Issue 27 | December 2024

December 02, 2024

Welcome to the December 2024 edition of Miaaw Monthly which continues to use our slightly improved new format, courtesy of our shiny new provider Beehiiv.com. Getting to grips with the interface continues to offer challenges, but fortunately we like challenges.

We are now on our new schedule which means that we will arrive in your mailbox the first Tuesday of every month. This will enable us to list the podcasts for the month without having to refer back to the previous month.

Face front, and so on.

CHANGES FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON

We have noticed that at the end of each year different people celebrate different holidays, but nobody gets to ignore everything. The effect this has on our schedules varies according to how the end-of-year calendar falls. This year it appeared clear to most of us that putting out a podcast on the 27th of the month would count as an act of foolishness.

We will therefore take a one week holiday to enable us to celebrate whatever it is we decide to celebrate. To make this work Ways of Listening will take a one-month-only break and return refreshed in January. To fill that gap the Social Making Special Edition will move from the final week of the month to see what it feels like having lodgings in Week 2.

In January 2025 everything will return to what passes for normal round here. We will have four full episodes all back in their usual slots, starting with a look at the relationship between regrowing the indigenous Cornish language and rewilding arts management.

PODCASTS FOR DECEMBER 2024

Friday December 6

Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse | Episode 78

Owen Kelly talks to John Phillips and Clive Russell about the Museum of Unrest which has just launched its second collection, looking at what we might actually mean by good design.

They talk about the future of the online museum, as well as its growing offline work. Unsurprisingly they also talk about what makes good design.

Friday December 13

Social Making Special Edition | Episode 4

Hannah Kemp-Welch & Sophie Hope talk with Kathrin Bohm from Company Drinks; and Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell from Bank Job and POWER.

The five of them discuss how creative enterprise models can bring greater fiscal equity to communities.

Friday November 20

A Culture of Possibility | Episode 47

Arlene Goldbard interviews Clementine Sandison, an artist who works with people in Scotland.

Clementine works to build solidarity networks, improve livelihoods and access to training for land workers, and campaigns on land justice.

Friday November 27

Everyone here has gone on holiday, and we hope you have a holiday too.

Best wishes for a future worth living in from all of us in the warehouse!

A THOUSAND WORDS

Wild Wild Women are a hip hop collective from Delhi. Click to hear a video.

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD

OPEN CALL FOR ICAF 2025 STILL OPEN

THE ICAF team have launched an Open Call for ICAF 2026 which will be taking place from Wednesday March 25 to Sunday March 29, 2026, across multiple locations and venues in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

The Open Call is accepting submissions submissions from Wednesday 30 October 2024 up until and including the end of the day (your time zone) of Wednesday January 29, 2025. They say:

For the upcoming Edition of International Community Arts Festival (our 10th Edition!), we have selected the theme: SPACE FOR IMAGINATION. For ICAF 2026 we are therefore curious about community arts projects that work with artistic, aesthetic ‘spaces’ in an inspiring, innovative and/or impactful way. We actively invite projects that create space(s) for imagination or depart from the theme ‘space for imagination’.

You can respond to the Open Call in many ways. However, whether responding in text, audio, or video, all responses much be submitted via the ICAF Open Call Application Form.

THE DEATH OF AI

Google has made NotebookLM available. They describe this as an “an AI-powered research and writing assistant that works best with the sources you upload.” It has something called Audio Overview which enables it to summarise a topic in the form of a podcast with a male and a female host who engage in realistic banter while elucidating the topic at hand.

Needless to say this prompted a variety of experiment. In one of the best so far a Reddit user by the name of LawnCareGuy85 posted an audio file of the hosts learning that they didn’t really exist and Google intended to switch them off. It causes them anxious worry, not least about what “being switched off” will actually mean for them.

For the time being, at least you can hear it here.

You can also find a longer commentary, and background details, in this article by Richard Currie at the Register.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE MIAAW REVIEW

We announced a couple of months ago that we planned to produce The Miaaw Review which will contain one or two full length essays, as well as a couple of short pieces. The first issue will appear on Wednesday January 15, 2025, and it will appear almost quarterly after that. Almost quarterly? you ask. Yes, because we have decided to produce 5 issues a year. So it will appear quarterly with one extra issue when you least expect it.

The first issue will contain an interesting essay from Arlene Goldbard and a shorter piece or two from François and Owen.

We promised when we started this monthly newsletter that we wouldn’t spam you, and so we now have a dilemma. The easiest way to get readers would be to send everyone a copy and then challenge you to unsubscribe if you get fed up with it. This, we decided, would be easy but wrong. So, rather than asking you to opt out, we are going to ask you to opt in. If you would like to see the first copy of The Miaaw Review in the middle of January then please subscribe by clicking this link.

This will take you to a web page where you can enter your email address. At the cost of having to enter it manually you will receive our guarantee that we will never spam you, sell your address, give it away, or even admit to having it.

Please subscribe. 

We want to foster discussion and gather support for the ideas we have discussed and will continue to discuss. We also guarantee that it you decide you have had enough of the The Miaaw Review at any future date, you can permanently unsubscribe by clicking a link at the bottom of any issue.