The Culture & Technology Podcast

Dr Mercedes Bunz is Professor of Digital Culture and Society at King's College London's Department of Digital Humanities, where she researches how digital technology transforms knowledge, communication, power, and society. Author of "The Silent Revolution" (2012), an early exploration of how algorithms shape our world, she co-founded the Creative AI Lab with Serpentine Gallery to help artists engage critically with AI technologies on their own terms..

In this episode, Mercedes and Severin discuss how AI represents a fundamentally different technological shift from previous digital revolutions. She demystifies how large language models actually work, explores why we need public AI and open data sets to counter corporate dominance, and challenges the binary thinking around AI—neither savior nor devil—arguing that our fear of machines replacing human work is actually masking deeper anxieties about an out-of-control financial system.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist living and working in Berlin and London. Her work aims to archive the experiences of Black Trans people by creating video games and interactive experiences. Influenced by early gaming history and personal experiences, her work aims to make audiences reflect on their choices and emotions rather than simply consume art passively.

In this conversation with Severin, she discusses her journey from early experimental games to complex social installations such as Soul Station, 2024. Her upcoming show at Serpentine London explores how interactive spaces can help strangers connect emotionally in an increasingly polarized world, challenging traditional gallery experiences while making art more socially functional.

Rebecca Merlic is an artist and architect who uses 3D scanning, game engines and virtual reality to create alternative worlds. Her work emphasises co-creative processes with subjects and innovative uses of data, from biometric tracking to spatial mapping.

In this episode, Severin is joined by Rebecca to discuss her project Kissaten Vienna, a documentation of vanishing coffee house cultures across Vienna, Japan, and Zagreb using 3D scanning and game engines. Together, they explore how emerging technologies can document and reimagine traditional social spaces while raising questions about accessibility and preservation.

How can we rethink computing systems to be more in tune with nature?

In this episode of The Culture and Technology podcast, Claire L. Evans (author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet) joins Severin to explore the intersection of life, technology, and the environment.

How is gender bias and discrimination coded into history, reality and AI models?

Claudia Larcher is an artist, filmmaker and AI researcher in Vienna. Her work spans video animation, collage, photography, and installation, and in particular explores the impacts and experimental uses of artificial intelligence.

Severin met with Claudia in her studio to dive into her most recent work: AI and the Art of Historical Reinterpretation, a growing fictional image archive that injects inclusive and diverse representations into historical images and manipulates future AI training data as a form of activism.