Today's conversation is with Zachary Small, staff reporter for the NY Times. I have been following their arts journalism since they wrote for Hyperallergic years ago. They're often the first to identify new, consequential developments in a field that thrives on change.

A little less than a year ago, they became a staff reporter at the Times – a well deserved and enlightened hire. In particular, they have been hot on the trail of the NFT "situation" (remember that) and I suspect we'll be hearing much more about art and digital tokenization over the months and years ahead.

Zach’s first book, “Token Supremacy: The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022,” will be published by Knopf in spring of this year.

So it was a pleasure to be able to speak to them for Informer.

Today's conversation is with Prem Krishnamurthy, designer, author, and educator. His multifaceted work explores the role of art as an agent of transformation at an individual, collective, and structural level. This manifests itself in books, exhibitions, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts, and workshops.

He is one of those thinkers and makers whose brain is spinning out ideas and reflections as fast as you can absorb them. And I appreciate so much his emphasis on the importance of embracing juxtaposition as a prerequisite not only for artistic creativity but also as a key ingredient for healthy civic life. He argues that there is no singular America, but instead a multiplicity of Americas just as there is no singular individual: we are all collections of paradox and competing interests. 

We also talk about the ways in which the world will forever be hybrid, there's no going back to the old technologies. And how do we take what we learned from the "zoomacene" (his word) and build that into the ways in which we come together now.

This conversation, and it was very much a conversation more an interview, was a joy. And I hope you find it to be inspiring and nourishing as well. 

What does it mean to have a body that moves in three dimensional space in our current time? How do cultural institutions better relate to the public in a way that takes into consideration the massage changes in technology over the last three years? Can relating to the other than human beings help us learn how to be better partners to the planet? These are the types of questions London-based choreographer and dancer Sara Wookey dives into. She is one of the most interesting thinkers on the relationship of bodies and material space and how post-modern dance can open windows into more rational ways of understanding our bodies in space and, as she always points out, time.

As she says, "we look back on the effects of the pandemic on the way that we choreograph ourselves in social interactions since the pandemic. We've had to raise our awareness of our three dimensional space." These days she is spending a lot of her time helping museums and other cultural organizations think through how they can take a more creative approach to engaging publics that are re-thinking their relationship to the material in the post-covid age.

I spoke to Sara last fall so some time has passed and you'll notice our references to the season feel anomalous, unless you're in the southern hemisphere. But I'm glad that's the case because everything is shifting so quickly at the moment, it is sometimes helpful to get a snapshot of where things were at even just 5 months ago in order to gain some footing as to where we are now.