Carrie Hott likes to tinker. She takes apart electronics and tries to figure out how they work. She once did a residency at the UC Davis Center for Spaceflight Research. A recent project involves a pocket-sized, solar-powered internet server that hosts a website that she coded herself.
Researching Carrie Hott’s work got Kayte wondering, what is it that artists do? How is their inquiry different from—or the same as—scientific or technological inquiry? We touch on those questions and more in our conversation.
Carrie Hott is an artist, designer and educator. She is Assistant Professor of graphic design in the studio art department in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Her current project, How to Slow Internet, focuses on, “collaborative experimentation with small scale communication technology in order to better consider the large scale communications infrastructure on which we increasingly depend.”
You can explore past projects (includingLamps That Sense Us, andOur Shiver) on her website.
Kayte recommends watching a series of videos from a project called Room of Edges.
Raising the roof at an underground bar
TheBlockhouse Bar is tucked under another staple of the Bloomington arts scene; The Back Door. Like the best kind of joints that live under other good spots, it’s not the most easily found place. But once you find it, there’s pretty much always something going on. The number of record release events for local bands that have taken place at the Blockhouse somehow averages out to be far higher than the actual number of albums releases in that same amount of time. Nobody knows how they do it.
They also keep a regular calendar of nice and predictable events notched between comedy shows, touring bands, benefit shows, and all the other kinds of things that go down at the Blockhouse. Tyler Lake spoke with Kaiya Grundmann, the Booking & Promotions Managerabout all the ways they stay busy over at The Blockhouse Bar.
An underwater world made of yarn
Over at the Sydney and Lois Eskenazi of Art a new show by one artist has taken over the entire Featured Exhibitions Gallery. It’s a magical textilescape of knitted and crocheted coral reefs and other sea creatures, both real and imagined. The artist, Mulyana uses recycled yarn, and shredded plastic bags to depict the sea floor in different stages of life. Bright and colorful coral in the bloom of life occupies one corner of the gallery, while coral that has been bleached white sits in limbo between all that color and similar seascapes darkened into shades of gray and black.
The show is called Mulyana: Vital Ecosystems, and it features dozens of intricate knitted and crocheted scenes, thousands of yellow fiber fish that hang from ceiling and an unavoidable environmental message. As you move through the space you see the effect of environmental damage, colorful coral fades to bleach white and finally to black and grays that seem to signal death and decay.
The show up now through Sunday, June 28, 2026.
Credits
This episode was produced and edited by Kayte Young. We get production help from Danny William, Holly Wilkerson, Karl Templeton, Leo Paes, Jillian Blackburn and Jonah Ballard.
Our theme music was composed and performed by Alan Davis. Additional music from Universal Production Music. The executive producer is Eric Bolstridge