Sonic Boom is an audioplay based on a story co-written by a text generating Artificial Intelligence and the artist Michael Simku.

The story is set in 2049 and told from the perspective of an AI managing and governing a large urban area. The narrative consists of three major threads:

Part 0 - The Anatomy of a Smart City
How can an AI govern a densely populated city and the lives of its inhabitants?

Part 1 - This is an emergency broadcast
In 2049 the Smart City spirals out of control. An unforeseeable event emerges as a fundamental test for the AIs capabilities. 

Part 2 - How the jigsaw fell into place
This part draws up a historic timeline of the implementation of the AI and explains the marketing effort necessary to install it as a governing body and a new model for politics. 

Caution - This audioplay contains dog whistles and rodent repelling ultrasonic sounds inaudible for human ears.

Sonic Boom

In this episode, we speak with Sam Kinsley, Senior Lecturer in Human Geographies at the University of Exeter, in Devon, England, and the inaugural Co-Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Digital Geography & Society. Sam is interested in spatialities and geographical imaginations of technology and the future; about how our situated existence is inherently technical, as well as the stories we tell about technologies in our daily lives. He is a close interpreter, and occasional translator, of the work of late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. So we took the opportunity to ask Sam about his own work, as well as Stiegler’s writing, and how it might be a way to step back and think through how and why we might think about digital data, and the systems through which data are collected and mobilised, as ‘industrial-scale’ systems of memory.


The interview for this episode was recorded in July 2021.

Music from filmmusic.io "Clean Soul" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) License: CC BY (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

About the podcast: Data Materiality is a podcast series about the ways in which digital data depends on physical forms and infrastructures, and comes to matter in practice and imagination. The impetus for this podcast is a three-year research project by the same name – Data Materiality – co-sponsored by Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture and the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology. The series is co-hosted by Joel McKim and Scott Rodgers.

For more information: www.bbk.ac.uk/vasari

To listen or subscribe via Apple Podcasts, visit: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vasa…gy/id1494065021

To listen or subscribe via Spotify, visit:
open.spotify.com/show/6JnV9RJc4QS50kMDKBBFHm

Sonic Boom

Sonic Boom

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