Ex nihilo - Podcast English
Episodes
The Man of the Crowd
14 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,I want to share a few thoughts with you on the peculiar relationship our society has with Artificial Intelligence. It confro...
Post Mortem II
10 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As the current wave of disruption, manifesting itself through various conversations about artificial intelligence swirling around us (which, from our ...
Talking to ... Peter Fleming
19 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It is difficult to ignore how Capitalism has slipped into a deep values crisis – and indeed, you might be forgiven for thinking we are in a Potemkin...
What does it mean to be literate?
29 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Following our presentation of the »Labyrinth of Signs,« parts I and II, we now provide a deeply reflective yet light-hearted post-mortem discussion ...
How to animate your Bedroom
15 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The title’s rhetorical question is a tautology. After all, it's evident that when we dream, our bedroom transforms into a space that’s magically f...
Imagination Unleashed
03 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Who comes up with something like that? (Carmela Soprano)It's been a good two years since we entered the world of AI-generated images, and during this ...
In the Labyrinth of Signs - I
28 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The following text is part one of the second chapter from Martin’s second book, titled »Vom Geist der Maschine. Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrü...
Talking to ... Daniel Markovits
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At a time when productivity theater, task masking, and sham production have become commonplace, it is clear that we’re facing a profound crisis of w...
Talking to ... Cam Caldwell
25 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It may be that the world around us is transforming into a vast puzzle, even a Mystery Play. This situation also extends to our professional environmen...
Talking to ... Eliza Mondegreen
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If identities in the Digital Utopia can be defined with the click of a mouse, it isn’t surprising when people want to make their lives as colorful a...
Talking to ... Philip Pilkington
15 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It's common knowledge that capitalism has been in a deep crisis of values since the financial crisis of 2007/2008, while the question of where it come...
In the Ghost Town / In der Geisterstadt
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Here is a short video that provides some illustrative footage for a documentary we have been planning about the carnival activities of Castiglion Fibo...
Talking to ... John Aziz
09 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When the cognitive dissonances of our present-day made themselves felt in the aftermath of October 7th, the question of where and how the abysmal hatr...
Talking to ... Mark Lilla
16 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If there's a great mystery in the history of ideas, it lies in where the blind spots of thought are encountered. However, this raises the question of ...
Talking to ... Moriel Bareli
13 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Because life is life-size, academic discourses, let alone grand worldviews, can only ever be approximations. Yet, direct observation and engagement wi...
Talking to ... Göran Adamson
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sometimes, political landscape changes occur very slowly, almost imperceptibly, and not infrequently; a social step backward is disguised as a seducti...
Talking to ... Megan Gafford
23 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The artist's becoming the preferred role model of modern Europe is a perfectly understandable process, as we can see in him the embodiment of the idea...
Talking to ... Catherine Liu
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Imagining the Boomer world straying into suffocating moralism during the Pop Revolution would have seemed like a grotesque, if not outright ridiculous...
Talking to ... Brad Evans
25 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you follow the rise of populism and conflicts emerging in post-industrial societies, you see the same picture emerging everywhere: a society lost i...
Talking to ... Benedict Evans
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
One might call Benedict Evans an anthropologist of our digital age, as he’s been observing and analyzing its technological changes for over two deca...
Talking to ... Sergei Medvedev
20 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
While the harbingers were already visible long before, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it clear that the days of the comparatively peaceful p...
Talking to ... Danya Fast
20 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There is no doubt that the margins of society can reveal something about what shifts within. And this is precisely what’s drawn our attention to a y...
The Story of the Silk Road, Part One
13 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The rise and fall of the Dread Pirate Roberts is a complex story that delves into the creation and dismantling of the Silk Road, an online marketplace...
Talking to ... Robert Skidelsky
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When does it ever happen that an intelligent contemporary describes himself as a neo-Luddite with conviction and a certain sense of status? This alone...
Talking to ... Wilfred Reilly
02 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
That society loses its way in phantasmata and ideological labyrinths may be attributable to the human-all-too-human – but it’s strange in a cultur...
Talking to ... Volodymyr Ishchenko
30 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Since Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the country has been at war, with the rest of the world having registered this state of exception in hor...
Philosophy of the Machine 12
03 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Examining the question of how the Universal Machine represents an epistemic force - this chapter explores how a Machine Culture’s socioplastic natur...
Talking to ... Scott Tinker
29 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If one were to describe Scott Tinker's work, perhaps the most apt description would be to describe him as an anthropologist of human energy use. In an...
Talking to ... Benedict Beckeld (Audio)
31 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Undoubtedly, the question of oikophobia is a most puzzling social phenomenon. If the 19th-century psychiatrists understood it as the fear of being ins...
Talking to ... Jeff Sutherland (Audio)
20 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Looking at many contemporary institutions, we can't help thinking Modernity's secret goal lies in its organizational irresponsibility. In the shadows,...
Philosophy of the Machine 11
23 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
If we remember that the machina mundi, like the Deus ex Machina, flies in from above, it's unsurprising that the scene of the Machine Discourse shifts...
Talking to Roger Pielke jr. (Audio)
13 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
You might call Roger Pielke Jr., the son of the highly respected Climatologist Roger Pielke Sr., an Environmental Political scientist who analyzes the...
Philosophy of the Machine 10
08 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The chapter deals with the birth of metaphysics and eternal damnation, the emergence of that peculiar attitude of mind called Gnosis in the science of...
Philosophy of the Machine 9
04 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of another world arises with the pure, animate signs: Pure spirit, eternity, Platonic bodies. In contrast, the real world is a cave, an under...
Talking to ... Malcom Kyeyune
24 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Occasionally, we must admit we belong to an older generation with worldviews shaped by our specific generational experiences. This, at least, was what...
Philosophy of the Machine 8
16 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The chapter deals with the birth of Pythagorean mathematics - or, more precisely, the way with which mathematicians fall into the delirium of Infinity...
Philosophy of the Machine 7
05 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The chapter tells of how the Machine, as socioplasty, inscribes itself on antiquity - how it becomes an ideal of personality and, as imprinted freedom...
Philosophy of the Machine 6
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The sixth chapter tells how the phallic sign of the bull deity turns into an alphabetic type. But where does this story begin? There, where the god in...
Philosophy of the Machine 5
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The fifth chapter deals with the paradox that the art of memory (ars memoria) is joined by the art of forgetting (ars oblivionis) - which may explain ...
Talking to ... Thomas Maeder
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The serial killer is a figure of pop culture. This may be one reason why one of the strangest cases in this field is little known to this day: the cas...
Philosophy of the Machine 4
18 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This chapter tells of the origin of the god Zeus, who was originally Zeus metallon, a metallurgical godhead reflecting the social practices of mining ...
Talking to ... Sam Vaknin
05 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sam Vaknin is an Israeli author who’s written extensively on the question of borderline and narcissism - and this with an unparalleled clarity. Abov...
Philosophy of the Machine 3
18 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This chapter goes back to the beginning of the machine concept, or more precisely: it makes clear that the Greek deus ex machina is based on an even o...
Philosophy of the Machine 2
03 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This chapter continues uncovering the obscurations of what a Machine is by examining the Phenomenology of what it is or isn’t. What lies behind and ...
Philosophy of the Machine 1
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Martin Burckhardts Philosophy of the Machine, Introdction. Translation & Music: Hopkins Stanley Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at ma...