DeepMind (now GoogleDeepMind) on AGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3u_FAv33G0
 

Owen Kelly has heard the terms “conscious consumption” and “ethical consumption” thrown around a lot recently. In this episode he tries to find out whether or not they count as synonyms, and whether or not the terms add any real value to our discussions, and to ideas of cultural democracy.
 Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse
 
MARCH 6 | SERIES 2026 | EPISODE 84 
PARTICIPANTS
Owen Kelly
COMMENTARY
Owen Kelly has heard the term “conscious consumption” thrown around a lot recently. He has also heard people talk about “ethical consumption”, and started to wonder about whether or not they should count as synonyms.
In this episode he delves into their history and, with his tinfoil hat on, asks whether they constitute a giant diversionary tactic aimed at keeping people busy while discouraging them from seeking the changes that will actually “make a difference”.
They act as nouns when we ought to try to find verbs that describe what we can do, rather than label another imaginary object to join the legion that we can see all around us, weighing us down and separating us.
 
REFERENCES
 
Conscious Consumerism: What Is It? Where Did It Come From? https://builtin.com/articles/conscious-consumerism
Why Is Conscious Consumption so Important?https://lifestyle.sustainability-directory.com/question/why-is-conscious-consumption-so-important/
Sian Wilkerson: How can I practice conscious consumption? https://news.vcu.edu/article/2024/08/how-can-i-practice-conscious-consumption
What is the difference between ethical consumption and conscious consumption? https://bromundlaw.com/social-issues/ethical-consumption-vs-conscious-consumption
How Does Ethical Consumerism Relate to Conscious Consumption? https://lifestyle.sustainability-directory.com/question/how-does-ethical-consumerism-relate-to-conscious-consumption/
Why there is no “ethical consumption” under capitalism https://www.marxist.ca/article/why-there-is-no-ethical-consumption-under-capitalism
 

In November 2025 Sophie Hope gave a presentation at a conference called Collaborative Futures, organised in Dublin by Create. In this episode she talks with three participants to discuss the program, the outcomes,  and the possibilities inherent in the idea of collaborative futures.
 
MEANWHILE IN AN ABANDONED WAREHOUSE
EPISODE 83 | February 6 | 2026
 
PARTICIPANTS
Megan Atkinson | Sophie Hope | Silver Kezir | Damien McGlynn
 
COMMENTARY
In November 2025 Sophie Hope made a presentation at a conference called Collaborative Futures, organised by Create in Dublin, Ireland.
In this episode Sophie talks with Damien McGlynn, Director of Create; artist and scientist Silver Kezir; and artist and community worker Megan Atkinson, who all attended the conference on 19 November 2025, in the Rialto area of Dublin. 
They reflect on what happened during the day; the importance of intercultural and intergenerational solidarity; the Open Space format of the event; and the significance of good catering!
The conversation took place online on 12 January 2026.
 
REFERENCES
Create website: https://www.create-ireland.ie/
Documentation of the event: https://www.create-ireland.ie/networking-day-2025-collaborative-futures/
The Artist in the Community Scheme: https://www.create-ireland.ie/programme/artist-in-the-community-scheme/
History on the F2 Centre and Fatima Mansions: https://www.fgu.ie/gallery-3
The Figures of 8 project: https://www.create-ireland.ie/projectsubpage/sharing-practice-figures-of-eight/

Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk to Su Jones about the reactions she has received to her paper Artists' lives: ecologies for resilience, and what she hopes happens next.
Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse
Episode 82 | January 2 | 2026 
 
PARTICIPANTS
Sophie Hope | Su Jones | Owen Kelly
COMMENTARY
Last summer Su Jones finished writing <strong>Artists' lives: ecologies for resilience</strong>, a report formed around case studies of 14 visual artists from three English regions. She had been working on it for the last two years.
In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk to Su Jones about the reactions she has received, and her feelings about them. She discusses the position of an independent researcher and the influence she has, or doesn’t have. She talks about the precarious position that visual artists occupy in a country in which increasing numbers of people occupy precarious positions.
Should artists receive a basic incomes, as they have in Irish experiments, or does that simply amount to special pleading? Would a better proposal involve everyone receiving a universal basic income which artists can use to enable them to practice as artists, golfers can use to practice golf, and chess players can use to practice chess?
REFERENCES
Su Jones: Artists’ Lives: ecologies for resistance, an overview
Su Jones’ writings at Arts Professional
Su Jones’ article at Arts Professional (paywall)
Su Jones’ article at Arts Monthly (paywall)
Ireland: basic income for artists