Future Artefacts FM

In this episode, we speak with artist Bassam Issah Al-Sabah about his new collaborative work with Jennifer Mehigan called Field Image, where landscapes shaped by extraction, memory and technological infrastructure are contextualised through the shifting terrain of the Irish bog. Beginning with the work's disembodied narrator, we explore what it means to become part of a landscape where human presence lingers only through traces. The conversation then moves towards the bog as an ancient archive, existing alongside a contemporary landscape increasingly reshaped by data centres and digital infrastructure.Together we discuss how folk knowledge, ecological systems and colonial histories intersect with computational technologies. We consider whether plants, folklore and older systems of organising land might operate as forms of resistance that repel the infrastructures imposed upon them. Thinking about the material realities of the digital through heat, soil, extraction and energy, the conversation challenges immaterial information and asks what ancient technologies and embodied ways of knowing might reveal in an age obsessed with data and legibility. This mini-series is commissioned by the Henry Moore Institute as a part of their program for their exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15th May - 30th August 2026.Bios;Bassam Issa Al-Sabah works CGI animation, sculpture, textiles, painting, and installation, constructing speculative worlds where fantasy, mythology, and digital culture become methods for reimagining identity, memory, and collective futures. Drawing on the visual languages of anime, video games, and online image cultures, his practice explores transformation as a queer methodology, proposing mutable bodies, mythic narratives, and hybrid ecologies as alternatives to fixed understandings of gender, history, and belonging. Recent work has increasingly engaged feminist and posthuman perspectives, using fiction as a critical framework through which care, desire, revenge, and interdependence can be imagined beyond patriarchal and colonial structures.Al-Sabah's work has been presented extensively across Europe in museums, galleries, and festivals, including the Barbican Centre, London; Jeu de Paume, Paris; FACT Liverpool; De La Warr Pavilion; and The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. Alongside his solo practice, he has developed an ongoing collaborative body of work with artist Jennifer Mehigan, extending his interest in speculative storytelling through large-scale installation, animation, sculpture, and publishing. Across both solo and collaborative projects, his work continues to investigate how fiction, digital technologies, and myth can produce new ways of understanding ecology, kinship, and collective experience. His work is held in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), the Arts Council of Ireland, and Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council Using paint, inkjet, neural networks, her garden and her phone, Jennifer Mehigan’s prints and paintings blend new and old methods of processing the world. She positions the relationships between contemporary image-making technologies and their predecessors as a ‘strained mother-daughter’ dynamic, encompassing wider ideas of reproduction and inheritance in image ecologies. For the past seven years, her research has oriented around the Famine to present alternative vantage points of what abstraction means in an embodied context, its relationship to ideas of appetite and fertility, and how it can be considered both an applied and innate technology. The mouth and throat are interrogated as sites of image production, becoming ‘embodied printers’ in which oral histories and their materialities might be made visual to renegotiate the conditions of abstraction as we understand them now. Her wider practice incorporates sculpture, filmmaking, publishing, perfumery, and parties, deploying sensory experiences to explore ideas of movement and digestion as it is outsourced to machines. She regularly works in partnership with artist Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and has previously collaborated with and been part of collectives such as Synthesize_Her, Temporary Pleasure, Fruit Shop, and The 343. Recent shows include multiple iterations of ‘Uncensored Lilac’ in Aksioma, Ljubljana (2026), VSSL Studio, London (2025), and Transmediale, Berlin (2024); ‘Nightbloom Chokehold’ in Douglas Hyde Gallery 2, Dublin (2022); and group shows and screenings include Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2023), Anafi Film Festival, Greece (2025) and FACT Liverpool, UK (2026). She is currently a research fellow at the International Centre for the Image, Dublin. Previously based in Singapore and Belfast, she now lives and works in rural Limerick.Broadcast through @rtm.fmHost @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke Artist @this.isnowhere Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v

In this episode, we speak with artist Sarah Al-Sarraj about her new speculative audio work The Mandjet. Framed as a fictional radio phone-in and set in a near future reshaped by rising waters and contested borders, the work uses humour, satire and political tension to explore how environmental crisis transforms our relationship to land, water and community. We discuss the process of building this imagined world, the use of radio as a storytelling device, and the complex figures who inhabit it.Our conversation also explores the histories that underpin the work. Using one of the main protagonists, the leader of a radical water-autonomy movement, as a starting reference, we talk through the drainage of the English Fens and the resistance of the Fen Tigers as well as touching on contemporary debates around water privatisation, environmental justice and political dissent. Finally, we consider how folkloric actors, whether real or imagined, collective memory and ideas of borderlessness shape both the narrative and Sarah's wider artistic practice.This mini-series is commissioned by Henry Moore Institute as part of the programme for their exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15 May - 30 August 2026.Actors: Rosemary Moss ELLCRaza TariqAshirbad RoyYasmin AlrabieiSpecial thanks: Siegrun SalmanianAngelina RadakovicDavis Galvin The opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of the Henry Moore Foundation, its trustees, employees or associatesBios;Sarah Al-Sarraj (b. 1997) is a visual artist and cultural worker based between Pittsburgh (US) and London (UK). Her work centers on worldbuilding as a creative and critical process, where painting and immersive technologies are understood as portals to other worlds. Predicated on the belief that our world was designed in service of imperial violence, she builds new lifeworlds rooted in land, spirit, and ancestry. Currently working with game engines, she is interested in appropriating military simulation technologies to build uncolonisable realms inspired by Global Majority knowledge systems and emerging quantum thought. Her creative practice is informed by working in movements, at organisations such as Forensic Architecture, the Inclusive Mosque Initiative and Healing Justice London. She is inspired by the tangible material potential of visionary practice in global liberation movements and she occasionally lends her hands to illustration and graphic design for various groups. Broadcast through @rtm.fmArtist @ssaarraahj Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke Music @joemoss1 @jtre_v

In this episode we talk to Mumbai-based artist and UCLA assistant professor Sahej Rahal, whose practice spans sculpture, video games, AI simulations, film, and painting. Starting from three excerpts of Rahal's text Hallucination Stream we discuss how the micro-fictions of Simulation, Story and Rumour explore caste as a mythology sustained through narrative, hallucination, and political performance. Across the conversation, Rahal reflects on ghosts, digital folklore, cooperative gaming, and the role of art in confronting systems of power.This mini-series is commissioned by the Henry Moore Institute @henrymooreinstitute as a part of their program for their exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15th May - 30th August 2026.Bio;Sahej Rahal (born 1988, Mumbai, India) is an artist and assistant professor of Design Media Arts at, UCLA. Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He creates counter-mythologies that interrogate narrations of the present. This myth world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, video games, and AI simulation programs. Drawing upon folklore, prophecies, archaeological conspiracies, hidden histories, and occult manuscripts, he renders scenarios where the fictive and the real begin to converse, at the borderlines of myth and memory.Voice actor Nivedita NairSound designer John TrevaskisBroadcast through @rtm.fmArtist @sahejrahal Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke Music @joemoss1 @jtre_vwww.futureartefactsfm.com

We’re so excited to launch a new mini series commissioned by Henry Moore Institute @henrymooreinstitute as a part of their new exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age. In the first episode we talk to the exhibition curator Sean Ketteringham. Moving between folk art histories, sculptural practices, affect theory, hauntology, horror, and memetic culture, we discuss what functions as contemporary folklore, questioning what sculpture becomes when it exists through circulation and interaction rather than static objects.  This mini-series is commissioned by the Henry Moore Institute @henrymooreinstitute as a part of their program for their exhibition Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15th May - 30th August 2026.Bios;Sean Ketteringham is Assistant Curator of Exhibitions at Henry Moore Institute and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. His first book, Architectures of Identity: Imperial Decline and the Homes of English Modernism, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2027. From May 2026, he will join the University of Birmingham as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow on a new project titled 'Postwar Folk'.  Henry Moore Institute's Galleries, Research Library and Archive of Sculptors' Papers are free to access and open to all. As part of the Henry Moore Foundation, they are a hub for sculpture, connecting a global network of artists and scholars to ensure the art form is accessible and celebrated by a wide audience. Discover their changing programme of historical, modern and contemporary exhibitions and events in Leeds city centre, where Henry Moore (1898-1986) began his training as a sculptor.Guest Sean KetteringhamHosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke Music @joemoss1 @jtre_vBroadcast through @rtm.fm

For this episode, we recap our As A Chorus mini-series, revisiting conversations with artists Niamh Schmidtke, Dane Sutherland, Rhys Morgan, and Emily Roderick. The discussion expands from ideas around choirs and group singing into broader questions about authorship, infrastructure, collaboration, and collective survival within the contemporary art landscape.We reflect on how artistic work is rarely created in isolation, touching on socially engaged practice, artist collectives, digital production, labour, and the emotional infrastructures that sustain creative communities. Collaboration isn’t just a working method, but a form of resistance and mutual support in increasingly precarious cultural and economic conditions.Hosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke Music @joemoss1 @jtre_vBroadcast through @rtm.fm

What does it mean to amplify a collective voice through collective performance? How do traditions like bell ringing persist, evolve, or disappear, and what do strange histories reveal about their cultural significance?Emily Roderick is the fourth and final guest of our ‘as a chorus’ mini series, sharing personal anecdotes, recordings, and sounds inside bell towers from her ongoing project Can You Call A Touch.In this episode, we focus on her research around bell ringing, a deeply social, intergenerational practice that sits somewhere between music, ritual and public communication.Interwoven with familial conversation, and sounds of the ascent of bells being rung up, and the resonant unwinding of ringing down, the conversation considers broader questions around collective expression using bell ringing as both a personal inheritance and a collective language. We hear how the practice functions as a “village voice,” marking time, signalling events, and shaping a shared sense of place, while also operating as a close-knit, sometimes opaque community.Bell ringers:Steve RoderickSue RoderickLynsey RoderickDave Peacock Emily RoderickWith thanks to Martin and Louise Green at St Michael's Church, Bishops Itchington. This work was made with support via DYCP from Arts Council England.Bio:Emily Roderick is an artist, producer, and facilitator, teetering between 'the serious' and 'the silly'. Based in Berlin, her creative and often collaborative outputs include performance, film, workshops, walks and writing. Curiosity and questions drive her practice across its different lines of enquiry, exploring social space and interaction with non-art audiences and community contexts, using art to create conversation and exchange. Removing barriers to the arts is also a big part of her production work, with a focus on developing accessible and inclusive projects.Artist @emilyhrodders Host @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards @niamhschmidtke Music @joemoss1 @jtre_vBroadcast through @rtm.fm

How can the rhythms of songs incite a crew, family or collective solidarity? Rhys Morgan is the 3rd guest of our ‘as a chorus’ mini series, sharing 3 queer sea shanties from the project and choir, Seaweed in the Fruit Locker. Using Polari, a gay slang used to declare and protect gay people historically, the choir rewrites and performs historic sea shanties to describe queer lived experiences and histories. Founded in 2022, we speak about Morgan’s role in the choir, how queering shanties is a return to their origins,Credits (in order of appearance);Lion’s Den; Written by Rhys Morgan, performed by Seaweed in the Fruit LockerHell Cats; Written by Sef Penrose, performed by Seaweed in the Fruit LockerI’ve My Own Suggestions Too; Written by Ben Doney, performed by Seaweed in the Fruit LockerBio;Rhys Morgan is a queer interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Plymouth, UK. His work explores queerness as an operative in everyday experience and the expectations, possibilities, and limitations of how this is expressed. Being based in the South West of England, Morgan’s work often reflects on the heritage and experience of queer people on the peninsula. In 2023 he completed the MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London, being selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries the same year. He recently worked for the National Gallery with conceptual artist Jeremy Deller, as one of four national Assistant Curators to deliver Deller’s 2025 work The Triumph of Art. Artist  @rhys__mHosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards   @niamhschmidtke Music @joemoss1 @jtre_vBroadcast through @rtm.fm

What conditions do we gather in? Can this exist without hierarchy, or even a physical space? Most Dismal Swamp joins the second episode of our mini series ‘as a chorus’, sharing audio extracts from the recent film, The Bastard Fields. A mixtape of 3 sketches, each audio builds on the language of historical preachers, reddit forums and social media commentary. They weave a world which asks about the violence or nightmares that instills our need to come together. With Most Dismal Swamp, we discuss the mechanics of making shared spaces, how an art practice can parody this by collaging the works of multiple authors into longer ‘playlists’ that become complex and inconsistent worlds (such as the ones we all live through), and a self-cannibalising process built on pattern recognition, outliers in data sets, and the impact of regional specificities in AI models. We ask how art practices traverse creative production, curation and production to open up space outside of traditional systems and build artistic community both within and around the works being shown.Bio:Most Dismal Swamp is a mixed-reality biome; a place and a practice where a dank miasma of fictions, artists, model worlds, adversarial realisms, external hard drives, camera-tracking data, campfires, opaque rituals, game engines, amateur heresies, visual effects plug-ins, and other animals come together.Emerging from the curation, artwork, and research of Dane Sutherland, Most Dismal Swamp’s multimedia projects involve collaboration and convivial speculation with many other artists. These projects are modular and densely populated, presented across various immersive and bespoke installations and online; Multi-User Shared Hallucinations dredged from the slumgullion swamp of adversarial digital, platform, and neural media.A rigorous ‘acid pessimism’ inspirits the work of Most Dismal Swamp: an acerbic yet playful immersion into the composite hallucinatory lifeworlds, gamespaces, and protocols that make up the hostile architecture of our shared platform-mediated crises. Artist @most_dismal_swampHosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards   @niamhschmidtke Music @joemoss1 @jtre_vBroadcast through @rtm.fm

Can choirs be a form of protest, and what kinds of resistance could they provide in the midst of climate crises?Our mini-series, ‘as a chorus’ begins with Niamh Schmidtke’s work, CHANTER (Aughinish). Their 15 minute audio introduces us to an aluminium refinery and it’s impact on the local population. Combining song and audio description, the work brings together its own chorus, inviting us to join their melodies, building from the individual to the collective as our awareness of their injustice intensifies. Together we discuss how the work incites forms of direct action, and the need for collective making.This work was made through the Welcome to the Neighbourhood residency in summer 2025 at Askeaton Contemporary Arts. Askeaton Contemporary Arts is an artist-led organisation based in the west of Ireland since 2006. An ongoing residency programme creates critical cultural encounters in the midst of the Irish countryside each summer, while public programmes and exhibitions in Askeaton and elsewhere over two decades have found innovative public contexts and resilient relationships for new forms of artmaking to emerge.Further resources about Aughinish can be found through https://www.stigmadamages.com/ Voices (in order of appearance); Bernadette Hayes, Inbher Glenn Community Choir, Monya Riachi, Christopher Clery, Grainne Hassett and Akinsola Lawanson.Bio:Niamh Schmidtke (b. Dublin 1997, they/she) is an artist, lecturer and arts facilitator based across London and Limerick. They explore the politics of green washing, economic jargon and the language of democracy through speculation, audio, ceramics and installations, centring intimacy as a form of decolonial praxis. They examine the relationship between listening and speaking, to consider the kinds of voices that deep time, the sea, or humans could have with one another. They currently lecture in the School of Architecture, Limerick, with an MFA from Goldsmiths, London and BA from LSAD. Awards include; Agility Award, Material Futures Residency at Cove Park Scotland and the European Investment Bank’s (EIB) Artist Development fund. They have exhibited across Ireland and internationally including TULCA; Salvage Agency, Galway (2024), Pulling Blood from a Stone (solo), Science Gallery Berlin (2024), DARE 2019, Orpheus Institute, Belgium and PULSE, Limerick City Gallery (2022). Their work is held in public and private collections, including the EIB’s permanent collection. They are a member of Lewisham Arthouse artists’ co-op where they co-organise the Graduate Award with Sara Willet.Artist @niamhschmidtke Hosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards  Music @joemoss1 @jtre_vBroadcast through @rtm.fm

For episode 29, we listen to the second half of Black Holes Act 1. This 40-minute radio play by Suley, which holds a mirror up to the UK after last year’s race riots. A re-imagining of Derrick Bell’s 1992 novella ‘Space Traders’, Black Holes is a satirical work of speculative fiction in which aliens offer the UK vast riches in exchange for its Black citizens and a referendum is called on the trade. An Afrofuturistic exploration of critical race theory, this two-part episode asks if progress for racial justice happens only when it aligns with the interests of a White majority. Drawing inspiration from political satires like The Thick Of It, surrealist dramas such as Atlanta and the contemporary Black British storytelling of I May Destroy You, Black Holes employs worldbuilding as a radical tool to deliberately instigate positive change. In this episode we discuss how the work is an attempt to critically reflect on the familiar with which are inextricably bound – and how to change the world, we first must imagine one drastically different to the one we have.​Bio:Suley is a playwright, painter, lawyer and lecturer, Suley uses worldbuilding as a radical tool to deliberately instigate change. His latest body of work is an attempt to critically reflect on the familiar with which are inextricably bound. Fusing sculpture, ceramics, print media, film, and sound, Suley continues the Afrofuturist tradition of generating a multiplicity of futures with which to positively affect the present.Artist @suley.artHosts @influential_bro @_rebecca.edwards  @niamhschmidtke Music @joemoss1 @jtre_vBroadcast through @rtm.fm