Introducing All That We Touch — a new podcast from Impact Studios, all about technology and society, and how the things we make shape and reshape us in turn.

Here, host Matt Ryan speaks with Tamson Pietsch about the podcast's sources of inspiration, from Octavia Butler's fiction to Bruno Latour's concept of assemblages, and what it hopes to explore.

At its heart, Latour's thinking insists that humans, tools, language and technologies are bound together in networks where nothing stands apart, pure and untouched. It's a direct challenge to a much older idea in Western thought, one that built whole academic disciplines on the assumption that humans and nature were separate. Octavia Butler's dystopian novel, The parable of the Sower, opens with the lines "all that we touch, we change, and all that we change changes us" - a credo that seems to neatly sum up Latour's central idea.

You'll hear a sneak preview of the first two stories we'll publish over the coming months, on a podcast that will feature documentaries, talks and recordings of live events - all on that theme of technology and society.

Voices

Dr Matthew Ryan is a Chancellor's Research Fellow at UTS' Faculty of Design and Society.

Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch is director of UTS' Australian Centre for Public History at UTS and managing director of Impact Studios.

Actress Lynne Thigpen reads the excerpt from The Parable of the Sower by Octacia E. Buter.

Professor Heather Ford, Dr Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke present our inaugural series on Wikipedia - coming very soon.

Michelle Maloney and Abe Noe-Hayes feature in a forthcoming episode, Liquid Gold.

Credits

This introductory episode was produced by Lachlan A'Court.

Excerpt from Parable of the Sower is by Octavia E. Butler, narrated by Lynne Thigpen, provided courtesy of Recorded Books, © 2000. The full recording is available wherever audiobooks are sold.

All That We Touch is made on Gadigal land, in Sydney, by UTS Impact Studios. Executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.