Marley Starskey Butler - Resourcing Listening

This completes a mini-series that looks at whether or not we should feel concerned about the digital tools we use and the effects that they have on us. In this episode Owen Kelly looks at some practical examples of changes we can make and tools we can use.
He discusses why he uses Vivaldi as his browser of choice; why his websites all run on ClassicPress; what software he uses to write; which apps he use to access the fediverse; where he lives on the fediverse; and why the fediverse has replaced Big Social in his online life.

Every year some months have five Fridays, and every time this happens we find something to do there: something out of our normal schedule. We try to adopt an annual theme. In 2021 we played music licensed under creative commons licences; in 2022 we found four old radio shows; and in 2023 we looked back to four early episodes of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse.
This year whenever we stumble into the fifth Friday of a month we will look around us and find a podcast that interests us: one published under a Creative Commons licence that relates in one way or another to our areas of interest.
Where better to start than with a podcast produced by a friend of ours with whom we have already talked? We talked with Agnieszka Pokrywka twice in 2021 about Ferment Radio. Since then she had produced 41 episodes, and the podcast has become one of the projects produced by Super Eclectic, a “a multimedia production house for the world we want” that she has founded with Humberto Duque.
Today we listen to Episode 40, "Show me your kitchen, and I will tell you who you are" with David Zilber, chef, fermenter, food scientist, and author of "The Noma Guide to Fermentation".

In this episode Sophie Hope talks to four people connected to the MA degree course in Art and Social Practice at the University of the Highlands and Islands. According to the UHI website, “We are the only university based in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and we're a little different - we offer you the choice of studying at one of our colleges or research centres, over 70 local learning centres, or online from wherever you are.”
Sophie talks with Roxane Permar, founder and programme leader; Siún Carden, lecturer and module leader; Nicola Naismith, lecturer and module leader; and Mara Marxt Lewis, former student.
The group discuss the origins of the MA, the structure and content and what it’s like to teach and study on a remote course, where students develop work in the places they live and come together via online seminars and tutorials, a virtual annual symposium and residential winter school.

In Culture of Possibility #38, Arlene Goldbard talks with Sebastian Ruth, Founder & Artistic Director and Resident Musician at Community MusicWorks in Providence, Rhode Island.
CMW describes itself as a “community-based organization that uses music education and performance as a vehicle to build lasting and meaningful relationships between children, families, and professional musicians.” Its resident musicians form a string ensemble that commissions and performs work in concert while students receive free string lessons and take part in an ongoing community of peers.
In this conversation Arlene and Sebastian explore the complex question of how classical music can connect with community arts and cultural democracy.

In the fifth episode of Ways of Listening, artist Jody Wood talks about listening as a practice of care - where to care is not to cure. Jody advocates for participatory ‘opt in’ structures for social practice art rather than co-creation, noting the complexity of human desires and potential for conflicting agendas.
She goes on to question the expectations placed on artists to solve social issues. Using examples from projects taking place with social workers and in homelessness shelters, Jody talks through the need to resist the spectacle, and keep focus on process and the power of a relational practice.
She also highlights the need to listen to yourself, as a spiritual practice of attunement.

This continues a mini-series that looks at whether or not we should feel concerned about the digital tools we use and the effects that they have on us. In this episode Owen Kelly explains three dimensions that we need to consider when thinking about the tools we use and why we use them.

In early February Sophie Hope went to Rome to present Manual Labours’ work at a conference. In this episode She and Fabiola Fiocco tell us about the workshop they did at MACRO - the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome.
The workshop was organised by Fabiola Fiocco in collaboration with the Arts Module of the Master in Gender Studies (Roma Tre University) and facilitated by Fabiola and Sophie. They explain the background to the workshop and their research into bodies at work and the politics of exhaustion.
Sophie and Fabiola then reflect on some of the themes and issues that came up during the workshop, such as where people go to both rest and rage; the dependencies and addictions that get people through the day and barriers to collectivising care and rest for freelance workers.

David Francis comes from Dumfries in the south west of Scotland, but cut his musical teeth in the north east, playing for bands like Desperate Danz Band. He moved to Edinburgh in the 1990s and became a central figure in traditional music: performing with Mairi Campbell in the successful duo The Cast while occupying key positions in the Scottish Arts Council traditional music section and the Edinburgh Folk Festival.
In Culture of Possibility #37, Arlene Goldbard talks with David Francis, who currently acts as Director of the Traditional Music Forum in Scotland, about its impressive network of traditional musicians, preservation, reinvention, formal and informal education, Scottish cultural policy and funding, and the whole tapestry of issues, questions, and possibilities it engages.