Speculation, storytelling and the joy of earlier glitchy AI models

Season finale with Angelo Custódio on Technosomatics, collective listening, and resisting algorithmic determination

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!

Speculation, storytelling and the joy of earlier glitchy AI models

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.

Technologies of Care and Resistance

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).

Translating Worlds, Dreaming Non-Capitalist Futures, and the Counter Human

In this episode of Restless Grounds, host Mariana Fernández Mora is joined by Andy Dockett, Carlo De Gaetano, and Zachary Formwalt to reflect on what it means to consider yourself a storyteller, the importance of imagining alternative futures, finding joy and opening up new narratives that resist capitalism. Together, they explored the role of storytelling and imagination as resistance within the context of algorithmic systems and their entangled ecologies. From narrative as a site of refusal to the politics of speculative world-building, the conversation considers how creative and collective imaginaries offer tools for resisting extractive technological logics.Soundscapes in this episode were created by artist and researcher Angelo Custódio during the Slow AI Material Playground “Everything Evaporates.”

Unicorns, Forgetting, and Algorithmic Histories

In this opening episode of Restless Grounds, we dive into the entangled histories of magic, technology, and capital. Our conversation explores how belief systems—from Enlightenment science to tarot, commodity fetishism to algorithmic “intelligence”—shape not only how we relate to technology, but how technologies are designed to relate to us. Host Mariana Fernández Mora is joined by Flavia Dzodan, Zachary Formwalt, and Carlo De Gaetano to think through magical thinking as both a historical foundation for Western science and a critical tool for deconstructing algorithmic systems today. Together, they ask: What does forgetting have to do with AI? What makes a dataset “magical”? What does a unicorn fossil tell us about the myth of objectivity? From tarot cards to financial systems, from emotional agents to algorithmic affect, this episode weaves together personal histories, critical theory, and artistic practice to confront the social, historical, and material dimensions of artificial intelligence and how AI systems reflect and obscure our histories. The soundscapes in this episode are courtesy of artist and researcher Angelo Custódio and were produced during the Material Playground he hosted, titled “Everything Evaporates.”