Move Fast and Break Things: Control, Progress and the Black Box

Events at BCS Moorgate and Zoom - visitors and attendees need to book, link will be here nearer the event.

Speakers: James Bloom, Alex May
Moderator: TBC
Other time zones: https://www.timeanddate.com
Location: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, 25 Copthall Avenue, London, EC2R 7BP, UK
Directions: https://www.bcs.org/about-us/our-london-office-and-event-venue/

Visit the Moorgate London exhibitions: please email info@computer-arts-society.com for booking details.

About the Talk

"Move fast and break things" was the mantra that defined a decade of technological acceleration - prioritising scale over consequence. In this joint talk, artists Alex May and James Bloom reclaim this phrase to debate the role of the artist in an age of automated "black box" creativity.

While both artists share a critical urge to dismantle the seamless interfaces of modern technology, their methods place them in direct collision:

James Bloom (The Antagonist) fights the machine. He purposefully feeds Reinforcement Learning agents until they fracture, generating "functional provocations" that expose the artificiality of progress and the goal-seeking impulse. He breaks the system to reveal inherent weakness.

Alex May (The Architect) asserts radical control. By hand-coding his own algorithms from scratch, he rejects commercial engines to intimately preserve the fragility of human memory and time. He breaks the standard workflow to build poetic precision.

Join us for a lively discussion that moves beyond the standard artist talk into a debate on agency:

Should we dismantle the machine by taking it apart line-by-line, or by pushing it until it crashes?

Alex May

Alex May is an internationally recognised artist known for his innovative exploration of the intersection between art, science, and technology, with a focus on creating multi-layered works that resonate with the human experience in a digital world.

His body of work utilises creative software he has written and a wide range of digital new media forms including video sculpture, algorithmic photography, interactive robotics, photogrammetry as memory, 3D printed sculpture, virtual and augmented reality apps, video projection mapping, generative algorithms and biological sonification, with roots in experimental performative software, video and sound art.

James Bloom

James Bloom is a London-based artist who uses technological innovation as a method to generate perceptual problems. His online artworks connect their participants in real-time but have utility engineered out, upending the structure of the networks they exist within and revealing possibilities for autonomy. He takes complex code-based and material production techniques and combines them in unintended ways, often to the point of failure, triggering new states.

Booking on EventBrite will be here nearer the event

Photo credits: [To be added]