Restless Grounds cover art

Restless Grounds

Restless Grounds

Written by: Slow AI
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About this listen

 This series is part of the Slow AI project, a collaborative research initiative that emerged from a growing discomfort with the ways artificial intelligence is transforming our world and how quickly it is being developed and implemented, while its extractive, colonial histories remain largely unacknowledged.

From image generation and chatbots to facial recognition and predictive policing, AI systems are shaping what we see, how we remember, how we make decisions, and eventually who we become.

Rather than trying to fix or limit these technologies, Slow AI asks how we might relate to them differently. It is not a technical solution, but a shift in orientation: toward care, collectivity, and refusal.

Each episode features a conversation from our research group, comprising artists, writers, and researchers working at the intersection of theory and practice. These conversations emerge from our Material Playgrounds: experimental sessions that explored algorithmic technologies through artistic research, speculation, and collaborative inquiry.Messy, curious, and sometimes unresolved, this podcast invites you to imagine these technologies otherwise.

This podcast is part of the Slow AI project, initiated by Mariana Fernández Mora and supported by the Visual Methodologies Collective (AUAS), the Algorithmic Cultures Research Group (Sandberg Institute), ARIAS Amsterdam, and funded by the Centre of Expertise Creative Innovation (CoECI).Copyright Slow AI Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Season finale with Angelo Custódio on Technosomatics, collective listening, and resisting algorithmic determination

    Season finale with Angelo Custódio on Technosomatics, collective listening, and resisting algorithmic determination
    Dec 20 2025
    In this bonus, uncut conversation, host Mariana Fernández Mora explores, in conversation with Angelo Custódio, the presence of the body in technological environments, its capacity for listening, and its role in collective emergence. Together, they discuss his work with voice, sound and somatic practice, where technology becomes a relational object rather than a tool of detachment.

    The discussion considers technosomatics as a way of keeping the body active inside technical systems, and how amplification, algorithmic effects and improvisation can open spaces of play that unsettle anxiety, expectations and default modes of expression. Listening emerges as a shared and negotiated form of attention, while vulnerability is understood as a condition for co-creation that requires continuous care.

    The episode reflects on how sound, embodiment and micro-resistances might interrupt the extractive logics of algorithmic design and invite alternative ways of sensing, relating and staying with complexity.

    At the end, you’ll be able to listen to “Something Older”, an audio piece created during the Material Playground Everything Evaporates in the spring of 2025. This piece was guided by Angelo and created in collaboration with the participants. The soundscapes in this episode were also created during this session. Thank you for listening, and see you next season!
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Speculation, storytelling and the joy of earlier glitchy AI models

    Speculation, storytelling and the joy of earlier glitchy AI models
    Dec 8 2025
    In this episode, host Mariana Fernández Mora explores, in conversation with Janine Armin, Andy Dockett, and Sabine Niederer, how AI can act as a collaborator in collective imagination and storytelling. Returning to early experiments within the research group, the discussion examines how machine-generated text once introduced unruly narrative structures, fluid pronouns, and unfamiliar relationships between subjects, objects, and environments. Together, they reflect on why unpredictability felt so engaging and how early models enabled forms of co-creation that resisted closure, efficiency, and fixed hierarchies. The conversation considers the narrative assumptions embedded in contemporary AI systems, and how alternative, messier exchanges might reopen space for other voices, perspectives, and ways of telling stories. Soundscapes in this episode were created by artist and researcher Angelo Custódio during the Material Playground Everything Evaporates.
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    51 mins
  • Technologies of Care and Resistance

    Technologies of Care and Resistance
    Nov 4 2025
    In this episode of Restless Grounds, host Mariana Fernández Mora is joined by Sabine Niederer, Flavia Dzodan, and Janine Armin to explore how storytelling, imagination, and artistic practice might offer resistance to extractive and colonial technological systems. The conversation moves through feminist, ecological, and anti-colonial frameworks, asking what it means to design, read, and live with technologies otherwise.

    Together, they consider how technological imaginaries might shift from instruments of control to carriers of shared relations, becoming small, situated, and/or attentive. The discussion touches on data feminism, carrier bag theory, and interspecies communication, tracing how alternative modes of knowledge and relation can unsettle dominant logics of automation, productivity, and mastery.

    What does it mean to treat machines as agents rather than tools? How can we practice care without reproducing extractive or gendered forms of labour? And what happens when we think of technology not as a project of mastery, but as a shared carrier bag, gathering histories, myths, and relations into new forms of collective life?The soundscapes in this episode were created by artist and researcher Angelo Custódio during the Material Playground “Everything Evaporates” (2025).
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    1 hr
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