The Digital Salon is a podcast series and a multi-media blog meditating on the theme of the PORTAL produced by the alumni and affiliated practitioners of UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative. In our pilot season, we respond to Arundhati Roy’s provocation in saying that the “pandemic is a portal.” As the pandemic fractures the cities we study, live in and love, alumni (and friends) fabulate responses that draw on the practices we call urban humanities. Through readings, soundwalks, audio-collages, interviews and more, we seek out the openings, fissures and apertures within the pandemic. digitalsalonpodcast.org
UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative
And for our 12th episode, Dr. Jonathan Jae-an Crisman, Assistant Professor of Public and Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona and a founding faculty of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative composes a sonic exploration of Asian American and diasporic collective identity through a chorus of sixteen different voices, recorded shortly after the Atlanta shootings of six Asian spa workers.
And for our 11th episode, UHI alumni and Urban Planning Master's student Eliza Franklin explores the Black Matrix Collective, reimagining the ways in which Black Folx attain their higher self through internal and external healing.
And for our 10th episode, Bangkok-based interior architect, researcher and bread baker, Marta Kwiczała casts a collective of home bread-makers that emerged in the Covid-19 pandemic, in, as she calls it, a story of bread in three acts.
And for our 9th episode, Ana Maria Alvarez, founding artistic director of CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater and 2020 Doris Duke Artist weaves a sonic tale about family-ing as a verb, tuning us into unrevealed practices of kinship that link us through a DNA of care.
And for our 8th episode, UHI alumi and PhD student of World Arts and Cultures and Dance at UCLA Lili Flores Raygoza and Roya Chagnon, Master student in Architecture at UCLA, investigate the potential for collective knowledge production through the creation of a Knowledge Center in the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture.
For our 7th episode, UHI alum and PhD student of Urban Planning at UCLA, Gus Wendel explores the state of the UCLA student commute to and from campus.
For our 6th episode, UHI alumni, graduate of UCLA Architecture and Urban Design M.Arch I program, also, founder and leader of the Earth Girl Helen Brown Center for Planetary Intelligence Band, Heidi Alexander, relays the communal knowledge disseminated by the synchronized, vocalized, embodied practice of aerobics.
For our 5th episode, UHI alumni Peter Chesney and PhD candidate of History at UCLA dives into the history of rideshare in Los Angeles and beyond, illuminating the collective organizing practices that bear relevance to today's so-called ‘sharing economy.'
For our 4th episode, UHI alumni and architects Martha Kriley and Hideyo Kameda reflect on a changed work environment for designers wrought by the pandemic.
For our 3rd episode UHI alum and PhD student in the English Department at UCLA, Miranda Hoegberg investigates the intersections between food, literature, and sound with her undergraduate students in an English class at UCLA.
For our second episode, UHI alum Dr. Brady Collins and professor of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona tells a story about collective struggle during the pandemic by tuning into the ways the coalition Healthy LA navigates the bureaucratic dissonance of a call-in public comment system.
Welcome back to Digital Salon Podcast, Season 2: The Collective. For our first episode, we take you to the scale of global memory, as a collaborative group of sound artists and architects, led by Lena Pozdnyakova and Yara Feghali, walk us through the streets of Beirut, past and present, to reflect on collective trauma, grief, and healing.
A critical playlist diagnoses our present day situation as passengers aboard globalized capital’s ship of fools. Episode by Teo Wickland.
In this week's episode, members of the Center for Planetary Intelligence Band reflect on technology in the age of COVID, surveying the highs and lows in conversation, and veering way off track with no look back. For additional musing on washing machines, internal combustion, cooking, optics, dump trucks and Duḥkha visit digitalsalonpodcast.org to listen to Part 2 of Production in the Age of Data Sprawl.
In this episode, a global sonic archiving project remixes our journeys home. Episode by Cassie Hoeprich, Akana Jayewardene & Ru’a Al-Abweh.
Listen to the uncommon quiet and radical emptiness that is UCLA’s campus during the shutdown. Episode by Genevieve Carpio.
In our pilot, we pay tribute to the writer and activist Arundhati Roy, through a reading of the first chapter of her newest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and discuss the episodes to come. Episode by Jacqueline Barrios & Gus Wendel. digitalsalonpodcast.org/First-Portal
Tune into the soundscapes of LA’s ethnic supermarkets and the story of the essential work they perform in urban space. Episode by Brady Collins. digitalsalonpodcast.org/esta-tienda-me-importa-mucho