Artists and Technology Discussion
James Bloom and Alex May, hosted by Bronac Ferran

Summary

Artists Alex May and James Bridle present contrasting approaches to art and technology under the framing 'move fast and break things, control, progress and the black box'. May examines how people remember and how technology changes what they keep, lose and trust as real, discussing works such as 'Shadows of Light', algorithmic photography, the blockchain-based Object Time series and 'Memory Compression', which reveals the visual artefacts introduced by video codecs such as H.264 and Cinepak. Bridle describes systems built from reinforcement learning, commercially available body scans and deliberately introduced code bugs, including 'Half Cheetah', the blockchain series 'Mass' and a networked response to Gottfried Jäger's generative photography, to probe agency, automation, failure and authorship. A chaired conversation with Sarah Cook follows, exploring stillness, duration, technological acceleration and the place of the human body within opaque AI systems. Both artists agree that process matters deeply, that users should remain alert to corporate control and dependency, and that authentic work arises through struggle with the medium rather than through results that have not been earned, and that technology must remain an extension of humanness rather than a replacement for it.

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