Jacqueline Barrios – Gus Wendel – Dana Cuff

The Digital Salon is a curation of listening experiences produced by the alumni and affiliated members of the urban humanities initiative at UCLA. In our pilot season, our contributors meditate on the theme of the portal. Through readings, soundwalks, audio-collages, interviews and more, we seek out the openings, fissures and apertures within the pandemic.

The Digital Salon is a podcast series and a multi-media blog meditating on the theme of the PORTAL produced by the alumni and affiliated practitioners of UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative.  In our pilot season, we respond to Arundhati Roy’s provocation in saying that the “pandemic is a portal.”  We see this rupturing of urban space and time as also a chance to imagine our world anew, as we call for audiographic work to manifest a collective urge to think, document, reflect, meditate, connect. As the pandemic fractures the cities we study, live in and love, our alumni (and friends) fabulated responses that draw on the practices we call urban humanities, critical spatial practices for inquiry about, and enacting spatial justice in, the city.   Our first season wraps with six episodes and six blogposts, with over 2000 downloads in 27 countries and an exciting 6-week Insta-takeover.   Podcast episodes highlight experiments with novel readings, soundwalks, audio-collages, interviews as sonic practices that tell stories about the openings, fissures and apertures within the pandemic.  The first season features six episodes (roughly 30-40 mins each) with accompanying content hosted on our website, digitalsalonpodcast.org, where contributors locate “portals” in the urban imaginary, from the city graveyard in fiction, to empty college campuses, from ethnic neighborhood markets to the trope of the “ship of fools.”

To learn more, visit:
digitalsalonpodcast.org