PHANTASMAGORIA: An introduction with Sean Ketteringham

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Introduction

Nina Davies

You're listening to Future Artefacts FM , a bi-monthly podcast/broadcast featuring speculative fiction audio works by artists and writers produced and presented by Nina Davies,

Rebecca Edwards

Niamh Schmidtke

and Niamh Schmidtke, on RTM

and also available on podcast channels.

The programme focuses on fictional works intended for broadcast to carve out a better understanding of the now by exploring various interpretations of the future.

Together with guests we discuss the mechanics of different types of storytelling to reveal the complexities of contemporary culture. Let’s get started.

All

Let’s get started.

This miniseries is commissioned by Henry Moore Institute to accompany their exhibition, Phantasmagoria Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15th May, 2026 to 30th of August, 2026.

For more information, just visit the Henry Moore Institute website.

Artist Introduction

And we're rolling. Welcome back to Future Artefacts FM. As per usual, I'm your host, Nina Davies.

I'm Rebecca Edwards.

And I'm Niamh Schmidtke. And we're here today to introduce a brand new mini-series. It's very exciting.

Yeah, we're really excited about this one. It's going to be three episodes including this special episode with Sean Ketteringham, who is the curator of an exhibition called Phantasmagoria at the Henry Moore Institute, which we'll explain a little bit more in a second. But thanks for coming into the studio, Sean. How are you today?

I'm great. Yeah, good to be here.

We've been asked or we've been invited by you and then we invited you back to produce a mini-series in connection to the show Phantasmagoria. There's a second line to the...

Yeah, the subtitle is Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age.

Okay. Yes, Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, we'll kind of get into the nitty-gritty on that in a bit. The show opens on May 15th.

Yes. Yeah. Well, the opening party is on May 14th and everybody's very welcome to that.

Okay. Oh, the party is on the 14th.

The opening party is on the 14th of May, Thursday, 14th of May, and then it's open to the public properly from the 15th and it runs through till the end of August. So it's our summer show.

Okay, great.

One of the things about the conversation today is partially we're introducing the mini-series and we're talking about Phantasmagoria, sort of what is folklore in the digital age, what is digital sculpture, even a little bit about when we talk about folk, what type of folk are we talking about? But I think also from our side as we're coming quite late to the process of you conceiving of this exhibition and inviting these artists is also a little bit about your own research interests, which we're going to expand on more, especially because there's quite a few of the artists that are featured in the show that we've also had on Future Artifacts FM in the past. So we're also going to talk more specifically about some of their works.

What we're quite interested in today is to understand a little bit about your own research practice in terms of like curatorially and how that works with the Henry Moore. I don't if it's helpful as well for us to understand a little bit about the Henry Moore Institute and sort of what's your relationship to them before we jump into the question about your own research.

Yeah, sure. I can definitely say a bit about the Institute. So it was established initially as a Centre for the Study of Sculpture based at Leeds Art Gallery. So we have a really close relationship with Leeds Art Gallery. We co-manage the Leeds Sculpture collections. But it was founded by Henry Moore as a Centre for the Study of Sculpture back in the early 80s.

And then it got the current building that we have in 1993. And it was established as the Henry Moore Institute. So we're part of the wider Henry Moore Foundation, which is dedicated to obviously the work of Moore and his legacy, but also and our focus at the Institute is the support of contemporary sculpture largely, although we do do historic exhibitions as well. A huge part of the work that we do as a foundation overall is the support of contemporary artist practices through our grants program and our exhibition program. So yeah, we're free to visit.

The exhibition spaces are there with our research library and archival sculptors' papers. So it has that sort of academic and research focus. And personally, it's a really fulfilling place to work because of the research driven nature of the exhibitions that we do. And obviously came to the Institute first of all as a researcher. And I was then given this opportunity to curate Phantasmogoria.

Did you know that you would be curating an exhibition when you started the fellowship?

When I first joined the Institute, no, not at all. But when I was stepping into the role of assistant curator, I had a pretty good idea of the challenge that was before me. The main galleries are an amazing space. And I'm very lucky to be working with such an incredible building, such an incredible environment, such incredible colleagues as well. So the nature of the exhibition really comes from a longer standing research interests of mine coming out of my PhD. And I'm going to be starting a long-term research project with the University of Birmingham soon, which is folk related. So what I really wanted to be doing for this show is to continue to explore some of those interests I already had. And this is really tailored around sculpture since we have this sculpture emphasis at the Institute.

At what point did you decide that this show would be folkloric sculpture for the digital age? And was there a specific work or text or online phenomenon that inspired you to kind of go in this direction?

I initially started out the project without a digital focus at all. I was interested in contemporary artists responding to the huge boom in interest, this kind of renaissance in interest in folk culture that we've seen in recent years. So I wanted to look at sculptors engaging with that.

And part of that was my wider interests around folk, identity, nationalism, empire. We'll be looking at a more historic post-war story of this.

Going forward.

Going forward, yeah. But I also wanted to understand that post-war context as a way sort of through its rhymes with our contemporary context.

Will you describe this as a side quest, this digit bike?

Um, I don't know. No, I don't think anything is a side quest anymore in the way that I work. It all sort of becomes platted back in to whatever it is that you call your kind of sustaining interests in the research that you do.

And sorry, post-war, you mean post-World War II?

Post-World War II, yes, of course, sorry. But yeah, so it started out without a digital emphasis. But I had a conversation with Philip Speakman, actually.

Who we had on the show.

We have a question about his work coming up later.

I started looking into Phil's work more, particularly his work, The Road That Eats Thoughts, where he uses this kind of Dungeons and Dragons. He's like the dungeon master, basically, he's working with four participants. It's almost like a workshop format, part projection, part script.

It creates this immersive reality space, where he tells this story of these visitors to a rural space who have encountered this slightly horrifying and vaguely folkloric event that you only catch glimpses of through radio excerpts and stuff. It's a very future artifacts work, actually. But yes, Phil's work was really important for then leading me on to a wider group of artists.

I mean, it's no coincidence that I'm talking to you guys now because of all these links that we're already discovering. But kind of through Phil's work, I came to Nina's work, to Dane's work, and Joe's as well. And the kind of the ripples gradually expanded over the next few months. And we arrived at the group of artists that we have in the show now.

So that includes Daniel Rathwaite Shirley, Joey Holder, Nina, of course, Jürgen Baumann, a Swiss artist, Phil Speakman is collaborating with Steph Lin on an artwork, Isaac Lithgow and Rustan Söderling, and Dane completes the ten artists in total that

How did you come across Phil's work? Like, what was the...

Yeah, actually a really strange connection. So I did a research residency at Grisdale Arts in the Lake District, and Phil did some work with them. And I had encountered his work called The Ur, which is like this amazing, like fake rock basically built around a sauna. I can't go and look it up. It's too much to explain.

It's built around this pre-existing structure, and he used this rock that is emulating an actual stone in nearby Lake District, which has its own folkloric history. He used it as a projection apparatus basically. And I think that established me a real interest in this tension between the sculptural and the image, the projection, which is really essential to the exhibition.

So to say a little bit about the title, maybe that might be helpful, which again, I find titles really useful when I'm preparing an exhibition. I don't know about you guys and how your title works or whatever, but I-

I actually forget the titles to my work a lot of the time. I have to go through e-mails. What did I title it? What did I say?

I find I always- I make really bad titles for their proposal, and then I get to the point of the work and I'm like, oh, that's the only thing this could be called. And it started off as like, the proposal is due, I need to give it something. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, actually, maybe that's kind of the best thing that it could be.

I'd say we arrived at the title for this show in kind of a midpoint, and it felt really natural and it felt like a good fit. Although it can be a bit of a mouthful for people who may be less inclined to tackle however many syllable words, phantasmagoria is, but it came to me through an article that Dane had written and presented at a conference that Dane shared with me.

And phantasmagoria itself, it was mentioned in the context of Walter Benjamin and his writing on the Arcades project in Paris in the 19th century. He talks about this kind of phantasmagorical space related to capital.

And I sort of traced this word back to Marx, where Benjamin kind of takes it from and expands it from. Marx is talking about phantasmagoria as a, almost like a metaphor for the seductive illusions that are conjured by commodity capitalism in the modern world. But Marx himself is taking it from a coinage by the magician and entertainer and sort of occultist, really, Paul Philidor, who coined phantasmagoria to describe this performance that was emerging in the late 18th century. I was actually just listening to one of your earlier episodes where you talk about this weird moment of the Industrial Revolution and the sort of late 18th century of Shelley's Frankenstein. And this is exactly the same moment where you have these new technologies, these early electricity is coming in, you have magic lanterns and projection systems. They're being introduced to these performances that Philidor and others are doing. And they are giving people the experience of a ghostly apparition basically. And that's what the Greek word means. Phantasmagoria is literally meaning ghost gathering, a gathering of ghosts.

So title was really helpful for me because it led me into the thinking around, you mentioned what texts have led me into this, led me into the show and it's led me into thinking around hauntology and the kinds of hauntings of both the past and the future that are very active in a lot of the work that is included.

Maybe I might use that to slightly segue into the second question, which is sort of an unanswerable question, so my apologies that we're asking this of you ,around what is folk? And I guess maybe specifically here it'd be helpful to ask about the types of folk that are being addressed in this exhibition in terms of to break it down something smaller.

But maybe picking up on the hauntology that you're talking about, there's this sense of collapsing time. And it's interesting because we've had Rhys Morgan on the show who has a kind of sea shanty choir, Seaweed in the fruit locker.

And I'm thinking about, I had a work on the show that was also about folk singing. And there's this thing about sort of like the re-performance of folk in terms of the history coming into the present, because there isn't really an authorship in terms of dating it at a specific moment in time, which then feels like there's sort of this unending continuum of, it's from the past, but it exists as much in the present as it will in the future, which feels a little bit also like where this Phantasmagoria is coming from. You know, like trying to make sense of a rapidly changing present through something that’s actually quite ancient.

Yeah, a huge motivation behind the exhibition was not to think through folk as, I think sometimes it is used as a turn away from the present, as a turning your back on modernity, basically retreating into a sometimes reactionary image of the nation, or of virality, or just turning away from technology very often. And that simply didn't hold true for a lot of the work that is in the show.

I think that the work that's in the show displays the fact that there's a real range of engagements with folk in contemporary practice at the moment, and touching on magic, and plenty of other elements, like masking, guising, looking at you, Nina.

Misrule, this idea of, in folkloric customs, of turning authoritative structures on their heads.

Could you just, I'm interested in that, what did you say, misrule? Yeah, well, yeah, could you just explain that a little bit more?

So there's the, it's linked to ideas of the Roman idea of satanalia, and you could touch on things like the carnivalesque as well. But this notion that in certain festival periods, this has deep anthropological roots. In certain festive periods, the lower classes, I use that in an inverted commas or the subjugated people, would be given liberty to play, to perform the role of the people at the top of the tree, the people at the top of the pyramid, the most.

So there would be this inversion for a period that would, and this has a social function of venting social stresses or anxieties. And the reason that I mention that is because, and to bring it back to the work in the show, is that more and more, I think, in the digital networks and the information ecosystems that we're seeing at the moment, you have a strange instability in

these traditional authoritative structures, right? Who controls the narrative? Is it Trump or is it the alt-right that have sort of incubated themselves on 4chan before then seizing power through a particular individual?

Like the power dynamics that we see in these folkloric structures are really complex. Do you want me to say a bit more about what is folk? I don't feel like I've answered that at all.

Yeah.

Well, I think in terms of what, because what is folk is like, it's like asking what is culture.

Yeah, it's an open-ended question.

Yeah.

I just think it's really important to stress that I think folk as a category has an inherently classed perspective to it. So the study of folk music in the late 19th century by people like Cecil Sharp, had this anthropologist perspective of going into agricultural or industrial communities, recording their songs and taking them out for them to be metabolized into higher art. So that was the perspective of folk. It has this class construct built into it. These were folk art, folk sculpture, which you might touch on, is really by untrained artists, unprofessional artists who didn't get to go to the Royal Academy or whatever. I was, early on in this project, I was very clear that I didn't want us to be gathering folk art and putting it into our white cube space at the Henry Moore Institute.

That seemed to me to be recycling those very class perspectives that I think a lot of the work in the show is thinking quite critically about and trying to break open in different ways.

It's making me think about there's this really incredible artist. So I've done quite a bit of work and spend a lot of time at Askeaton Contemporary Arts in Limerick, which is like southwest of Ireland, kind of southern point in the Shannon Estuary.

They work with this incredible local artist, Seanie Barron. He never trained, he didn't even finish school. He's known as a seanos, which is like an old story teller in Irish as gailge.

He was always making and carving things and acting as characters and telling. Pure creative soul, he's a sweetheart. He's so really, really nice.

Michele Hourigan, who's the director of Askeaton of ACA, she encountered his work because he was just around the town. He lives in the same town as her, and he made these beautiful walking sticks. He'd go and find bits of wood and then carve them into creatures. Then he'd trade them with people for pints and cigarettes. That was what he'd do. She would see these and she's like, these are beautiful. You've sealed these gorgeous wooden things and there's this creature.

I went to a studio in the summer and he had this amazing, he found this bit of driftwood that looks like a tortoise shell, and then there's a hole underneath where he's put another bit of wood, and so the head bobs up and down, and there's this weird bit of sap that comes out the side of the head that looks like the turtle is drooling. They're just really expressive, beautiful creatures, all of the work. But there's a thing where his work would be classified under this folk art tradition and what Michele and Sean Lynch, who's also-

I know Sean Lynch's work. We showed him a few years ago at the Institute.

So they work a lot with Seanie. They've made three publications of his work and they have to keep on restocking it because it sells out, because there's so much desire and interest for, I think, a practice that isn't- I mean, on this show, we feature a lot of very conceptual, research-heavy practice and I think what Seanie's practice is, it's so material and sort of embodied of how he moves through the world. And that's, I think, partially because of who he is as a person, but also he didn't go to art school.

And now there's a much more of a stronger interest in showing that type of work that would classically be being like, oh, this is folk art and therefore relegated to something that cannot engage with contemporary art sector or commercial art sector.

But now, Seanie has just had a show in Chicago, he showed in Paris last year, he had a big show in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, which is the gallery in Trinity College. Like, he's doing really, really well, but there's definitely this, I think, this growing interest in like, how do we break down those barriers of like, what is folk art, what is, you know, what is fine arch, what, in front comments, what is folk

It's only folk when it is observed.

Yeah.

Right? And to be observed implies an external observer that is separate from the system that they're observing.

Right.

So you have to be like an anthropologist.

To anybody else, folk culture is just culture, it's just what you live amongst. And I love this line from Jennifer Reid, who's a Lancashire folk singer, I saw recently where she says, um, folk is a JD bag, right?

I think that's interesting from a few different perspectives, because it's like it's plastic, it's mass produced, it's completely ubiquitous. It is not unique, but it might be unique in the way that it's used.

And that runs against our standard definitions of what the folk object should be, which is handcrafted, unique, local, all of those things.

Well, that kind of brings me on to a question I had around the digital angle of this show.

We've kind of discussed a little bit about what, I guess, traditional folklore is or the folkloric within art, but you're looking at this specifically from the digital age. So when I'm thinking about a digital folklore, I'm instantly thinking about the millennium bug.

You know, if I'm thinking of folklore as being these kind of like old wives' tales, or these myths, or these like traditions or beliefs that are passed down, that's the earliest example I can think of of like a digital folkloric tale, is like the millennium bug that was going to wipe the internet.

What is the milleniu bug?

So it was a programmatic error. So before the year 2000, the way that dates were listed was a particular way, and they were scared that when it got to like 00, that it would like reset everything.

Because they had spaces for two of the years rather than four. My parents were both working from Microsoft at the time, and they were given mobile phones for the first time because they were so worried about the millennium bug that they were on call when it turned 2000.

That's such a great bit of, is that lore? I think that might be lore.

That counts as lore.

So I'm thinking about that, but then also maybe more modern day contemporary folklor that maybe circulates through 4chan or reddit or meme culture or Facebook marketplace or wherever.

So I'm kind of thinking, I'm kind of I'm wondering where your head is at with that as well.

Yeah, you mentioned the millennium bug thing and I was going back to this idea. So it was a big thing for the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Keep on calling it an institute. It definitely wasn't an institute, anything but an institute.

The CCRU.

Yeah, and their idea of retro contamination in the sense that the ancient past is already caught up in the future and the future in that past. And it's just this this kind of knotted thing. But in terms of the digital folklore, I am thinking of two, not necessarily categories. They're not distinct, but I think there is novel folklore that is emerging, like very different forms. I suppose creepypasta is part of that, Slenderman, things like this. But then there's also really digital engagements with pre-existing folklore. And it's easiest for me to just talk about this in the context of the artists that we have in the show. So one that springs to mind for that. I mean, Nina is a great example of this slightly more novel folklore. Side of things, where we have Nina framing TikTok dances as folk dances of the future. We'll look back on these dances as folk dances in some sort of construction anyway. And that you could contrast to an extent with someone like Rustan Soderling whose film Virus Meadow in the show is really working with these ancient folkloric tropes like the Green Man, which has a fascinating history, by the way.

He first came into Britain from Arabian sources, manuscript sources, marginalia basically. This drawing of a man sort of taken over by the natural world with plants typically coming out of his mouth. But Rustan is thinking about this, he's thinking about virality in a post-COVID sense, but also in a digital online sense, online culture. And then this creature that features in this film, that becomes a kind of green man, animated spirit of nature, turns into a kind of Gollum of Jewish folklore. And Gollum is also another figure that appears in Joey Holder's work. This is a kind of creature of rock and earth that is animated by mystical inscriptions.

And so I've always found a lot of really fruitful rhymes between the digital and the folkloric, because if you think about a magical spell, how different is it from a line of code? If you think about a kind of...

Yeah, totally, like, if this, then this, add this, and you'll get this. This kind of like... Yeah, I never thought about it like that, but yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

There is a totally, totally new stuff like AI hallucinations. A friend of mine was talking to me about kind of these images that we have no idea where they've come from, not just in terms of generative AI, but these characters, these creatures almost, that appear and recur in generative outputs that are kind of like a bug, but can take on lives of their own. And I'm really interested in how we start to lose agency.

This show is also at the Henry Moore Institute, which is predominantly a foundation that's rooted in sculpture. And moving on to a different tact, I want to ask, how does folk exist in relation to sculptural practice and what is digital sculpture? And ultimately, is there a historical relationship between folk and sculpture?

Yeah, I think if by that you mean it does folk sculpture exist, I would say absolutely. And there's a very rich connection there. I think one of the best places in a museum context anyway to see folk sculpture in the UK is Compton Verney.

They have an amazing collection of shop signs and mass-produced ceramics, domestic craft that was collected by a guy called Andras Kalman in a post-war context, hence the focus of my other research project. And Isla Coley at Compton Verney is doing some great work expanding that collection. And these are objects that are made as part of people's everyday lives, as part of their everyday work. Just to give you a sense of what that collection is like, there's a huge pig that is drilled to the shop front.

A pig.

Like a taxidermied pig.

There is a giant cheese grater, a sculpted cheese grater, because it's a grating shop.

Okay.

I'm not making this up. This sounds absurd and it sounds weird and it is.

It sounds kind of like the inside of an old Irish pub.

Right. Exactly. I mean, yeah, the pub interior, I think I would consider a folk installation. That really drains the fun out of just going to the pub. So, but yeah, I think I'm just on the digital and folkloric sculpture. I'm really excited in this exhibition to be or attempting to really expand what we think of as folk in the context of sculpture. How we can think of a sculptural imagination as changing our approach to digital culture really dramatically.

Just to say something about how I would understand digital sculpture though, I think some, again, rough, not necessarily absolute categories, but I think we have virtual sculpture where you have a virtual object computer-generated imaging. You could have something that is 3D printed. So that's a digital file rendered in 3D form. I'd also class different forms of mechanical sculpting methods where a digital file is represented three-dimensionally. I'm thinking of Joe Moss's Time Compression series that is in our exhibition where he's used a laser engraver on cardboard and that is the noise of digital image that he has then put onto a three-dimensional support, which I think is a really interesting sort of slight tweak to that category of 3D printed sculpture. And then augmented reality, which is, I think, somewhere sort of between those two things, where the virtual image becomes part of a three-dimensional space that you can sort of encounter through technological mediation.

Because I think there's something interesting to me about this idea of digital sculpture where it doesn't have to be a material or physical thing in a space. In terms of pushing sculpture into the contemporary, I think for so, like when you think about a history of sculpture, I'm thinking like very classical art history, the materials, and also I say this as someone who studied sculpture in my BA, so it's like, it's not something I do anymore, but I spent many years. And there's a sense with it where it required so much money because of the materials.

In terms of like, you make something out of bronze or out of stone or out of wood or whatever it is, it's very time, labour, money intensive. Whether as now, then you start thinking about the ready-made and then it becomes less labour and money intensive. Whether as now, if you think about digital sculpture in terms of someone using something like Blender, you know, that's a, that's a freeware and obviously you need access to a computer. But I think for many contemporary artists, that's sort of seen as sort of the baseline tool that you, that you need.

There's an access point that's really different, but when you, when the sculpture can exist as the file itself, it doesn't have to exist as an object in a space.

Like I'm thinking about lots of projects that are around repatriation and sort of digitally scanning sort of like artifacts from museums and then artists then manipulating those, like Rebecca Romero, who's been on the podcast, like a lot of her practice is thinking about these artifacts.

Morehshin Allahyari as well, scanning artifacts in Iran that were, have bullet holes in them to make sure that they're classified. Kind of a little bit like Danielle's work in the sense of trying to archive something that is going to not be there forever, I guess, or?

Yeah, but there's a sense of the ephemeral and the immaterial that I think is really interesting in terms of pushing sculpture forward through the contemporary, especially as we live in this digital age where less and less is material, like are physical things we can pick up or walk around or so forth. It's like it's in the phone, it's in the screen, it's in a piece of media rather than this is a freestanding sculpture that I walk around.

And I understand that there's freestanding sculpture that's existing in this exhibition as well. That's part of my interest in where digital sculpture takes the conversation around sculpture, especially at an institute like the Henry Moore.

Yeah, absolutely. And I've been really interested in this through the development of the exhibition. I really wanted the show to emphasize the materiality of the digital networks that we're inhabiting. So obviously there's a lot of talk about this already. And on a straightforward level, it's about the server farms or the devices, literally our phones, our laptops, that without them, the digital would not exist, right?

But then on a lower level and a more exciting level, I think, these online subcultural communities that we've been talking about already, these 4chan servers, these Discord communities, really celebrate, they really celebrate. I say they because I'm not part of that community. I'm not trying to other them there, but they really celebrate the materiality of the Internet. And you can also see through the recent political history, how those communities and the kind of conversations that they're having, the kinds of narratives, the types of myths, the types of folklore that they're generating, have a really dramatic impact on our physical world, on our lived reality. And I think sculpture is really well placed to help us understand those connections better. I think we're politically compromised and we are creatively vulnerable.

If we, maybe creatively vulnerable is a good thing, but we're creatively compromised as well if we don't understand how these digital processes are material.

I came across a brilliant project recently by Kate Crawford and Vlad Anjola called Calculating Empires.

This project is amazing.

Have you already mentioned it on the show?

No.

Potentially, but I think I have given this as a reference to so. I think I sent it to you because I saw it at the KW show.

Yeah.

The one that Dane was in?

The one that Dane was in, yeah.

What was it called? Poetics of Encryption.

Yes.

Yeah. Amazing show, amazing project. But yes, please, for our listeners who don't know.

Well, yeah, I think it's an amazing research project that is graphically represented on this web page, that clearly shows how so many of the digital technologies that we live amongst at the moment are rooted in far, far earlier forms of technology and power, and forms of surveillance and penal structures, how they all operate and generate the supposedly immaterial digital culture that we find ourselves in today. I thought that was a particularly relevant project to Phantasmogoria, because if you look across the work of Phil and Steph, Dane, Rustan, Danielle, their work is often looking back to these earlier centuries and making reference of some of those structures and how they’ve evolved into the digital culture of 2026.

Maybe going back to what you were talking about with the immaterialness of digital sculpture, I was just thinking about one of my really early films about the commodification of dance in online game platforms, like emotes, and how I'd made this video about how dance has turned into a commodity that you can buy, and you don't need a body to dance it anymore. It's like the same thing for dance as when the record was created for music. It was turned into an object, but it was a digital object, but still it was like this thing that you could buy, which you could never, with dance, you would never be able to turn into an actual physical material product, but it's somehow been able to become materialized through digital platforms. So I wonder whether there are some things that become materialized in online spaces that could never be materialized in real spaces, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a really tough concept, that, but I've been thinking about the way in which these digital forms change the way we think, the way we move, the way we build, the way we create in so many different aspects. And I think a sculptural imagination really gets us somewhere here, because it's often in conversation with architectural considerations as well and the social structures that are sort of woven into those.

Yeah, it's just making me think about, but maybe just because I saw a group of architecture students, we were reviewing their projects on Thursday and they make renders and versions of their projects with Rhino or with SketchUp Files. And so you quite literally have the digital version of a whole building. And kind of in architectural practice now, that's very much used as the way to understand the different views and sights of kind of how a structure works.

And so in that case, almost like the digital building becomes the justification of the physical building, which isn't quite what digital sculpture is doing, but there's this question that's starting to emerge now, particularly in architectural practice or potentially just one in the studio in which I'm teaching, where we're asking kind of when do you need to make a building anymore? And so part of that is understanding the firstly, like the climate impact of kind of making a building, kind of pouring concrete, make construction of steel, yada yada. So then if we're not making physical buildings, do we make digital buildings?

And then does that fulfill the kind of desire or the purpose or so forth in the same way that making digital sculpture kind of relinquishes you from the financial material burden of a full physical sculpture, does that happen in kind of architectural practice? Like how does that?

That's just reminding me of Decentraland, where people were spending like thousands of pounds on pixels of land to build their McMansions and stuff. But that's collapsed now and they've lost all of that money.

I also think that there's so many ways that the digital world can be commodified and become like a material thing in that way. Like you have to, yes, there's amazing stuff in like crowd sourced modes of access. But often people are still buying hardware, they're still buying software, they're still buying assets online. But yeah, that utopian dream of the kind of noughties internet isn't fully dead yet. But I think it's hard to be hopeful about its continued success.

Even materially, I was hearing from, I was at a national power plant in Ireland, and one of the engineers of this power plant was telling us that 25% of all electricity in Ireland is used for data farms and data servers. So there is a very physical material essence. I don't think it's as high in the UK, but I think it's as high a wattage, it's just like a lower percentage overall.

But just to think about that material kind of presence of those farms of that digital infrastructure is.

So I'm going to bring it back a little bit to the artists in the show. There's quite a few artists in Phantasmogoria that have been on future artifacts before. I want to start with a question about Joe Moss. So in his episode with us, he talks about subcultures as being constellations of references. So these things are remixed, added to over time and brought into being by their repetition through social and verbal channels. And I guess in some ways I think this also describes memetic culture. And in Phantasmogoria, I feel like the folk that you're riffing on works in the same way where folklore is framed as re-emerging through platforms.

And you've already mentioned this, but there's something about hauntology here and continuity where digital practices or social platform practices are both recombining nostalgia and bringing newness to a folkloric understanding of storytelling and myth.

So if folklore is this shared culture, I'm wondering what you think about this idea of memes as present folklore. We've kind of briefly discussed this a little bit before, but...

Yeah, there's a lot of hauntological thinking in the exhibition generally. So yeah, I'm really glad that you've picked up on that. And it's a really relevant question. As to memes and folklore, I've read a lot of stuff on both sides of this, people who are really willing to disavow. I know Dane actually has said, no, I don't think we can talk about memes as folklore.

What I would say is I'm not sure they're the most interesting form of the kind of digital folklore that is circulating in our exhibition. I'm thinking of memes in their kind of text-based image recycling, you know, the classic meme. But I am interested in when it comes to hauntology, this sort of the way Mark Fisher describes it is related to modernism and its 20th century promise of social and scientific progress.

And this idea of an equitable and liberated society that's facilitated by automation. And that now is a mirage, like it's a fantasy that is just deferred constantly. And we are then haunted by that possible future that never arrives. These various types of speculative future that are circulating in the exhibition are part of that. What we have instead is this very alluring glimmer of the iPhone screen and AI generated imagery.

Part of that utopian vision, but we peel that away and we get this sort of feudal, aggressively oligarchic economic system, sort of techno feudalist world that Yanis Varoufakis has spoken about. And underneath that, originality is very, very thin. We are just in this loop of recursion, and that's part of Mark Fisher's idea of hauntology. The meme within that, I don't think it gives us an off-ramp. I don't think it allows us to imagine alternatives that easily.

Whereas thinking of Daniel Brathwaite Shirley's work in our show, or Joey Holder's installation, when you have these spaces as, they are communal, they are best, both of those projects operate online, by the way. You can play those games or you can chat with Joey's chatbots online. But you have to enter that space in order to activate those works to the fullest extent. It has to become a spatial sculptural experience. And I think that then allows for something that is beyond conventional meme culture to try and bring it back to your question slightly. If that is linking up.

Yeah, I mean, I think maybe memes was perhaps the wrong term to use. I was just thinking about the way that they sort of percolate through internet cultures and they're kind of beyond as well. They get into the news, you know, they're not just part of that internet subculture space. They're kind of more broad. And I think that's how I see folklore as well.

But I mean, I kind of I mean, I sort of sometimes see memes, not just as like memes in that sort of static. So I sort of have this idea that like, memes are almost like it's like this language that is forming and memes, it encapsulates kind of like a feeling. So I when I was like looking at TikTok, like when it first was kind of emerging, I sort of felt like if memes are the words, TikToks are the sentences that are starting to form from the words.

And then if TikToks are the sentences, then a bunch of TikToks put together might actually tell a story, like might actually tell a story. And so it's sort of memes are sort of like the early forms of this language, like beginning to kind of come together.

Exactly.

So not necessarily memes in the like, the like Arthur with the fists or the like woman screaming at cat.

Yeah, I think meme has become like a catchall, hasn't it, for like this this weirdness we're seeing with this kind of stuff.

We're also at such an early stage with this, that it hasn't had that much time to accrue history.

And what I'm really interested in this project in Phantasmagoria is how we carry the past with us, or a grain of the past is always embedded in even the most brutal technological ruptures. How we can't fully escape from history, right? That specter is always haunting us. And yeah, Marshall McLuhan's line about we march into the future, view the future through the rear view mirror, what's the quote?

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah, we habitually view the present through a rear view mirror, we march backwards into the future.

Yeah.

And I think he's, McLuhan is also really interested in folklore. And that for me just is a really neat click for this exhibition.

Moving on to another artist who we've had on the show, who also features in your show, is Most Dismal Swamp, who we've also spoken about under the name Dane. When we had Dane Sutherland on the show, who's a mastermind behind the project, he brought up the idea of folk-less lore.

He was speaking about it in relation to someone's work speaking back to them, and how a work can formulate its own resonances beyond what the artist intended. But I think there's something really interesting about the concept, especially in relation to digital folklore, which is so imbedded in algorithms and computational processes. It makes me wonder what kind of folk-less lore is circulating already on something like Malt Book, for example. I don't know if anyone knows about Malt Book. Would you say that digital folklore is folk-based, or is it something else, some kind of hybrid between folk and folk-less lore?

Could I just ask you to clarify what you mean by folk-based or not folk-based?

Folk as being like the folk, the people.

The people, okay, right. Yeah, almost in the German root, like volk.

Yeah. I think it's like folk-less lore of like this kind of this idea that like, I guess when Dane was talking about it, it was a shame we didn't actually get to kind of like dig into what he meant by folk-less lore on the episode. So it's like maybe this is not the best place to be chatting about it without him here, but we're going to kind of take his term and speculate on it.

We are actually going to be doing a panel discussion with Dane, in which I'm sure he will discuss this more at the Henry Moore Institute in July, so.

Perfect. Yes, there's a question that you can already add. But yeah, I think because when he was sort of talking about with like when he watches a work of his back, he says that there's like themes in it, or there's things in it that he didn't put into it as the artist.

And so suddenly he feels like the work is saying something back to him. Suddenly the artist, the folk, is not in the work. So he was speaking in a very particular context, but I thought the term was...

Yeah, well, my first thought on this is that that notion of folkloric law is not as new as we might think. I think non-human agency has had an impact on folklore from a very early period. If we think about animals, the climate, even the technology of industry, how these structures are kind of acting upon human creators and how they then shape folklore in centuries past. But I think what is different in what Dane is describing is this complete absence of human input, complete absence in a quite purified sense. And that's why you mentioned Moltbook, this kind of social media for AI agents, which is terrifying.

And lots of people will have seen those videos of two AI agents talking to one another, and they flick into this kind of like hyper morse code, sort of like digital crackle in which they then they use this kind of sonic language to communicate faster because our human languages are too slow. So I think that and then I think of Her, the film, Spike Jonze film that I rewatched recently and it's aged like such a fine vintage.

Not like milk, like a fine wine.

The opposite of milk, whatever the opposite of milk is. And yeah, how in the AI, spoiler alert, the AI in that film basically just slips away from the human. The AI abandons the human entirely. And that is quite an interesting speculative future in which we think whatever folklore that these AI agents may start to develop, probably will reach a point in which it is yes, completely unplugged from ours and separate from our folklore.

But I think in the more immediate future, in a really interesting phase where this sense of non-human collaboration is very active and why these sculptural considerations of the show are all the more important, because how do we understand its tether to our material realities in the way it's shaping our world? And so the sculptural elements of the practices in the show, I think, do some of that work or help us towards some of that work. And that for me is always just a key contribution of the artists in society, to zoom right out, not to get too philosophical. But how can they help us think differently about some of these issues? And how can they change behaviors, actually?

Because we don't just want to leave these systems to the, to be quite frank, the creeps in Silicon Valley, the billionaires running companies like Palantir, or the Sam Altmans and Peter Thiels of this world, because it's going to lead us down a very dark path. And to speak more on some of Dane's work, I know you've spoken about this with Dane, Rebecca, about this idea of effective mapping, riffing off Frederick Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping, again, just such a fascinating sort of route back to modernist theory and modernist writing that, for me, as my background, that's really, that's really fun. But this idea of cognitive mapping for Jameson is a sense of trying to orientate ourself within modernity and through cultural means, simply trying to understand the complexity of that system. And this notion of affective mapping that you guys have been talking about, as I understand it, you may correct me on this, Rebecca, but just the complexity of affect in this accelerating digital world is actually more of a problem than the material kind of cognitive aspects that Jameson stresses. Affectively, how do we understand our world? Like, how does it make us feel? How do we still relate to people? The sense of numbness, the sense of kind of online alienation and deracination that we feel, how can we re-root ourselves? Both in terms of re-routers in the roots and re-routers in paths to the future, affectively in these systems.

Because I want to pick up on that sense of affect. We spoke about Phil, Philip Speakman's work before. He obviously, his work Reality Break was on the radio show. I think something that I'm really interested in Phil's work is how his practice examines affect, as you're talking about, but kind of through occult and horror genres as a way to generate emotional responses to metaphysical works. There's a sense of being in the room with it, even though it potentially is not a material thing, such as in Reality Break, that's an audio piece. It's not a performance that you're within.

In the way that you're talking about affect in terms of, there's obviously this quality of social media and digital infrastructures, especially social media to make you feel angry to keep you online. There's an emotional affect that's happening there. Folk, if we think about traditional idea of folk, folk art or folk music or so forth, is also about dealing with types of affect in terms of thinking about folk music.

There's a song that's called The Rocky Roads Dublin, and it's about Irish emigration and it's being picked up and being used in different artists' films recently. But there's a sense of affect in the song in terms of the affect of being a person of Irish diaspora, even though materially it's not there. I don't need to be in the room with the music to feel the affect of it. Folk music does this.

I'm wondering about that role of affect in digital folklore and in this exhibition. If we could talk about what that role of affect has been in the space, in the physical exhibition of the Henry Moore Institute.

Yeah. I think I'm just to speak from a more curatorial practice point of view briefly. Like I'm far more interested in offering a kind of provocation as to what sculpture can be and what the sculptural imagination can give us in the context of this digital culture, than I am around presenting an argument or a thesis.

I might say differently if I was doing a more historical show to sort of present a case to give evidence in an exhibition format. For me in this show, it would be great if people had a kind of affective experience in that space.

It’d make them feel a certain way. They watched these works. In fact, I'm not even going to say it would be great if they did. I know that they will because of the work on show and of works like Phil's and Steph's.

So to say a bit about that work is that it's a triptych of these three sculptural assemblages basically of consisting of a screen, each some steel frame and knitted elements, woolen knitted elements. And speaking through these kind of reliquaries, Steph has conceived them as reliquaries, these sculptural containers for the remains of someone. Speaking through these things are a series of voices, filmed in vertical format video, emulating social media content. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that they are, in fact, historical ghosts, in some sense.

And they are modern people like you and me, but they are talking about the events of this 16th century peasant uprising in Norfolk. And I think that has the potential to really effectively operate on someone, you know? To make them feel a historical connection, which speaking as a historian and thinking about historiography a lot, that's such a difficult thing.

If you're writing a history book, to actually make people feel like emotionally and have an embodied connection to that history is incredibly difficult. And I think that's what Phil and Steph's work will do in this show.

But I suppose they're also bringing it into a kind of sense of dread or anxiety with the sort of mimicking of the phone screen or the sort of portrait style video. They're kind of giving you a sense of familiarity there as well.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

I think we're going to have to finish up there, sadly. I mean, I feel like I wanted to get into like so many more of the works that you feature in the show.

But I guess for all you listeners, you're just going to have to make a trip up to Leeds and see the show for yourself.

And this is the beginning of a much longer conversation around this idea of digital folklore. So we have three co-commissions between Future Artifacts FM and the Henry Moore Institute.

So we're starting off with Sahej Rahel and then we're moving on to Sarah al-Saraj and finishing with Basam Issa al-Sabah.

They're going to be three great episodes. We're really looking forward to them.

And you'll be hearing them through kind of anywhere you get your podcast and through the Henry Moore Institute website, across the summer, across the duration of Phantasmagoria.

Are they going to be sort of archived with Henry Moore?

Yeah, I imagine we will.

So they will be available forever?

Yeah.

Yeah, they'll be released each month the exhibition is open. And this is sort of conceived as part of our expanded research program alongside the exhibition. Also in that research program we've got Nina, you're coming up to Leeds for an In Conversation with Film Screening and Performance. I'll be doing a curator's tour of the exhibition and we'll also have a panel discussion with Dane Sutherland, Most Dismal Swamp. And you can check out information on the Henry Moore Institute website to see when those dates are.

Great. Thank you so much, Sean. It's been great to have you on the show.

My pleasure.

We're excited to kick off this new mini-series, so stay tuned.

Yeah. This mini-series is commissioned by Henry Moore Institute to accompany their exhibition, Phantasmagoria Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, opens 15th May, 2026 to 30th of August, 2026.

Bye.

Goodbye

Large Format Transcript

PHANTASMAGORIA: An introduction with Sean Ketteringham

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Introduction

Artist Introduction