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

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Speakers: James Bloom, Alex May
Moderator: Bronac Ferran
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 artist whose work examines how people remember and how technology changes what we keep, what we lose, and what we think is real. Working across moving image, photography, sculpture, and computational processes, he explores parallels between human experience and technological systems of recording, storage, and preservation.

Informed by more than four decades of programming experience, his work uses technology not simply as a tool, but as a way of thinking through how reality is shaped, altered, and re-experienced over time.

He has exhibitied at Ars Electronica, ZKM, HeK in Basel, MIT Museum, Nobel Prize Museum, and Tate Modern, and has work in several collections including ZKM and the Computer Arts Society.

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.

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Our next talk will be Wed 20th May The Unexpected Story - AI & Text Talk with Geoff Davis - online only.
Followed by Genetic Moo Talk and Exhibition on Tues. 16th June.
Visit Events for all Events and Exhibitions.

Photo credits: James Bloom/Alex May