Little Atoms

James Bridle is a writer, artist, publisher and technologist usually based in London, UK. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network. He has written for WIRED, ICON, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic and many other publications, and writes a regular column for the Observer newspaper on publishing and technology. In 2011, he coined the term “New Aesthetic”, and his ongoing research around this subject has been featured and discussed worldwide. His work, such as the Iraq War Historiography, an encyclopaedia of Wikipedia Changelogs, has been exhibited at galleries in the Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, and has been commissioned by organisations such as Artangel, Mu Eindhoven, and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC.Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist and writer. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Her work is transdisciplinary, using everything from electronics, software, and paint to social rules and words as media with which to explore and shape our interactions with the world. Her focuses include the seamless integration of technology into the lived experience, the humanity of objects and the built environment, and systemic resilience and conviviality. Eleanor is Principal Security Engineer at the Open Internet Tools Project (OpenITP), directing the OpenITP Peer Review Board for open source software and working on adversary modeling. She is also Technical Director at the International Modern Media Institute (IMMI), a member of the advisory boards at Geeks Without Bounds (GWoB) and the Calyx Institute, and works on occasion as a Senior Security Associate with Stach & Liu. She is a founder of the Constitutional Analysis Support Team (CAST), previously co-founded the Seattle-based Public N3rd Area hacker space, and works on the Trike and Briar projects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Irving Finkel is an archaeologist and Assyriologist, currently Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. He’s also an expert on the history of board games, and the founder of the Great Diary Project. Irving is the author of numerous books, most recently The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. Also on this week’s show, astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Wolinski and Joe Shrewsbury are one half of 65daysofstatic, an instrumental band from Sheffield, as comfortable crashing samplers to mine glitches as they are putting guitars through too much distortion. Influenced by a technologically dystopian present and an apocalyptically likely future, they tend to be found filling venues, galleries or headphones with different kinds of noise in their ongoing efforts to find the limits of what ‘being a band’ can mean.The Space Lady is a street-performing singer based in Colorado, USA. Originally beginning on the streets of Boston in the late 70s, she has recently begun playing again. Often seen performing in 1980’s Boston, and then a decade later in San Francisco’s Castro community – where she would play and sing for hours on end for the gay scene, and got her apt moniker – The Space Lady’s winged helmet and setup of a Casio battery-powered keyboard, vocal mic and echo & phaser controls became a small but striking phenomenon. Her sound is a blend of synth-laden pop and proto-techno that evokes the iconic soundtrack artists and early electronic composers such as Suzanne Ciani. The Space Lady has been recognised alongside Daniel Johnston and Jandek on Irwin Chusid’s seminal Outsider compilation Songs in the Key of Z, and her lo-fi synth minimalist interpretation of Peter Schilling’s Major Tom featured on Erol Alkan’s Bugged Out mix last year, as well as John Maus’ 2011 Rough Trade set. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Born into a showbiz milieu in Sydney, Tim Baker left Australia to travel in his early 20s and lived in Rome and Madrid before moving to Paris, where he wrote about music and worked in film. He later ran consular operations in France and North Africa for the Australian embassy, liaising with international authorities on cases involving murder, kidnap, terrorism and disappearances. His fiction includes the collection of short stories, Out From the Past, and his film work includes writing the feature film Samsara. His debut novel is Fever City. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Fleetwood is the founder and director of Hide&Seek, a game design studio dedicated to inventing new kinds of play. Hide&Seek started life in 2007 as a festival of social games and playful experiences on London’s South Bank, and built into a studio occupied a unique position in the UK, creating innovative games, installations and events with organisations including Film4, the Cultural Olympiad, Tate Modern, Warner Bros, Gâité Lyrique, Nike, Sony, the Royal Opera House and Kensington Palace.Anab Jain was born and educated in India (NID), with an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art, and founded Superflux in 2009, leading the Consultancy’s client partnerships whilst balancing the Lab’s self-initiated conceptual projects. She has lead multidisciplinary design, strategy and foresight projects for businesses, think-tanks and research organisations such as Sony, BBC, Nokia, NHS, Design Council, Forum for the Future, Qatar Foundation and Govt. of UAE. Honoured as a TED Fellow, she is the recipient of several awards, including the Award of Excellence ICSID and Apply Computers, Innovation Award, Chicago International Film Festival and the UNESCO Digital Arts Award. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA New York, Apple, Mattel Toys, Tate Modern, Science Gallery Dublin, National Museum of China and the London Design Festival. She is on the Board of MzTek and Broadway Cinema and Media Centre, and is a guest lecturer at the Royal College of Art, VCUQatar, Architectural Association, Goldsmiths, Dundee Innovative Product Design and CIID. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Olivia Laing‘s first book, To the River, was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Olivia is the former Deputy Books Editor of the Observer and writes for a variety of publications, including the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian and Times Literary Supplement. She’s a 2011 MacDowell Fellow, and has received awards from the Arts Council and the Authors’ Foundation. Olivia ‘s latest book is The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andy Miller is a reader, author and editor of books. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, Esquire and Mojo. He’s the author of Tilting at Windmills: How I Tried to Stop Worrying and Love Sport, among others. His latest book is The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed 2011 novel So Much Pretty. She grew up in northern Appalachia, where she dropped out of high school to work full time. Hoffman spent three years travelling and working as an agricultural labourer in Europe and the Middle East. She returned to the US, had a baby and found a job delivering newspapers which eventually led to work as a reporter covering environmental politics and crime. She has been a visiting writer at St. John’s, Columbia and Oxford, where she lectured on Violence and Masculinity for the Rhodes Global Scholars Symposium. Hoffman lives in Manhattan and teaches writing and literature at Bronx Community College. Cara ‘s latest novel is Be Safe I Love You. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, Neil Denny talks to Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall about her new book Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs, and then Francesca Kay on her latest novel The Long Room.Lisa Randall is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists and the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. She has received numerous awards and honours and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics. She is the author of numerous books including Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, and Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate our Universe. Her latest book is Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe.Francesca Kay's first novel, An Equal Stillness, won the Orange Award for New Writers and was nominated for the Authors' Club First Novel Award and for Best First Book in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Europe and South Asia Region). Her second novel, The Translation of the Bones, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel is The Long Room. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lee Rourke is the author of the short story collection Everyday, and the novel The Canal, which won the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize in 2010. He is writer in residence at Kingston University, where he is an MFA lecturer in creative writing and critical theory. He also lectures in creative writing at the University of East London. His latest novel is Vulgar Things. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.