Welcome to the SEPTEMBER edition of The Miaaw Monthly which tells you what to expect this month, and provides a few pointers to things you might like to explore.
Our podcasts are a way to have (hopefully) interesting conversations about the things we care about. Please spread the word as widely as you can, and encourage people to subscribe to The Miaaw Monthly.
If you have anything that you want to include in The Miaaw Monthly, or discuss in the podcasts, then please email us at monthly@miaaw.net and we will be happy to collaborate.
TODAY’S PODCAST
The final podcast for August arrives today and concludes our special series inspired by things we saw and heard at the ICAF festival in Rotterdam in the Spring.
In this episode Will Weigler, community-engaged theatre maker, writer and storyteller, discusses his role as official rapporteur for the ICAF Festival.
SEPTEMBER’S PODCASTS
Every Friday a podcast appears at 12:34 UTC. Sometimes we get so eager that they appear an hour or two early to allow for any lag across the internet. Mostly they arrive on time. With that in mind, here are the podcasts that will drop in September.
Friday September 1: Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse | Episode 65
Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss the process of enshittification. They talk about the origin of the word, what it means, why it has caught on, whether we can recognise it as true, and whether it has wider applications than the world of Big Tech.
Friday September 8: A Genuine Inquiry | Episode 30
Ed Carroll joins Owen Kelly to discuss the question of the Faro Convention. He explains how it came about, what it does, how it does it, and why we might consider playing a part in it.
Friday September 15: A Culture of Possibility | Episode 32
François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Caron Atlas of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts New York (NOCD-NY) and Arts & Democracy, two groups that bridge culture, communities, and policy.
Friday September 22: Common Practice | Episode 27
Chris Baldwin & Steve Trow look back at some of the lasting strategies of cultural engagement developed in the West Midlands in England, in the 1980s.
Friday September 29: Friday Number 5 | Episode 10
This week we have 5 Fridays, and so we continue our delving into the Miaaw archives, looking at some of the more interesting of the old podcasts, that you may have forgotten or never heard. This month we go back to Miaaw 11: The Resurgence of Cultural Democracy.
LISTENING
All our podcasts are available from Anchor.fm, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Overcast, RadioPublic, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.
You can also listen to them at the miaaw.net website where you will find additional links, notes, and references accompanying each episode. You will also find a full archive of all the previous podcasts there.
MIAAW LIVE!
Miaaw Live! Zoom Event No 3: coming soon
The third episode of Miaaw Live! will appear in October. We will announce the time and date in the October newsletter, coming to your inbox on September 29th.
OFF SITE
THE BBC JOINS THE FEDIVERSE
Last month the BBC stated that
“As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols. The most common software used in this area is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point.”
Those of you who have already started accounts on Mastodon can find a list of the BBC accounts you can follow here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-07-mastodon-distributed-decentralised-fediverse-activitypub
Those of you who haven’t should probably start doing so. There are a growing number of open source and commercial apps becoming available for browsing the fediverse. Tapbot, the small team who developed one of the most popular Twitter apps, have moved to developing Ivory for Mastodon, to give just one example. Ice Cubes is a fine (and free) open source alternative.
CRYPTO, ART & CLIMATE
This year, the RIXC Art and Science Festival in Riga will focus on artificial intelligence, NFT art and crypto and blockchain technologies. The festival will explore how the new generation of internet technologies are currently changing the landscape of art and culture in the context of one of the major contemporary challenges – climate change.
Virtual artworks in Riga will be on view at the Latvian National Museum of Natural History and in the urban environment in Esplanade Park from September 21 to November 11, 2023.
The opening program of the SensUs exhibition in Riga will take place on Thursday, September 21 at 12.00 featuring a guided tour in Esplanade Park, led by the exhibition curators Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, together with the exhibition artists.
Registration for the tour (free of charge) will be open from September 1 at rixc@rixc.org. You can also follow the information about the festival at http://rixc.org
FOOD BROKEN
An article by Khanyi Mlaba attempts to show just how broken the world’s food supplies have become. She details her argument under seven headings. These include the fact that in 2022, 691– 783 million people in the world faced hunger, and the fact that one third of food produced globally goes to waste.
You can find the full article here. We found it at Global Citizen
FLASH WITHOUT FEAR
Flash proved a security nightmare to the extent that Adobe eventually withdrew it. For a decade or so before that it provided the engine that powered thousands of web-based games.
The Internet Archive has now launched a Flash library, complete with a safe emulator. They say that the “Flash Games Software Library is abundant with options for any level of computer gaming. With an in-site emulator ready to run thousands of games in the Software Library, the Internet Archive can turn your computer into a mini arcade at the click of a button.”
You can begin exploring the library by clicking here.
BANGKOK NIGHTS
People of Ari, a new performing arts theatre in Bangkok, is putting local artists centre stage. Entrepreneur Marc Close has spent two years and 34m baht (€930,000) on the project, seeking to bridge a gap between mainstream shows and shoestring Thai-language productions. “Bangkok does restaurants and bars really well but it’s not a mature arts market,” Close tells Monocle on a recent visit. “It’s a cosmopolitan city, so we should have a diverse array of options.”
Two vacant shops inside a residential building in the Ari district now house a premium 60-seater, high-spec modular theatre. The inaugural performance, Journey into the Forest, was an interactive musical that sold out its Saturday slots, while a beatboxing Buddhist monk stole the show during the week. Curators Mia Thongpan and Thanisa Durongkaveroj are now dealing with a deluge of requests from Thailand’s creative community to take part. Hopefully, these shows go on.
We learned this from a recent issue of the Monocle Minute
OPEN CIRCUITS
No Starch Press have recently published Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components by Windell Oskay and Eric Schlaepfer.
They say that “Open Circuits is a photographic exploration of the beautiful design inside everyday electronics. Its stunning cross-section photography unlocks a hidden world full of elegance, subtle complexity, and wonder.
“Our phones, computers, and appliances are made of hundreds of internal components, each precisely engineered to perform a certain function, but none intended to actually be seen. Through painstakingly executed, vividly detailed cross-section photography, Open Circuits reveals the surprising—and often accidental—beauty hiding inside the electronic components that drive our everyday devices.
“From resistors to LEDs, USB cables to headphone jacks, stepper motors to nixie tubes, the book’s arresting imagery transforms more than 130 components into delightful works of art. As you visually dissect the components’ insides, you’ll learn about how they work and how they were made. Open Circuits has something for everyone to appreciate, whether you’re a seasoned electrical engineer, an amateur tinkerer, or simply a lover of art and photography.”
The book has its own website too. This contains a gallery of images that reward looking at, whether or not you feel you have any interest in purchasing the book.
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