Researcher and creative technologist, Yasmine Boudiaf, defines her research-based art practice as “tin foil hat research”. Playful projects rooted in deep research methodologies that span from writing to computation, seeking to shed some light on the shape-shifting white devilish tactics underlying state powers and new technologies. As part of the Algerian diaspora and with a background in science, her investigations question the relationship between technology and social structures, cultural memory, and policy-making, by examining and confronting publicly available data and infrastructures through a mix of traditional and non-traditional research methods.

In this podcast, Yasmine Boudiaf walks us through some of her experiences in the corporate world and the performance of fitting into the deeply entrenched British class system. She talks about AI ethics, the theater behind policy-making, soft power and new speak, invites us to think about passive forms of resistance and working out ways of non-colonial cultural archiving, while also pointing out the lack of originality of how state powers and capitalism operate or, as she puts it, how “they are not the sophisticated minds they make us think they are”.