Advertise on podcast: Alt-Social ~reconnecting social media with humanity~

What happens when we stop trying to silence difficult feelings and instead listen to them? Ximena, a certified Deep Listening® tutor, and Akky continue their conversation, and it gently turns to grief. They talk about Pauline Oliveros’s Horse Sings From Cloud, and Ximena shares her experience of performing the piece and reflects on how listening and sounding can give voice to difficult emotions, including sadness and anger. 🎧 Bonus: Ximena guides us through a brief Deep Listening practice, followed by a humming exercise based on a score by IONE. 🔗⁠Ximena's website ⁠

Ximena is a sound artist-researcher, a Deep Listening® certified tutor, and, in her own words, a “big dreamer.” Growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, she was already observing her surroundings through sound, sensation, and imagination. Years later, she entered the world of Deep Listening, bringing plenty of questions on her vivid dreams to Pauline Oliveros, the pioneering American composer and accordionist who developed the practice. That listening journey eventually grew into Sonic Migrations and INTIMAL, developed further during her postdoctoral research at the University of Oslo, exploring how bodies, memories, and people separated by distance can reconnect through sound and digital technology. In this Alt-Talk, Akky speaks with Ximena about how people living far apart can use digital communication not only to exchange words but also to sense place and presence, share memories, and even feel each other’s bodily rhythms across distance. 🔗⁠⁠Ximena's website ⁠⁠

Did you know the earliest films by the Lumière brothers were often under a minute long, not so far from today’s "shorts"? In this second session, Aleksey and Akky continue their slightly obsessive art-cinema conversations: from Tarkovsky to Leni Riefenstahl, and what shorts and social media could still be. They also reflect on professionalism and amateurism: what makes an image truly pure and innocent in the presence of amateurism.

It started with a window.A train to Italy, a child watching the passing world. Aleksey carries that image into his work: a desire to create cinema as new “windows” through which the audience can see, feel, and remember. In this episode, Akky speaks with Aleksey, a друг from VGIK, the world’s oldest film school in Russia, where they met in 2013. From their shared admiration for Andrei Tarkovsky to questions of social media today, they ask: Can cinema or even short-form videos, still shape how we see the world in deeper and more meaningful ways?

Love (a.k.a. Lavinia) returns from Basel.She reads a letter from her brother Jack, sincere words that echo uncannily with the world we live in today.🎶 Soundtrack: 21st Century Schizoid Man by King Crimson.

Luana returns, a yoga teacher from Italy who treats walking not as a pastime, but as a method: a way to come back to yourself, and to the present. In this session, we explore slowness as a practical skill in a world shaped by algorithms and metrics. Luana radically suggests that AI may need “slow time”, not just reactive to optimisation loops. Bonus: a short guided breathing practice with Luana!

Meet Luana — an Italian yoga teacher who first felt her body’s need in the Mediterranean, bathing with her father as a child. In this New Year Alt-Talk episode, Luana shares how yoga and Ayurveda helped her navigate moments of disconnection—from people, society, and herself.

Ban social media — the right move? The Alt-talk host, Akky, doesn’t think so. 🔍 Instead of a ban, what if we looked for co-living of “stable-social” and “alt-social”, by learning two very different kinds of thinking: calculative thinking and meditativethinking as Heidegger says? Put down our physical and metaphorical “Scouters”, the wearable devices and readouts that numerise our being, and try something else: attention, care, and deeply listen👂 🔗50 Seconds of Breath-taking https://schoolofcommons.org/making-public/issues/2023/50-seconds-of-breath-taking Akky's photoblog ⁠https://icaresque.tumblr.com⁠ Gelassenheit (Releasement): its role in Heidegger’s late thinking https://www.europeancentreforheideggerstudies.org/ Eisenhower on Atomic Energy https://www.history.com/speeches/eisenhower-on-atomic-energy

What if social media was beyond a scoreboard? Akky, host of alt-talk and a digital media specialist moving between film, media studies, and communications, keeps returning to one question: What if we paused the algorithm, silenced the index, and simply listened, to what truly resonates in the heart? This podcast is Akky’s tentative response. He is now studying at the Grief Care Institute, exploring 傾聴 (keichō, attentive listening), combining it with the methodology by American composer/accordionist Pauline Oliveros called deep listening👂 These are the links for what Akky touched upon during thetalk. -50 Seconds of Breath-taking https://schoolofcommons.org/making-public/issues/2023/50-seconds-of-breath-taking -Aokage Project https://linktr.ee/aokageproject

This Summer Special, we welcome Case (aka “Cat”), who runs an analogue-focused motion-picture production company in New Orleans. It was at Berlinale’s 2024 European Film Market that Case and Akky sparked the idea for the Alt-Social Initiative. Case reminds us that today’s social media may be as fleeting as slide photography. Just as slides, so too might social media in twenty years become something more human and authentic. Hear the uncut half-session that gave birth to our mission in early 2025. Imagine sharing a summer-evening drink on the balcony together🍹 Case’s production company 🔗 shawscope.com

Emmie, Research Associate, Yale Digital Ethics Center, and Akky explore whether using polite language with AI matters, and spotlight the bright future of social media for the next wave of digital natives. ⚠️ Academic alert – anthropomorphise – to give human traits to non‑humans. Akky was like "Hold up! my ears missed that acoustically!" 😂 Check out her blog ⁠⁠The Ethical Reckoner

Ever imagined dropping your physical self and living entirely online? We chat with Emmie Hine, AI governance specialist who takes us back to those early days on BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) to AI-based chatbot to talk to the dead. Hit play on Part 1 to follow her journey, from diving deep into tech to mastering Chinese, and see how those paths came together to shape her work in AI ethics. Check out her blog ⁠The Ethical Reckoner

This is the second half of a discussion with 'Mad Professor'🧑‍🔬 Shintaro and Akky speculate 🤔 “reading, writing, arithmetic, video-editing and computermodelling could be the contemporary liberal arts”, which could be the life-saver in the digital age to counter-dance against digitality. Are these views too elitist and optimistic? Or should we still dream on? Here is the must-read👉 ⁠Counter-Dancing Digitality Mastodon Bluesky COUNTER-N

Meet the digital world's 'Mad Professor'🧑‍🔬 Teaching Media Studies and Computation at Humboldt University in Berlin, Shintaro Miyazaki is pioneering 'counter-dancing digitality': a radical approach to transformingour digital lives. 💃 Shintaro urges us to dive into literature, music, film, software, games, and particularly computer modelling to participate in counter-dancing raves 👯‍♂️  Tune in to hear about his journey with techno music and computation and how these experiences shaped his groundbreaking concept of counter-dancing digitality. Here is the must-read👉 ⁠Counter-Dancing Digitality   Mastodon Bluesky COUNTER-N

This is the second half of a discussion with Lavinia (a.k.a. Love), a social entrepreneur based in Basel, Switzerland.She is launching her new social music project, Rainbow Cafe 👉 ⁠Teatime Vinyl⁠. Love discusses euthanasia in relation to her father's ongoing situation. (Additional info: Active euthanasia is illegal in Switzerland; however, providing the means for dying is legal as assisted suicide.) This is the list of films that Akky mentioned during the talk: Irene, 2023, 13 min (Sweden, Germany, Switzerland)Avec, 2014, 16 min (Estonia, Japan)