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.

As the creative director at The Vinyl Factory, Sean shares the process behind curating Reverb, a multimedia exhibition exploring the intersection of art and sound. In this conversation, Severin and Sean look at the importance of physical context in music consumption, the value of dedicated listening spaces, and how digital platforms can enhance rather than replace analog experiences.

How can we reimagine AI as a collaborative technology?

Eva Jäger is a Curator, Arts Technologist and Creative AI Lead at Serpentine, a contemporary art gallery in London. She recently curated The Call, Mat Dryhurst’s and Holly Herndon’s solo exhibition which proposes new cultural, legal, and technical rituals for art in the age of AI.

Severin and Eva peel back the layers behind The Call, where they discuss the transformation of training data production into a new art form and how cultural institutions can take active roles in shaping emerging technologies through initiatives like data trusts.

Penny Rafferty is an independent writer and theorist based in Berlin. Together with Ruth Catlow she edited and published “Radical Friends: How DAOs Could Change the Art World” in 2022, a seminal book that explored the potential of decentralized autonomous organizations through essays by leading voices in the NFT, crypto-art and web3 spaces.

Now that the initial hype around DAOs has cooled off, Penny and Severin took the opportunity to meet in Penny’s Berlin studio to discuss what worked, what didn’t and what’s next for using blockchains and other emergent technologies as a tool for radical imagination.

Alice Bucknell is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their work mixes elements of architecture, anthropology, ecology and science-fiction to imagine alternative worlds. In this conversation, Alice and Severin discuss the creative process of building worlds and the political and ecological dimensions of worlding as an artistic medium.

Paula Strunden is an XR artist & PhD researcher exploring multisensory and embodied spatial computing. In this conversation, Paula shares how she creates unique, multisensorial experiences in response to extended, virtual worlds.

Dragan Espenscheid is the director of digital preservation at Rhizome, the world’s leading art organization dedicated to born-digital art and culture. A first generation net artist and 8-bit musician, Dragan has pioneered Rhizome’s Digital Preservation Program since 2014 where he stewards its ArtBase collection of more than 2000 pieces of software and net art.