Acts of Transfer

Owen Kelly looks at a few of the common practices that occur in the Christmas season celebrations. Where did Santa Claus come from? How does he differ from Father Christmas? What does the Christkind have to do with any of this (and why does it sound like something from the Stephen Moffatt era of Doctor Who)?
We explore the development of the current incarnation of Santa Claus / Father Christmas during the nineteenth century, in parallel with the invention of shopping as a leisure activity and department stores as event-driven venues where shopping took place.
Finally we travel to Iceland where Vera Vestmann Kristjánsdóttir explains common practices there: including the thirteen Icelandic Santas, their use of potatoes as warnings, and the cat that hunts the coatless.

In the 12th episode of A Culture of Possibility, cohost François Matarasso returns to talk with Arlene Goldbard about the first year of the podcast.
They explore the strength of community-based arts work as reflected in the range of guests, stressing alignment around core values, the importance of emergence and allowing time for the work to unfold—and the obstacles presented by funding bodies and policymakers. It’s a wide-ranging conversation. As Francois says, our guests have been "very different people who work in very different situations and with different ways, but they all have an openness to the world and to each other and to other people. And that I think is a really valuable thing to hold on to at the moment.”
We hope you enjoy it. We also hope you’ll let us know what ideas and experiences you’d like us to feature on the podcast in 2022.

In the third episode Of Friday Number 5 Owen Kelly mused about the limitations that copyright laws impose on musicians’ abilities to use other music as starting points for their own work. He promised to think this through in a more structured way, and this represents his first attempt at doing just that.
In this episode Owen looks at the history of copyright from the invention of printing in 1476 to the creation of the Berne Convention in 1886. He asks when Mickey Mouse will step into the public domain, and points to the ways in which the copyrights laws benefit intermediaries much more than creators. He looks at three different ways in which the current laws fail everybody, writers and readers, musicians and listeners.
Finally he looks at the recent work of Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin who have developed a computer program that has recorded every possible melody (all 68.7 billion of them) via MIDI to a hard drive, and then made them available in the public domain.
He asks what conclusions we might draw from this.

Jo Coleman works as associate tutor in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, London. She conducts practice-based research into programming practices in local community radio.
Her received her first degree (in Geography) from Cambridge University and began her professional career in radio in the late 1980’s as marketing and public relations executive for the Chiltern Radio network, and later with Jazz FM in London.
Having trained and volunteered in production and presenting at a public access/community cable television and radio station in Northern Virginia, Jo continues to volunteer in community media in the UK, and as a member of the Community Media Association.
“Digital Innovations and the Production of Local Content in Community Radio: Changing Practices in the UK” offers an overview of the new technologies, media forms, and platforms in radio production, shedding light on how digitalization is impacting the routines and experiences of a predominantly volunteer-based workforce.
Jo Coleman argues that despite the benefits of digital media, traditional aspects of programme production remain of vital importance to the interpersonal relationships and values of community radio. In this episode she talks with Sophie Hope about all of this and more.

In the first episode of Common Practice we talked with Agnieszka Pokrywka about her long-standing interest in fermentation and her creation of Ferment Radio which looks at the many feminist and queer theories of fermentation and their political and social implications.
Ferment Radio has now celebrated its first anniversary with an episode in which Tosca Terán discusses her collaborative work with mushrooms with results in some very fungi music.
Tosca Terán works as an interdisciplinary, ecofeminist, human holobiont whose work is located somewhere between art, ecology, and craft. As part of the duo Nanotopia, she takes biodata from non-human organisms as mushroom’s mycelium and translates it into music.
In this episode Owen Kelly introduces the episode and then discusses Ferment Radio’s purpose and future with Agnieszka Pokrywka.
Another podcast with a free podcast inside every packet!

Jan Cohen-Cruz wrote Local Acts, Engaging Performance, and Remapping Performance, edited Radical Street Performance, and, with Mady Schutzman, co-edited Playing Boal and A Boal Companion. She worked with A Blade of Grass, an organization that supports socially-engaged artists, from 2013-2019. She earned her PhD at NYU Performance Studies and was a longtime professor in the Drama Department, initiating its minor in applied theater.
Rad Pereira are a multi-spirit mixed Black, Indigenous Brazilian, Jewish (im)migrant artist currently based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn). Their creative practices range from social sculpture, to popular theatrical and TV/film performance, to participatory liberatory artmaking and healing that weaves together an Afro-futurist longing for transformative justice and queer (re)Indigenization of culture.
They have curated stories from over 75 interviews and informal exchanges that offer insight into the field of Socially Engaged Performance in the United States over the past 55 years. The book’s voices bring the reader from 1965 through the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. They point to more diverse and inclusive practices and give hope for the future of the art.
Their book, Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965–2020, by Those Who Lived It, will be published by New Village Press in May 2022.

Owen Kelly participated in an online seminar recently with Mike Ananny, an associate professor of communication and journalism at USC Annenberg, where he “studies how technologies and cultures of media production have the power to shape public life”.
In the seminar Mike Ananny talked about ethics in an age of artificial intelligence and afterwards Owen went back and looked at a 2016 paper of Ananny’s: “Toward an Ethics of Algorithms: Convening, Observation, Probability, and Timeliness” which Sage published in a journal called “Science, Technology & Human Values”.
This paper proposes the concept of NIAs, or networked information algorithms, and in this episode Owen Kelly outlines this and other key ideas from the paper and offers critical reflections on both the ideas and their utility.

With this podcast we begin a new series, Meanwhile on an Abandoned Bookshelf, in which we discuss books that mean something to us or have a particular importance for us. While we might sometimes discuss new books we will mostly concentrate on older and overlooked publications.
In this episode Owen Kelly and David Morley discuss Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century written by Christian Caryl and published in 2014.
Neither of them agree with Caryl’s political position but instead argue about the usefulness of the approach he takes to history. Rather than following an issue he traces five plot-threads across the year 1979 and argues that they intertwine in significant ways that narrative-based conventional history overlooks.
David Morley is emeritus professor at the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths in the University of London.