This interview is part of my ongoing series on creative health: practical conversations at the intersection of art, attention, and care. My aim is simple: to help ambitious, creative people find health so they can think, make, and share without burning out. Learn more at ultradilute.com . I first met composer and performance artist Colin Self through their work in the world of experimental music and performance, where voice, bodies, and computers braid into social spaces. Learn more about Colin's work at https://colin-self.com/.

What happens when the body gets in the way of making? When menopause scrambles your sense of self, or an asthma attack forces you to reckon with what conventional medicine misses? This was a live conversation about how creative people uniquely define health and why it matters. Featuring Joon Oluchi Lee, award-winning writer and Literary Arts professor at RISD, and Tracy Steepy, celebrated jeweler and head of Jewelry + Metalsmithing at RISD, along with Roddy Schrock, who has been working with her as a homeopath while finishing clinical supervision at Academy of Homeopathy Education. In the audience, we were joined by the President of North American Society of Homeopaths, Tanya Kell, who provided additional insight during the audience Q&A.

Homeopath and former educator Kristina Jermain joins me to discuss what it's like to launch a homeopathy practice fresh out of school, something we're both in the midst of at the moment. Kristina and I were classmates in the full-time program at Academy of Homeopathy Education. We're both now moving toward certification by next year, and this conversation felt like a natural checkpoint: where are we in this journey? What does it actually look like to open a practice? And how do we navigate a field that's simultaneously misunderstood while also being increasingly sought after by people searching for deeper, gentler approaches to healing?

Artist and Arts Leader Shaun Leonardo joins Roddy Schrock to discuss how creative practice reveals the body's intelligence and capacity for transformation. Leonardo's decade of work with incarcerated individuals and trauma survivors has led him to a radical premise: certain experiences cannot be processed through language alone. His methodology strips away narrative to reveal the essential gestures that carry our deepest truths—what he calls the "choreography of how we've learned to move in reaction to what happened to us."

Former arts leader Roddy Schrock announces the evolution of his podcast from technology and creativity conversations to exploring the radical connections between creative practice and healing through homeopathy.

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.

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.

I've known Sara Wookey since we both lived in the Netherlands when I was working in creating music for dance, collaborating with our mutual friend Seamus Cater. Her career progressed in very exciting ways, eventually becoming a student of the seminal figure in dance, Yvonne Rainer and is a certified teacher of Rainer’s seminal dance work “Trio A” (1966) and other repertoire. She received her Phd. from Coventry University in England where her research looked at dance in the museum as relation and social-spatial practice contributing to institutional change and a model for public spaces post-Covid. She is now based in Cambridgeshire, England and works as dancer/choreographer, researcher and consultant. And she's also a square dance caller.

Having worked in the arts in NYC for about 15 years now, a constant inspiration has been Ruby Lerner. I have found her profound commitment to the importance of artists in building a more imaginative and rich culture in this country and her extraordinary talent in realizing that belief as the founder of Creative Capital, to be the gold standard of how to build rational and strategic approaches to arts funding.

My friend, the designer and artist, Mushon Zer-Aviv was in town a few months ago so we sat down to catch up. Having worked in open, values-driven design in tech for the last two decades, Mushon goes deep into what he sees as being the mistakes of the early internet and how we can avoid them in the future. His thoughtfulness is always optimistic: as he says, he is a designer so he wants to design! He points to the contradictions inherent in our tendency to offload "ethics into infrastucture" and the kind of return of the tech bros singing the same song with web3. This is a wide-ranging conversation that points to so many of the current challenges while showing new paths to the future.

Deborah has a reputation as an innovative arts leader here in New York. Over the past couple of years, she has fully transformed into a sharp-eyed astrologer building from decades of experience in the arts as well as a lifelong spiritual practice. In this, the final Dog Days 2022 episode, Roddy and Deborah discuss the value of astrology in the context of being an arts director where everybody is obsessed with knowing the future. And what it means for Deborah to give notice, then begin a full-time astrology practice in upstate NY. This is a wide-ranging conversation about the value of art, and astrology, in creating space for people to relate to one another and is a great way to close out the summer.

There are a handful of contemporary net artists for whom I have particular affection. Constant Dullaart is one of them. Since I first learned of his work in the early aughts, I've found an extraordinary depth to every move he makes. As our understanding of the internet has matured, Constant's work becomes more relevant. I most recently worked with him as one of our Eyebeam fellows in our Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future initiative in 2020. I appreciated this conversation so much, his insistence on thinking through powerful ways to help people re-think ways of being together digitally, most recently creating common.garden, the only art exhibition platform fully exited from surveillance capitalism.

As we enter these long, hot days of this unusual year, I'll be releasing three special episodes that aim to provide some dreamy inspiration for late summer. Between now and labor day, I'll be speaking with three dynamic artists over three episodes. The conversations move from foundational questions around what technology actually means to playful platforms for new forms of co-creation and community, and then finally to a discussion of astrology as an ancient, vital technology for spiritual practice.

B Covington, a multi-modal sound artist whose work is as formally challenging as it is joyfully satisfying, was in New York last month and sat down for a conversation with me at my office in Brooklyn. I enjoyed our time so much an it is the first episode of Informer that was recorded in person.

James Bridle imagines new modes of invention and engagement inspired from relationships with non-human beings. He's a fascinating thinker and this is one of my favorite conversations.

I first heard about K when they were active in the electronic music scene of the bay area in the early 2000's. I've enjoyed following their work from that time into becoming a force for thoughtful engagement with AI, thinking about it in very expansive way, involving anthropology and cosmology.

I've known Julia for over a decade and have admired her fearless approach to both creating communities through her Art and Tech Meetups which ran for years throughout New York City and then to her leadership in the creation of New Inc, an art and tech incubator with the New Museum. She's also developed a fantastic career as an independent curator, which she shares more about in our conversation.

"As an artist I am trying to see the hidden connections between things and trying to understand things that I feel as a person that thinks in slightly different ways." - Angelo Plessas I enjoyed this conversation with Angelo a lot. I think we need more people thinking like he is, finding moments of healing in our relationships with technology. We talk about a number of things, including his recent collaboration with Acne Studios in producing a fashion line from his singular style of quilting, made from materials that protect our bodies from electro-magnetic fields being generated by the devices that surround us.

It's always a pleasure to be in conversation with Mendi and Keith Obadike. The sound art duo have been working together for 25 years, which gives them perspective to be able to identify trends, changes, and ongoing challenges in the field. In this podcast, I talk to them about issues of structural racism, the changes they've seen in the last two years in how people consume their music, and their public refusal of an award offered by ZKM and the reason they chose to do so.

I had the privilege of visiting an insightful and rich exhibition at Albright-Knox, Buffalo, last month. Co-curated by curator and art historian Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan and artist Paul Vanouse, it focused on the impact of "difference machines" AKA computers in shifting our notions of identity. Featuring many artists that I have been fans of for years, I hope that this ground exhibition continues to make waves. You can dig into their ideas on this, the latest episode of Informer. * "You can not talk about contemporary life without talking about technology." * Photo: Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan and Paul Vanouse standing in front of Saya Woolfalk's Landscape of Anticipation 2.0, 2021.