Disintegrator

E. Elias Merhige is the experimental filmmaker behind Begotten (1989) and its sequels Din of Celestial Birds (2006) and Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022), as well as Shadow of the Vampire and Suspect Zero.

Gavin Gamboa is a composer, pianist, and video artist who wrote the music for Polia & Blastema and works in local-first "digital gardens" and the piano repertoire.

What began as their shared film becomes, here, a way into a single question Elias poses at the top: what is being born through us - and is that thing digesting us on its way out?

From there the conversation moves through desire and digestion as the engine of creation, and what happens when the interval between the wound and the poem collapses to nothing. Merhige treats AI as atavistic rather than alien: a dark mirror, an artificial unconscious, a "necromantic bureaucracy" of dead expressions made responsive, and reads the manuscript and the personal library as older machines through which the dead already speak.

Gamboa holds a more skeptical line, defending manual effort and drawing on Marshall McLuhan's "auto-amputation" and his own experiments training models on his audio. 

The guests & their workGavin Gamboa: composer, pianist, video artist  gavingamboa.net
E. Elias Merhige: filmmaker; his 1989 debut Begotten anchors the "Begotten trilogy" -  Begotten on Wikipedia
Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022) — premiere Q&A with all three (Vimeo)
Books & essays citedThomas Moynihan, “The GASTRULATION of GEIST: or, an Extended Meditation upon the World-Historical Connection Between Digestion and Simulation,” Vast Abrupt, 8 February 2018, link.
Kate Crawford, "Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop,"  e-flux
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018), Bloomsbury

We're joined by Yancey Strickler: writer, cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and the person behind a string of projects that try to give creative life a workable economic form: Bentoism, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, the Dark Forest Collective, and now Artist Corporations and the Dark Forest Operating System. The episode is timely. We recorded in late May, days before Governor Jared Polis signed the Colorado Artist Company Act into law on June 2, 2026 - the country's first "A Corp," a company type where the artist keeps majority control, intellectual property reverts to its maker if the company dissolves, and an artistic mission sits above profit. More than 4,000 creators have already signed up, and several states are drafting their own versions.

Where this show usually works by critique, Strickler builds working alternatives and writes them into law. Our running question throughout: when criticizing the system is the admired move, is building something real the more radical act, or does anything built inside the system end up serving it?

Yancey Strickler's projects
Yancey Strickler — ystrickler.com
Bentoism — bentoism.org
The Creative Independent — thecreativeindependent.com
Metalabel — metalabel.com
New Creative Era (Strickler's podcast with Joshua Citarella) — metalabel.com
Artist Corporations & the lawArtist Corporations — artistcorporations.com
The Colorado Artist Company Act (SB 26-133), annotated full text — artistcorporations.com/law/annotated
Strickler's TED talk, "Forget hustle culture. Behold the Artist Corporation" (2025) — ted.com
News coverage of the signing: The Colorado Sun · The Art Newspaper · ARTnews
Frieze, "Can A-Corps Save the Struggling Artist?" (skeptical take, also previews DFOS) — frieze.com
The private internet, AI & IPDark Forest Operating System (DFOS) — app.dfos.com · protocol spec at protocol.dfos.com · code on GitHub
Strickler on DIDs, the AT Protocol and Bluesky ("Antienshittification") — ystrickler.com
Holly+ (Holly Herndon's voice model / licensing experiment) — holly.plus
Books & ideas citedThis Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World (Viking, 2019) — thiscouldbeourfuture.com · Penguin Random House
"The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" (essay, 2019) — original on ystrickler.com · The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (Metalabel, 2024) — Goodreads
Samuel W. Franklin, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History (University of Chicago Press, 2023) — press.uchicago.edu
Venkatesh Rao's "cozyweb," — Ribbonfarm

Disintegrator's spring tour lecture, love to watch this continue to unfold in real life. Thanks to Index, Montez Radio, Hugh, Elie, the Disintegrator team and especially Dena Yago for joining us. For the visually hxc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xbWCcHbtWY (good slides).

Marek solo ep. To be released on Nuda Mag <3 later this year in text form.
Piece starts like 17 minutes in hahaha.

This episode is entirely in Spanish. English translation is here: https://marekpoliks.com/noinvestigues_transcript. 

We are delighted to be joined by the algorithmically contagious memetic research project no.investigues. If you are chronically online, especially if you are familiar with the Spanish-speaking corners of the internet, you must have already interacted with one of the echoes of no.investigues —probably through their wonderful Substack, or in conversation at their Discord book club, or through the 28.research cluster, or most likely through monumental Instagram meme carousels.

Their voice flows through online algorithmic inertia, yet the substance of their discourse exists in the shadow of virality.

In this conversation, we talk about what it means to understand the apocalypse as an asymmetrical phenomenon: no one experiences it at the same time, and clearly not with the same intensity. This polyphonic nature of the apocalypse is amplified by the increasingly atomized and homogeneous global distribution of violence.

Even so, the apocalypse is already here, and we might be better off learning how to inhabit it. Through an extrapolated reading of Ernesto Oroza’s visual archive Desobediencia Tecnológica (Technological Disobedience), documenting repurposed technology in Cuba, we talk about repurposing salvaged discourses into newly assembled modes of thinking that would allow us to confront the roughness of our apocalyptic situation. This invitation resonates with a thread that runs through our conversations ever since Exocapitalism came out: the premise that perhaps the apocalypse and capital are forces not to be treated as enemies, but as inertias of History. Both demand a nuanced engagement with their diverse local articulations of violence. Under this framework, the apocalypse feels like an ineluctable situation, one that cannot be won by fighting.

Instagram: https://instagram.com/no.investigues/
Selected no.investigues substack posts:
Pensamiento apocalíptico, una aproximación: https://substack.com/home/post/p-192881638
La Torre: https://substack.com/home/post/p-191289547
Desobediencia Tecnológica de Ernesto Oroza: https://substack.com/home/post/p-179603849

References: Valencia, Sayak. Capitalismo gore. Barcelona: Melusina, 2010. ISBN: 978-84-96614-87-1. Oroza, Ernesto. Desobediencia tecnológica: La permanencia de lo temporal en Cuba. Ciudad de México: FIEBRE Ediciones, 2025.