Broadcasts S1 Ep4: Analogue

Storefront for Art and Architecture and Montez Press Radio present the fourth and final episode of On the Ground: Broadcasts, titled Analogue. This episode focuses on our online obsessions, the digital realm, and how technology and commerce have changed the urban landscape and public life.

Participants in this episode include the following: Poet and artist Benjamin Krusling layers and colleges audio textures to explore structures of dispossession and the constitution of public space. Remixing music, particularly drill and trap, with archival footage sourced from New York media outlets like CBS and Newsweek, and tiktok, Ben uses sampled reports about crime tracking apps, police surveillance, and recruitment videos for civic services, against the backdrop of  failing city infrastructure. Architect Jesse LeCavalier reads NYC Local Law 166, a local law established in 2021 in relation to micro-distribution centers for distributing goods from ecommmerce platforms otherwise known as microhubs. Artist Danielle Dean talks about post-Fordism, Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, and specifically how capitalistic structures are maintained through specific forms of labor organization and data collection. Artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s 4-channel video and live performance titled At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade into Each Other. Performed by multiple avatars generated from people who participated in the 2018-2019 March of Return in Gaza, the work repurposes fragments from Edward Said’s After the Last Sky to reflect on what it means to be constructed as a person who’s right to exist is threatened. Writer and technologist Sophia Tareen brings together Claudia Irizarry Aponte, senior reporter covering labor and work issues for THE CITY and AI researcher Ria Kalluri to discuss contemporary labor movements and digital technology. Architect and curator Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli reads an excerpt from his research project Riders not Heroes, introducing us and setting the foundation for his video essay of the same name which we listen to next, that investigates the precarious conditions of food delivery riders in Milan. Artist David L. Johnson meets sociologist Sharon Zukin about their shared ongoing interest in the transformation of New York City and the increasing privatization of civic infrastructure. Artist Cao Fei’s documentary 11:11, recorded the work overload of the entire JD.com logistics sectors before and after the Double Eleven Shopping Day in China which is the equivalent of the Black Friday, sketches out the landscape of consumption driven by the powerful Internet economy and asks how this situation will lead us into a future social ecosystem. Curator and researcher Camila Palomino reads from her recent essay on artist Emily Jacir and unpacks her 2000 work, My America (I am still here).

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Across their works they probe a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary and language can emerge that is not bound within colonial/capitalist narrative and discourse. In their projects, they find themselves excavating, activating and inventing incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present. Often reflecting on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia and deja vu, and in the process unfolding the slippages between actuality and projection (fiction, myth, wish), what is and what could be. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances.

Claudia Irizarry Aponte covers labor and work issues for THE CITY, a nonprofit local news outlet in New York. Her reporting on the exploitative working conditions of the New York’s app-based food delivery workers resulted in the adoption of a landmark minimum pay rate for those workers and was awarded the James Beard Award and the Edward R. Murrow Award, among other honors.

Danielle Dean is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the geopolitical and material processes that colonize the mind and body. Drawing from the aesthetics and history of advertising, and from her multinational background—born to a Nigerian father and an English mother in Alabama, and brought up in a suburb of London—her work explores the ideological function of technology, architecture, marketing, and media as tools of subjection, oppression, and resistance. Dean received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She recently worked on Amazon Proxy, a new commission for Performa 21, New York (2021); and Amazon, a solo show at The Tate Britain, London (2022). Other solo shows include Trigger Torque at The Ludwig, Germany (2019), and True Red Ruin at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2018) among many others.

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli is an architect and curator and is a partner at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). The studio looks at temporary, communal spaces for food preparation and consumption as a testing ground for alternative models of domestic institutions. Together with Anna Puigjaner and Marina Otero Verzier, Ippolito is a tutor on ADS8: Domestic Institutions at the Royal College of Art. ADS8 will use Manifesta, the nomadic European Contemporary Art Biennial, as a cultural and spatio‐temporal framework.

Jesse LeCavalier uses the tools of urban design and architecture to research, theorize, and speculate about infrastructure and logistics. He is the author of The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and his design work has been recognized by the Sudbury 2050 urban design competition, the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the Oslo Triennale, and the Seoul Biennale. LeCavalier was the Daniel Rose Visiting Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Architecture (2017–19) and the 2010–11 Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in Cabinet, Public Culture, Places, Art Papers, and Harvard Design Magazine. His essay “The Restlessness of Objects” was the recipient of a 2013 Core77 Design Award.

David L. Johnson is an artist who lives and works in New York City. Johnson uses photography, video, found and stolen objects, and installation to engage the margins between public and private space. Focusing on loitering and property law, his recent work has been interested in the complex relationship urban development engenders between the built environment and its living and non-living subjects. Johnson received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2015 and an MFA from The University of Pennsylvania in 2020. He is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program and a part-time lecturer at The New School. Recent exhibitions include: Life Between Buildings, MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Everything is Common, Artists Space, New York, NY; Revocable Consents, Theta, New York, NY; A Place to Live, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA; Wants & Needs, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY. Johnson’s work is in the public collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Ria Kalluri is an AI researcher and PhD candidate at Stanford University. Weaving scientific and humanistic inquiry, Ria’s work confronts and nuances narratives that paint AI as a purely neutral, inscrutable, and authoritative technology. Rather, Ria’s research looks beyond this veneer of neutrality to reveal that AI technologies are currently contributing to larger, overwhelmingly power-centralizing, neocolonial, and surveillant projects.

Benjamin Krusling is a poet and artist, the author of Glaring (Wendy’s Subway, 2020) and two chapbooks, most recently It got so dark (UDP, 2022).

Camila Palomino is Curatorial Assistant at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. She is a curator and researcher from New York City. Most recently, Palomino was the 2021–2022 Curator in Residence at Abrons Arts Center and the 2022 In-Practice Curatorial Fellow at SculptureCenter. She has held curatorial positions and contributed research to exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, The Drawing Center, and the 58th Carnegie International. Palomino is a curatorial consultant at Amie Gross Architects on a project that commissions artworks by Queens-based artists for new affordable housing buildings in the borough. She has also been a visiting lecturer in The Photography Program at Bard College. She holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Sophia Tareen is a civic technologist and writer based in Brooklyn. In both her narrative writing and technical work, she aims to center the experiences of historically marginalized communities and their relationships with digital technologies. Sophia was a 2022 Open City Fellow with the Asian American Writers Workshop and her work has been featured in The Margins, Reconstructed Magazine, and delightfully, even found its way into the curriculum of a Brooklyn high school government class.

Sharon Zukin is professor emerita of sociology at Brooklyn College and at the CUNY Graduate Center but is still working with PhD students and will occasionally teach courses. Her new book, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy, examines the shaping of the tech ecosystem in New York.  Zukin has been a Broeklundian Professor at Brooklyn College; a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Western Sydney, and Tongji University; and a distinguished fellow in the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center.