Baroque Copyright Laws

Timo Cantell works as the director of the Urban Research and Statistics Unit of the City of Helsinki, a unit of 35 people within the city council charged with gathering data, and publishing it in ways that the citizens of Helsinki can use.
In this episode Timo Cantell talks with Owen Kelly about the ways in which the city approaches the collection, distribution and publication of public data. They discuss Kvartti, a printed and online publication produced each quarter. They talk about the approach Helsinki has adopted towards open data, and the ways in which the unit Timo leads can developed APIs so that people and organisations can analyse, combine and mix the city’s datastreams with other publicly available information.
Timo Cantell also deals with the approach of the city to the ethics of data collection, and the growing public resistance towards having personal data repurposed without explicit permission.

In the 10th episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard talks with Gary Stewart, an artist and experimental sonic musician based in London.
Arlene and Gary first met more than 30 years ago in a community arts project, and his work since that time has taken him to Africa, Latin America, the U.S., and numerous spaces in the white-box gallery and prestige festival worlds.
In this episode, Gary explains how he came to do the work he does. He explains about Dub Morphology and their approach to their work. He and Arlene explore the possibilities and challenges of bringing the emergent, co-creative, egalitarian values of community-based arts practice into other types of creation and interaction, putting marginalized voices at the forefront, and the powerful results when kids in Brazilian favelas are trusted to master the full complexity of their art.

Sophie Hope has worked as an artist and an academic. She currently works at Birkbeck, part of the University of London. Since 2010 she has co-developed a network of practice-based research students at Birkbeck, called Corkscrew. She also chairs the School of Arts Disability Committee and serves as a member of the Peltz/Arts Space Steering Committee, Birkbeck Institute of Gender and Sexuality (BIGS) and Centre for Museum Cultures Research Centre Steering Committee.
She describes her academic work as socially engaged research and in this episode of Genuine Inquiry she reflects on what the term “socially engaged research” might mean. She discusses issues of consent, power relations, and trust, among others.

In this bite-sized shorter-than-usual episode Owen Kelly offers two surprises and a look back at Clive Sinclair and the impact of the ZX Spectrum, which ushered in a brief period of democratic bedroom coding.
For a short period the ZX Spectrum, and its rivals the Commodore 64 and the BBC Micro, created an ecosystem of bedroom hobbyists-turned entrepreneurs, cassette-based games, and monthly magazines that advertised and reviewed them. The coders formed the primary audience for each other’s work and offered living examples of what Alvin Toffler referred to as prosumers.
This opened up a range of possibilities that slowly closed again as one-person companies merged until eventually more powerful computers and the emergence of giant companies like Electronic Arts turned the computer games ecology into a “proper” market in which highly paid teams of coders made proprietary games for audiences entirely different from themselves.

Rob Watson runs projects using radio and podcasting to facilitate community development, and to construct a social economy model based on the belief that people should be empowered to tell their own stories.
In this episode Rob talks to Sophie Hope about researcher positionality, the importance of authentic participation in socially engaged research, and what positive steps we might take to ensure the effective communication of important messages for ensuring meaningful engagement, improving trust in our institutions, and building a better society.
Note: this episode forms a special festival edition and is also published as one of the Corkscrew podcasts.

In the ninth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard talks with Meena Natarajan, Artistic and Executive Director of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Chrissie Orr, community artist and cofounder of Seed Broadcast in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In this episode, they talk about the Seed Syllables project, facilitating dialogues with 32 community artists and cultural activists to offer a composite portrait of life in the quadruple pandemic of virus, racial violence, economic meltdown, and climate crisis — and what comes next.

Late last June while addressing a meeting of Facebook employees, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook would grow from a company involved in social media to building “a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — the metaverse”. He argued that “you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness”.
Second Life attempted to build and popularise this idea fifteen years ago with a very limited success. Two questions therefore arise. What makes Mark Zuckerberg think he can succeed where Philip Rosendale failed? What consequences will we face - socially and individually - if he actually succeeds?
In this episode of Genuine Inquiry Owen Kelly explores these questions and the deeper problems of “virtual reality”.

Jonathan Gross researches and teaches in the department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London.
In this specially repeated episode, Sophie Hope talks to him about the relationship between autobiography and cultural action, and the needs to explore memory and history as a means of making sense of one’s own cultural politics.
During the conversation they each discuss how they came to view cultural democracy as a meaningful idea and a useful tool, and what inspired them to do so.
The conversation then broadens to include the work of Aristotle, Sheila Rowbottom, Lynn Segal and Hilary Wainwright. They then begin to ask whether we should see cultural democracy primarily as a kind of practice or as a demand for systemic change.