We’re raising money to take an ecological artwork to Venice. Support us here.

In 2022, my partner and I co-founded the artist’s collective Vessel on the island of Aegina to explore creative approaches to ecology, climate change, and the needs of our community.

We’ve taught students how to build collectively and ecologically, painted murals in local playgrounds, and invited people to explore the lost springs of the island.

Now, we’ve been invited to take something of Aegina to the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2025, and we’d like your help to get there.

Mediterranean seagrass – Posidonia oceanica – grows all around our island. It’s an extraordinary plant, the only flowering one in the ocean, and it is vital to marine ecosystems worldwide. It stores carbon, fills the ocean with oxygen, and provides a habitat for everyone else. It’s also under threat, with some 60% of seagrass meadows disappearing from the ocean in the last few decades.

On Aegina, and around the Mediterranean, seagrass has been used for generations as insulation for houses and fertiliser for fields. Although these practices have largely disappeared, and been replaced by synthetic and unsustainable alternatives, the seagrass is still here. 

We’ve been using seagrass as insulation in our projects, and it really is a wonder material: fire-resistant, inhospitable to pests, and free to collect on the beaches. Moreover, as we’ve used it, we’ve discovered its worlds, and become involved in conservation efforts to preserve and regenerate local seagrass meadows in the Aegean.

We want to share this knowledge, and raise awareness about seagrass ecology and conservation. And the Vennice Biennial has invited us to do so: but they don’t offer any financial support. That’s why we’re asking for help.

We want to send several packing cases of seagrass, collected on our local beaches, to Venice. As well as samples of seagrass prepared for architectural use, we’ll include ceramic objects made from local clay, which tell the story of seagrass in the wild. This is a reference to the Venetian glassmakers of Murano, who used to send their wares around the world packed in seagrass from the lagoon of Venice. Even the painted crates will be made from reclaimed wood, and will form part of the exhibit, in order to minimise waste and maximise recycling as part of the project.

You can read more, and donate to our fundraising effort, here. It would be hugely appreciated.

I was recently interviewed by Kanoko Tamura for the Japanese art magazine art journal “Bijutsu-Techo”. The interview will be published, in Japanese, in a forthcoming issue of the magazine, dedicated to Generative AI. I’m publishing an English-language transcript, only lightly edited, of our discussion, because it touches on so many things I’m interested in, and raises one particularly interesting question, which I attempted to answer: “what is a non-human aesthetic?”.

Kanoko Tamura:

For the next issue that we are working on, it’s going to be about generative AI and art. Becaus now ChatGPT and all these technologies have been spread among general people, a lot of people have started using those technologies. But it’s also a very particular time in the history because generative art has its own long history. But what is happening now is something very unique. So I want to use this issue as an opportunity to analyze what is really our current situation?

I think a lot of us are having been learning pros and cons of AI and if it’s actually useful for art. And there’s a huge discussion in the art world as well if we should use AI or not, and how should we face the AI from the point of view of the art world. So we are doing different interviews with artists to hear how people think about it and also in a way to try to find a positive way to look at the current situation. So being positive – not accepting everything nor denying everything, but trying to find a positive/productive way of looking at the technology from the artist’s point of view.

I will be interviewing you today, and I wish to talk about stuff based on Ways of Being where you talk about non-human intelligence and how you find values and possibilities in it? Also connecting that to what’s going on in the art world. If you, as an artist, see any possibilities or issues or challenges in usage of AI in terms of creative work. If you could start by maybe talking about how you see this current situation at the moment and also if you see any possibilities toward the future?

James Bridle:

Certainly, and thanks. It’s a vast thing to talk about, right? Because one thing to start talking about from the outside is really: what are we talking about? One of the first splits to talk about is between the AI that most people imagine and the AI that actually somewhat exists. We have AI as in the kind of vast science fiction imagining of everyone, which is fed by science fiction films, and by the marketing propaganda of companies that engage in this. That is something that’s so huge and so culturally powerful that it really shapes so much of our thinking about AI, in the art world, but also everywhere.

The reality of the actual tools that we have in the present moment are pretty different from what immediately pops into our head when we think about AI. So that’s the first thing: making a distinction between AI as it is in the popular imagination, and in the artistic imagination; and in the actuality of the tools that we have.

The second thing I would say is that there’s a really important distinction between the AI you’re talking about – generative AI and large language models – and all the different kinds of AI there actually are in existence. Because I have made projects over the years using neural networks, which underlie generative AI and large language models, but I haven’t used those specific technologies in my work. And these emerge from a whole history of other attempts to build AI that have different outcomes. The idea that AI is just something that can make images or make text out of these kind of huge corpora is only one thing that might be possible with them. There’s a range of practices around AI.

The other split I’m quite keen to make, that cuts across those other ones and doesn’t just apply to imagining other forms of AI, but trues to ask what we’re talking about when we talk about intelligence in general. Where does AI sit within our imagination of who gets to think, who gets to create. A lot of my work, and particularly in Ways of Being, has been about trying to figure out what we mean when we talk about AI – or rather, let’s call it machine intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. Because when we talk about intelligence, we mostly, subconsciously or consciously, mean what humans do. So all of our thinking about AI is contained within this very narrow idea that AI is somehow mimicking some or all aspects of what we consider to be human intelligence. It’s like a subset of human intelligence. One of my questions is: what if it’s not? What if it’s actually a radically different kind of thinking about the world? Therefore, what other modes of thinking the world might we be able to come up with to compare it to, to make sense of it, to measure it against?

I’ve always found it incredibly striking that AI, this big amorphous conceptual thing, is having such a huge moment in the popular imagination just as in a lot of other ways, in the art world and elsewhere in politics, in our relationship to the planet, we’re also rethinking the centrality of the human. We’re recognizing both our overwhelming power to organize, control, change, damage, perhaps improve the planet, but also our intense limitations, and part of that is recognizing that there’s a whole world of other beings that have always inhabited this planet, who also have their own forms of intelligence that are not lesser than ours. They’re just different ways of thinking the world. And so is machine intelligence like human intelligence? Is it like the intelligence of some other living being? Is it something entirely new? How does it partake in the world?

That brings up really fascinating philosophical questions concerning what we can know about the intelligence of others. Not just the intelligence of other species, but the intelligence of other people, the intelligence of people who’ve existed within different cultures, different cosmologies. There’s so many different ways of thinking in the world. That’s the beginning.

We can say some things about what kind of intelligence we are dealing with. One thing we can say about the contemporary forms of AI that most of us have access to is that it is what I call corporate AI. It is AI that is made by large corporations, mostly American and some Chinese and others, all within these very particular structures of power and capitalism. That is like a plant growing within a particular ecosystem. It will take on the qualities of the life it has to survive, what it considers success from that niche in which it grows up. This is why so much attention is paid to AIs that play games. It’s because that’s the only way we have to tell if it’s winning. But that makes it think that winning is the most important thing, which is a particular value of capitalism and of some other systems. It comes freighted with these kind of values, biases, concerns. It comes with its own view of the world that it acts upon.

Personally, I’m not interested in art involving AI that doesn’t contain some of that critique, that doesn’t contain some of that thinking. Because what is this thing we’re talking about? Is it a way of painting or is it a way of thinking about painting? Or is it a way of seeing the whole world? Is it a tool? Is it a context? Is it a framework? Or is it a whole cosmology, a whole model of the world that we’re interacting with?

And very, very finally and briefly, I want to make a case that AI is very boring. It’s not as interesting or as important as so many other things, including art. It has to be secondary to the important things we’re discussing, which in this case might be: what is art? What can art be? What can art do? We have to talk about the art first and then see if maybe, just perhaps, AI is an interesting component of that.

Does it help us answer some of these questions? Does it help us do something or not?

Kanoko Tamura:

Thank you for that. With that said, I’m interested in hearing about your AI Chair Project because I see a lot of potentials in that project. Even though it’s a very simple and maybe small project that you recently started on, I think that it shows or it tries to explore possibilities of humans and the other. How can we collaborate with someone who is not human? It also shows that the values that you reach together in the conversation with AI. It’s not always the standard beauty or function. It questions the values that humans think are good. I also think about the use of the used materials or the materials that are often usually considered useless. So I think AI Chair Project asks very crucial and fundamental question, and that’s how I interpreted the project. If you could maybe talk about your intention behind it or what did you get out of it after you started the project?

James Bridle:

So one of the ways that I think about AI is thinking about the fact that you are in communication with another being, a system or whatever it is that has a way of thinking the world that is different with the way that I have of thinking the world. And most of the discourse in AI is around the discordances that it creates. Things like AI hallucinations, the way it does seem to understand the world differently in a way that doesn’t make sense to humans, that comes across as a mistake or even sometimes as a lie. That’s often how these systems are critiqued as seen as being wrong, as being lying, when really that’s just how they understand the world, and it’s different to how humans understand the world.

In particular, they’re good at things that humans are bad at, like thinking about huge numbers or very large amounts of information. We’re just not very good at that. We need machines to help us with that or that’s what machines are good for, anyway. But then they’re not good at things that humans are good at, like certain other types of creative thinking, guessing, hunches, another kind of thinking in the world, just a different way of thinking. So we have these different ways of thinking. There’s different roles to be had here, and in particular rather than assuming that AI is something that will outcompete humans, we can at least start to think about it as being something that accompanies humans, that collaborates with humans, that we can put those ways of thinking into some kind of productive alignment.

One thing that the computer systems are really good at that humans aren’t so good at is optimization and efficiency. One of the long term uses for computer systems within architecture, for example, is something like how do we make a bridge with fewer supports, or less material? How do we build a more efficient roof on a house? These kind of questions. Complex mathematical problems. So that seemed like the thing to push on. I had a load of spare wood sitting around, scrap wood from other projects. So I was like, okay, well, I know how to build a chair, and chairs are useful, direct, you know. We’re probably not going to improve on the design of the chair: humans know how to make the best form of the chair for the human body. It’s just something that holds you off the ground. But I thought that the AI could perhaps do this kind of creative work that I wasn’t so good at, which was to imagine which materials would be the most efficient in different places. That’s what I was really hoping for from the project, that I would be able to give this machine a bunch of descriptions of pieces of wood that I actually had, and it would tell me how to combine them in ways that I wouldn’t have thought of, that wouldn’t have occurred to me.

The result was actually less interesting than that. It told me how to build a very simple chair. It did use the materials very efficiently. There was also work for me to do, to figure out how to follow its instructions. I had to do some creative work here. That was interesting to me because the AI didn’t learn anything from this experience, but I learned something practical and definite from this experience. My carpentry improved slightly. That’s more than collaboration. That’s commensalism, which is a term for a symbiotic relationship where something gets better on both sides. You’re not just surviving. You’re actually improving. I think that’s really key, in that I want to have relationships with my tools that is commensurate. Where we’re improved by our use of them rather than merely doing as we’re told or using them instead of our brains. It’s trying to find the places in which we have either hierarchical relationships or negative parasitic relationships, which most of our relationships with technology are, and replace them with commensal ones. Where we are all uplifted by this experience.

There’s a bunch of other stuff in there about like treating the AI as the other and that kind of stuff. But that was really my main thing: how do I build something greater out of this? Also, how do I get a better understanding of the thing that I’m dealing with? Because buried in there is a very literal description of how this kind of AI functions. The chairs that I’ve built by asking the AI to help me build chairs are the sort of chairs that are imagined by someone who has only ever read about chairs. They’ve never sat in one, which is a very important thing to understand about how AI understands things. It’s such a beautifully direct description of what this thing is that I’m dealing with that becomes so apparent when you actually make a thing.

That’s slightly in counterpoint to my last point about how you have to talk about the art first. Sometimes you just have to do the thing and then figure out what the art of it is.

Kanoko Tamura:

Yes. It’s very interesting the last thing you talked about. By making the chair, you kind of understand what exactly AI is, because it produces something not from the experience of sitting, and but out of all the information. I think in Ways of Being, you also talk about there are lots of hints as to how humans can build relationship with non-humans, including AI and other animals in nature. I think you could imagine that relationship being the kind of relationship that you’re building with AI as well. Do you have any specific ideas or examples or imagination on how exactly we can build that kind of relationship with non-humans? I’m interested in animals and plants and all the other beings that you talked about in the book as well. Maybe you could focus on those instead of AI.

James Bridle:

Happily. Very happily. What to say? One of the main points of Ways of Being is that everything is alive. Everything has its own being. Everything exists in this world equally with everything else, with its own presence, its own awareness, its own living force, whatever that is. Some of that is knowable and recognizable by us. Some of it is so strange and different to us that it’s almost impossible for us to grasp. How do we change or shape our awareness in recognition of that? How do we enter into a world in which most of the life that’s occurring is radically different to us and yet shares the world with us? There’s many possible answers to that. One of them is to directly experience, to pay attention. As I said about the AI chair, sometimes you have to do it. Most of what I’m talking about exists in the realm of direct experience. It can’t be spoken of.

What do I mean when I say these things cannot be spoken of? Well, what I mean is that language is a system for making distinctions between things. So you have to divide things up in order to be able to talk about them meaningfully. If I say “this mountain”, I’m describing a particular mountain. I’m separating it from other things. But if I say the mountain is alive, what does that mean? Does it mean that the mountain breathes like a mammal? Does it exist like a bacteria? Does it live like the wind lives? The words stop having meanings in ways that are useful to us. But the mountain is alive. It’s just really hard to talk about. So the only really meaningful relationship one can have is one that goes beyond language. That concerns direct experience. Things just happen: that is the realm of direct experience. And that’s also the realm of quite a lot of art. So we’re talking about things that have a relationship. That go beyond everyday language and quite often beyond language itself in order to be able to conceive, feel and experience things that are truer than what we can put into any form of words.

The question then becomes what kind of relationships do we want to have. What do we want these to be for? Do we want these to be relationships to build a better world? A world of mutual flourishing, a world in which everyone gets to live to their fullest possibilities? And by everyone, I do also mean the birds, the animals, the seas, the mountains. How do we build a world of mutual flourishing? It comes from these kinds of forms of attention, from caring about these things, and by the gift of thinking the world as being fully alive.

A lesser question, but one that I am still fascinated with is: do computers count? Does AI count? Is AI alive? Could it be? Which is this question that keeps coming up. I find it fascinating. This is, for me, the best use of AI because it makes me ask this question – Is AI alive, in the terms that I’m talking about? If so, how? Because I understand that aliveness has some kind of a resonance, but also something that descends from something greater, from the universe. Everything comes out of the universe. That’s what makes it alive. Does AI come out of that? Or did we build it in just in the lab, and therefore, it has no life? But everything is alive. I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.

What is AI made out of? It’s literally made out of the bodies of creatures that died billions of years ago. It’s made out of plastic and oil and electrons. So it is part of the universe as much as anything else. What does it mean to think and have these relationships? How does it change us to have these relationships? How is the world changed by the relationships that we have? These are the questions that I’m interested in.

Kanoko Tamura:

I think that’s a very, very important message and question that you raised that is important not only to this topic that we want to discuss in the magazine issue, but it’s a very fundamental question that we all need to face because when we try to ask questions about AI, we tend to start by questioning and trying to criticize the corporate AI. If it’s useful or not or if it’s helpful or not. But I think if you really think about why AI is here and is AI alive, we can actually get to a very fundamental question in art as well because instead of talking about all the games happening in the art market, we start to ask questions like why do we start drawing in first place, or why do we start dancing and singing? I think it connects to those more important questions.

James Bridle:

Yes, absolutely. That for me is the most interesting thing about AI. It’s the idea of it, not whatever we write in code or systems. Why as a species are we so fascinated by the idea of there being non-human intelligence?

I should really qualify that by saying why as particular human cultures are we fascinated by non-human intelligence? Because for many cultures, the idea of non-human intelligence is not so complicated. For someone acculturated to, in particular, a Western European post-enlightenment scientific position, we’ve been told that there’s no such thing. And we’ve forced most of the world, if not to accept that position, then at least to live within it. We are living within the consequences of that imperial, colonial, epistemological action. Whatever anyone else in the world thinks, we’ve set the world up to run as though there’s nothing but the human and really nothing but certain types of human that matter. So the project, the only important project at the present, is to change that situation.

I think that’s quite a long shot, given how entrenched our colonialist, capitalist, and Western Enlightenment scientific cultures are. But it does seem to me that the attention given to AI quite clearly speaks to a yearning within the human to meet and learn from the non-human.

Kanoko Tamura:

With that said or from that point of view, do you think it’s possible to kind of come back to the art and talk about aesthetics with non-human intelligence? Because aesthetics is important, it’s being discussed over years by philosophers, and then there is also a discussion of new aesthetics. But do you think it’s possible to discuss non-human aesthetics, or aesthetics of intelligence, or aesthetics of being?

James Bridle:

My engagement with aesthetics has always been somewhat accidental. My project, The New Aesthetic, which still continues, is very much a sort of amateur, outsider one, in which I responded quite viscerally to things that I was encountering. It’s always been a research project rather than a doing project in that sense. But in another sense, it’s something I’ve been doing for almost 20 years now. So I guess I can call it meaningful.

The first thing to say about a non-human aesthetic would be that it can’t be an aesthetic, as we understand it, because aesthetics is about human sense and human judgment and experience. It’s about that we encounter, process, think of the world primarily in terms of appearances because we’ve got these great big eyes in the front of our head that are our primary sense. But that’s not how most of the universe encounters itself.

One of the things I always think about is the way, as humans, we live within such a narrow band of space time, in multiple ways. Within time, we live within the ticking of a clock. Our day-to-day time, the 24-hour cycle, and the cycle of our attention, which is also determined by things outside of us. We also live within the time scale of our lives, and we live within the time scale of our culture, what our culture remembers, which is a very small fraction of the history of the planet, let alone the universe, let alone, a number of other things. We live within this really narrow time and we can’t see that far ahead. Our experience is so bounded just by time. And then regarding space, we can see a little, we can hear a little, but that is limited by the frequencies we can perceive. There are huge numbers of beings that live on this planet that can hear things that we can’t hear. So even there, immediately, this other aesthetic, a non-human aesthetic, is bigger, broader, deeper, wider, stranger than a human aesthetic because it extends into all these different potential realizations, awarenesses, and therefore, things to process and therefore, things to think with. It increases the number of objects to think with.

So I guess that actually makes for me quite a neat definition of a non-human aesthetic: to increase the number of things we have to think with. Every culture has its own set of aesthetics that it thinks with and humans have collectively a set things to think with. The most interesting thing for me in the world is trying to expand the things, or rather beings, that we have to think with. I add that ‘beings’ to it because I think a big part of this is the transformation of things into beings. The process by which we stop regarding only the people that we know, or humans in general as being people, beings who matter, and we start to see everything as being people who are in their own process of passing through space time on a trajectory that occasionally intersects with our own. Because the moment of thinking happens when those things collide. The moment of living happens when those things collide.

In Ways of Being, I write about intelligence as being a cooperative process. But I’d go a lot further than that, and I would say this kind of living and thinking, this being or mattering is what happens when beings interact, when they meet. How do we increase the number of relationships? That is not a non-human, but a more-than-human aesthetics, that includes all these possible and effectively infinite different intersections between beings to produce entirely new perspectives, new ways of perceiving and thinking the world.

Kanoko Tamura:

You gave us a lot of hints to really digest and think on, so thank you for that. Do you have any plans for near future or anything that you’re working on at the moment that you could tell us? Any current project that you’re interested in?

James Bridle:

My work at present is largely focused on quite practical work. I spent, you know, a lot of the last 10, 15 years looking at questions of technology. That’s been my main focus. Writing Ways of Being was was part of, I should say, a conscious transition from a technological focus to an ecological focus. It’s explicit in the book, but it’s part of my whole practice and part of my whole life. I think for me and for a lot of other people, the most urgent work at present is to address the planetary ecological crisis. And an incredibly important question for artists is: what is our role within that?

One of the ways that I think about that is to ask questions of art itself, of what it can do, of how it operates. In my work with technology, I found myself running up a lot against essentially a problem of representation, which is where you make work with technology about technology that just does more technology in various ways that just recreates the same systems you’re critiquing. That problem is even greater when it comes to ecological work. It’s very easy to make work about climate change. It’s also pointless and irresponsible in the present moment.

The only work that really matters is work that actually does something. I’m not about to claim that my work succeeds in doing that. It’s hard. But it is my intention always that the work actually does some work. Now that can be work to inform people just to talk about things, to raise these as issues, to increase awareness or imagination, but that is mostly representation. It can also be super practical. I build solar panels. I build windmills. I make these things as works of art that actually do the thing, that actually work. I call them ‘works that work’ or ‘works that do work’ because they’re actively part of the transformation that I’d like to see in the world. They’re not solutions; I don’t believe in solutions. But I do believe in a kind of active engagement that the work, the artworks themselves, are part of. They don’t stand alone. They’re not representations of anything anymore. They’re actually getting involved in some way. That’s probably of a piece with my feelings about ecology, about the world around me, about the aliveness of everything. The artworks partake as much as anything else. That’s where I’m at these days. I’m making things and I’m making things in the world and I’m eager to see what the world thinks about it.

I am very pleased that Ways of Being is now available in Spanish, courtesy of Galaxia Gutenberg, joining translations in German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and other languages. I did a small interview with El Mundo, on AI and more-than-human relations, which I am publishing in English below.

1. Repsol, a Spanish company, features prominently at the beginning of your book as it uses Artificial Intelligence to search for oil in Greece, leading to the destruction of the ecosystem. When something as old and harmful as fossil fuels joins forces with something as new and seemingly positive as Artificial Intelligence, should it alarm us that things may not be as they are portrayed?”

Artificial Intelligence, as it currently actually exists, is a business technology developed by corporations for capitalist ends, so we shouldn’t really be surprised when it is put to use in ways which continue to degrade the biosphere and corrode human relations. Of course, too, the hype is about making the world better, but hasn’t it always been? As the writer Joanna Maciejewska recently put it, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” We could say the same about AI and the environment: what do we actually want this tool to do, and who should be imagining it and working with it to make that so?

2. Is the technological determinism that claims technology is unstoppable a fait accompli strategy that leads us to disaster?

Technology in itself is not the problem; any technological problem, at sufficient scale, is a political problem. It matters who builds and deploys technology, and historically this power has been concentrated in the hands of corporate elites and governments who don’t always act in the best interests of people and the planet. This isn’t inevitable: most of us have access to skills and resources to shift this power towards mutual flourishing, but it’s not easy; political change never is. But the more of us who can imagine a world in which technology is a tool for emancipation and equality, rather than control, the more we can determine the future of that world together.

3. You write: “True AI is already here: it’s corporations.” It is fascinating to expand the concept in this way. Is AI any golem that has escaped its creator’s control?

I don’t think AI has escaped its creator’s control; it’s doing exactly what its creators want it to do, which is make money. AI is not some strange, otherworldly force from nowhere, it’s part of our existing systems of culture, law, and society, and it emerges from them. I talk about corporations as AI because I want to emphasise that we already live within complex, opaque systems which we have little control over – financial markets, state governments, the global climate – but we also have cultural tools to address them, from art to political activism. Changing the status quo involves both concrete steps to reduce inequalities of power and knowledge, as well as re-imagining what we think technology and governance are for.

4. When Silicon Valley tells us we should fear AI, do you think AI is also going to replace even them? Isn’t it also a way of diverting attention by pointing to Skynet so we don’t think about the gigantic power Silicon Valley is accumulating?

“Silicon Valley”, meaning the quite small number of powerful people who control the major technology companies, and have always controlled such powerful entities, including governments, like to pretend that they don’t have power, that they too are at the mercy of the systems that in fact we all create together. This pretense disempowers the rest of us too, by making us think that we too lack the power to make change in the world. AI does promise, or at least make possible, a radical shift in power, but it is unlikely to do so in a way that benefits all of us when it’s in the hands of a few corporations. We should always be critical of proclamations from the powerful that X – whether that’s AI, corporate taxes, or environmental protections – is dangerous to all of us, when in reality what is threatened is their own power. Nobody ever gave that up willingly, and they will do anything to continue their own dominance, including inventing fantasies of Skynet.

5. Your main hypothesis is that someone has deceived us into thinking that there is only one kind of intelligence when there are many. What mental journey led you to that reflection?

All my ideas come out of the world, from encounters with the Earth and the many different beings that live on and in it. In the last few years, as I’ve delved deeper into ecological thinking and forging stronger relationships with the more-than-human world – meaning us and everyone else who lives here – this has radically shifted my thinking about technology. One aspect of this is the realisation that what we call ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is really only one kind of intelligence. Just as birds, dogs, trees, monkeys and oceans all manifest their own kind of intelligence based on their context, experience, and embodiment, an intelligence no ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ than our own, but evolved for its particular circumstance, so AI is currently evolving it’s own capitalist, machine-like intelligence because of the context in which it is being raised. It’s helpful for me to think of it this way because it grounds some of the wilder thinking about AI in a broader ecological context, and also helps me to re-imagine how it could be otherwise.

6. What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, fungi, or forests?

This is the logical next step, and of course it applies to more than AI. What would all of our technologies look like if they were firstly more concerned about bringing us closer to the world than separating us from it, and secondly what can we learn from non-humans about how to do this? Octopuses, for example, have minds which are physically spread throughout their whole bodies, federated brains with neurons in their arms, which allow for a radically different kind of thinking: more responsive, perhaps more creative, and more in tune with their fluid environment. Forests are superorganisms consisting of many beings working together, intimately entangled, and more often co-operating, rather than competing, for resources. We have become programmed – by science, technology, and modernity – to think of minds as little boxes trapped inside our own heads, or inside machines, that we miss out on the reality of intelligence as something embodied, enacted, and networked in an infinite number of possible configurations.

7. What is the ecology of technology?

Over the twentieth century, almost all scientific and philosophical disciplines discovered ecology, which is the simple idea that everything is interrelated, that it is impossible to study any phenomenon in isolation, because it impacts, and is impacted by, everything around it. This applies to physics as much as biology, in the discovery of the quantum world, and to economics as much as sociology. Technology has an ecology as well: the cultures it is a product of, the rules which govern it, the effects it has on our minds, our bodies, and the planet. We tend to think of technology as lots of little boxes, which do specific things, when really it is a network of relationships, and these relationships matter more than what any particular little box does.

8. In New Dark Age, you explained that we live in a world so technologically complex that we are incapable of understanding it. What possibilities of action does a human being, walking blindly, have then?

When I say that we are incapable of understanding the complexity of contemporary technologies, I don’t mean that we are blind. The kind of understanding that we like to think we have, the ability to break something down into its component parts, master it, and control it for our own ends, simply does not apply to complex systems like a worldwide computer network, or a financial market, or the global climate. Rather, these are systems which we live inside, which we shape and which shape us in turn. This realisation shifts the question from one of understanding – a matter of power, control, and dominance – to one of ethics. How to live justly within such systems, in good relationship with everyone else, human and non-human, for the mutual benefit of all? The implications of such a question are not something we are blind to at all.

9. If one day we contact a highly advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, would it be more like an octopus or Elon Musk?

Scientists have recently begun working with, and coming to recognise, the organisms which live deep within the earth’s crust; which exist by digesting exotic minerals and excreting other ones, which might form some of the foundations of all life. In recent decades we’ve met creatures who live in total darkness at the bottom of the ocean, huddled around hot vents, breathing only methane. Others flourish atop dry mountains, or in the iron-rich rivers of mine tailings. I cannot even begin to imagine what else might be out there, but if if we meet it, it is likely to have got there by working with, rather than against, its own environment and community.

10. “The world is not like a computer. Computers are like the world.” Is another kind of computing possible?

Almost all the computers in the world are one kind of computer: the automated, binary machine invented by Alan Turing in the 1940s. Yet infinite other kinds of computer are possible, from hydrological computers which use the flow of water, rather than electrons, to calculate the freeze rate of concrete or the likelihood of a recession, to quantum computers operating at vastly accelerated speeds, to Gaia, a conception of the world as a vast, cybernetic system constantly regulating itself towards flourishing. And all these are just ways of thinking about thinking, abstractions from the actual business of living together on the Earth, useful some of the time, less so at others. Everything is not only possible, it is happening all the time.

Last year I was asked to contribute to the Serpentine Galleries’ Infinite Ecologies Marathon, a prelude to their Inifinite Ecologies programme, with something that expressed what I thought was missing from most discussion and practice of what we might call ecological art.

Over the last few years, I’ve been concerned with what might broadly be called a new crisis of representation when it comes to ecological work. This awareness stems from my own practice as well as wider concerns.

One place in which it is expressed is in Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement, a text I return to often. In it, Ghosh argues that capital-L Literature is unfit for engaging with climate-scale issues. The global ecological crisis is simply too vast in scale and complexity to be captured adequately by human-scale fiction, and thus cannot be meaningfully acted upon it. (I could write a lot more about this: Ghosh is concerned mostly with the bourgeois novel, rather than, say, speculative fiction; I would argue that in his own fiction he disproves his own thesis through his use of multiple narrators, including non-human ones; and the book is about much more than this, but anyway.)

My own journey to this crisis point comes through the technological art which was my own main preoccupation for more than a decade, centred on issues arising from networked systems, the materiality of contemporary technology, and its political effects. I found, in particular, that most art work about, say, surveillance (and now AI) which described itself as critical (including my own) mostly just reproduced the structures and mechanisms of the things it was critiquing, and thus normalised it. This is as true of the Snowden leaks as of critical tech art. Art which just does more surveillance, however transparently, or just maps out the existing structures of technological control (Look! A datacentre! Behold! A dataset!) is more likely to dazzle, frighten, and ultimately turn off an audience than to spur them to action; to make a change.

We can see parallels to this in what we might call the empathy crisis in media and humanitarian work: we know that just showing pictures of terrible things happening far away doesn’t do anything (at best) or actively turns viewers away (at worst) – but we keep doing it, for lack of better ideas (and lack of actual power and agency).

One result of this, in turning to ecological work, was to insist on what I call “works that work”, or “works that do work”: pieces which function both as artwork and as engines of ecological intervention, however minor. Hence: windmills, solar panels, self-built architecture. Not always achieved, not always achievable, but necessary. There’s no point making work about climate change. You have to do the work. This is a whole book; it might be in time.

As I couldn’t be present for the Serpentine event, I sent a short film in my stead. And for this, I focussed on the other component that I feel is central to ecological work – to art, to life – the part I feel less confident speaking about, the more personal, the often unspoken. And yet: without it, we cannot conceive of being ecological at all. And so: to the mountain.

Following my experiments with the ChatGPT-assisted AI Chair 1.0, I’ve been continuing experiments with a range of other LLMs. The below image is Chair 1.1, designed with the assistance of Mistral AI.

Before embarking on this chair, I did some experimenting with local LLMs. These are essentially small “large” language models that you download and run on your own computer. What you gain is transparency, control over resources, privacy etc etc; what you lose, to a quite significant degree, is power and complexity.

I used llamafile from Mozilla, a programme which lets you download small LLMs (filesizes are around 1GB) and tried out two very lightweight models, at the absolute maximum of what I can run on my wheezy secondhand laptop. With very little RAM and no GPU, they can only output a few tokens (~words) a minute, so the process was quite painful. Furthermore, neither were capable of designing a chair.

The above are my attempts to sketch out designs for scrap wood chairs based on the instructions from two locally-running LLMs: LLAVA 1.5 and Phi-2 (click those links for full transcripts of our conversations). While I tried to makes sense of what I was given, the above sketches are very creative interpretations of instructions which mostly did not make sense. Confusion over materials, inconsistent referents, and severe difficulties with measurements, resulted in descriptions which sounded like they should make a chair, but really didn’t.

I don’t know how much of this I can blame on the models, or the fact that they were running on a seriously underpowered machine. But I decided if I was going to use up my remaining stock of scrap wood, I would work with a slightly more helpful assistant, so I turned to the ChatGPT competitor, Mistral.

I have a pile of scrap wood and I would like to make a chair. I have a saw, a drill, screws, and wood glue. Please give me step by step instructions for making a chair from the following materials, using as little wood as possible. 3 pine panels: – 18, 180, 490 mm – 18, 255, 490 mm – 18, 255, 490mm 1 plywood sheet: – 4, 480, 455 mm 1 L-shaped laminated chipboard sheet: – 15, 280, 410 mm (missing 130, 135 mm cutout) 3 planks – 20, 95, 1300 mm – 20, 95, 1200 mm – 20, 95, 1200 mm 1 wood beam – 50, 50, 895 mm

Sure, I’d be happy to help you create a simple chair using the materials you have. Please note that the design will be basic due to the limited materials and tools. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
Materials:
• Pine panels: A (18, 180, 490 mm), B (18, 255, 490 mm), C (18, 255, 490 mm)
• Plywood sheet: D (4, 480, 455 mm)
• L-shaped laminated chipboard sheet: E (15, 280, 410 mm)
• Planks: F (20, 95, 1300 mm), G (20, 95, 1200 mm), H (20, 95, 1200 mm)
• Wood beam: I (50, 50, 895 mm)
Tools:
• Saw
• Drill
• Screws
• Wood glue
Steps:
1. Backrest and Seat:
– Use pine panel A (18, 180, 490 mm) as the backrest.
– Use the plywood sheet D (4, 480, 455 mm) as the seat.
2. Back Legs:
– Cut plank F (20, 95, 1300 mm) into two equal pieces (20, 95, 650 mm) for the back legs.
3. Front Legs:
– Use plank G (20, 95, 1200 mm) and cut it into two equal pieces (20, 95, 600 mm) for the front legs.
4. Armrests:
– Use plank H (20, 95, 1200 mm) for the armrests. Cut it into two pieces, one of 20, 95, 500 mm and the other of 20, 95, 700 mm. The longer piece will be the back armrest, and the shorter one will be the front armrest.
5. Support Beam:
– Use the wood beam I (50, 50, 895 mm) as a support beam between the front legs.
6. Assembly:
– Attach the backrest (A) to the top of the back legs.
– Attach the seat (D) to the top of the front legs and the bottom of the back legs.
– Attach the back armrest to the top of the backrest and the back legs.
– Attach the front armrest to the front legs.
– Attach the support beam (I) between the front legs for added stability.
– Use the L-shaped laminated chipboard sheet (E) as additional support. Attach it to the back of the seat and the backrest.
Remember to pre-drill all your holes to prevent the wood from splitting. Also, use wood glue in addition to screws for extra strength.
Please be aware that this design is quite basic and may not be as comfortable or as sturdy as a professionally made chair. Always ensure your safety when using tools and handling materials.
Good luck with your project!

This seemed like a pretty do-able set of instructions, although I had doubts about some of the aspects, so I went ahead and built it. There was a bit more back-and-forth about how to attach the seat (the above makes no sense), the seat’s orientation, and various connections. Read the full transcript here. Mistral is very apologetic, but I’d also been told it was more technically accurate than ChatGPT and less likely to make stuff up, so let’s go.

There were two major changes to Mistral’s first design, one of which I prompted directly, and the other I did without discussing it. The first is that it was very obvious that the seat as described had no way of attaching to the legs, and there was no way of adapting the design as given without using more wood. Challenged on this, Mistral advised adding cleats to the back legs to support the chair. I interpreted this in the way you see in the chair: adding additional blocks to the legs to widen them and provide a secure base for the seat. I did this to the front legs too, which Mistral didn’t ask for, but was very obviously necessary (and still insufficient; see below). As an aside, this produced a detail which I absolutely love, where the rear of the seat is very neatly sandwiched between the rear leg cleats and the backrest.

Secondly, Mistral suggested armrests, but it was very unclear where these went or how they were attached. As the original instructions included bracing between the front legs, but left the front-back axis supported only by the 4mm ply seat (again: no), I decided to use these pieces as semi-armrests, semi-braces, as you see in the final design. I like this: a design element I would not have come up with without having to solve a structural problem posed by, and constrained by, my collaborator’s instructions.

Mistral advised me to use the incredibly thin plywood sheet as a seat again, just as ChatGPT did. However, in this case it over-reached. It said the seat should “overhang the front legs slightly”, which when combined with the other measurements it provided, resulted in the above. This cracked as soon as I sat on it. To prevent this crack getting a lot worse, I had to add an additional beam support underneath the seat – although this actually worked really well, both aesthetically as it connected the armrests nicely, and structurally to stabilise the chair.

(A reminder when looking at these photos: I am building these chairs quickly, with very poor tools, out of materials which have been sitting in the rain and sun for months/years. Do not judge my joinery.)

Here’s the other major problem with the design as given:

I am 6’0 (182cm) tall, but even my feet don’t touch the ground. Now, the ChatGPT chair was weirdly large, but kind of comfortingly so, like an outsized child’s chair. Mistral went even bigger, specifying legs which are 60cm long. This is too long.

Of course, I could see this coming, and in a true collaboration I would have simply adjusted the height, and I nearly did this. But since I am still in the prototyping phase, I decided to let it stand, as it makes for a good point of comparison with other collaborators, for now. As I said, Mistral was supposed to be more technically precise, and concise, than ChatGPT, but from this experience it seems slightly less capable with materials and human dimensions. The various changes prompted or needed – adding cleats, shortening the legs – also made for much less efficient use of materials than the first pass.

On the other hand, apart from the material efficiency issue (which does matter), those adaptations are my job: Mistral made a way more interesting chair. The inclusion of armrests-turned-braces and the low backrest led to something that’s much closer to a ‘designer’ chair than ChatGPT’s oversized doll’s chair, even in this very rough prototype version.

Finally, for comparison, here’s where we are now: from left to right, the FRÖSVI folding chair by IKEA, the AI Chair 1.0 by ChatGPT and me, and the AI (High?) Chair 1.1 by Mistral and me:

Am I annoyed that I started making chairs, rather than simpler, elongated stools, so that I could have made a BENCHMARKING joke? Yes I am. But if any other AI developers want to give me access to their paid / geo-locked products (Anthropic, I’m looking at you there), I’d be happy to discuss BENCHMARKING your product too.

(Go read the history of benchmarks now. It has nothing to do with furniture, but it’s very nice.)

I wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian on Amazon’s “cashier-free” grocery stores, AI, outsourcing and military technology. You can read it at the Guardian’s website, but the bit I’d like to focus on is this:

The national minimum wage in the UK is £11.44. A small grocery store like the Amazon Fresh shops might have half a dozen staff. Assuming all of them were on full wage (unlikely) and all of them were on the lowest wage (ie not managers), the average individual salary would be about £20k and the annual wage bill would be about £130k. When this work is outsourced via video cameras, it is passed to data labellers. Amazon’s remote data labellers might be paid one or two pounds an hour, if they are lucky. If you can replace half a dozen UK staff with half a dozen data labellers in India, Kenya or the Philippines, then the difference in the annual staff bill alone could be almost £100,000 a year.

Jeff Bezos is the second-wealthiest person in the world, worth about $205bn (£163bn). That money doesn’t come out of nowhere. It doesn’t drop out of a pier-end slot machine called, “I learned to code at Princeton and that’s why I’m better than you”. It is the result of deliberately hiding actual work – designing, making, sorting, packing, cooking, farming, delivering – behind little icons on your smartphone screen, in order to devalue it. It is the systematic use of the fake robot trick to lower the value of labour, until people are reportedly sleeping in tents at the factory gates, then banking the difference.

The size of Bezos’s rocket is very precisely determined by the difference in costs between paying a worker in Britain and a worker in India – including all the historically determined racist and colonialist inequality that calculation involves. But make no mistake – Bezos and his ilk will pay a robot even less, as soon as that’s possible. The only lesson of Amazon Fresh is that we are not – quite – there yet.

The thing that I’m doing here – looking at the precise cost saving of outsourcing labour through technology, and pointing out that this is actually a form of wage theft which accumulates to the capital of the company doing it – was directly inspired by one of the most extraordinary books I’ve read in some time.

That book is Sven Lindqvist’s Dig Where You Stand. I expect I’ll be writing a lot about it in my next book, but – not least because I’m really interested in discussing it with anyone else who’s read it – some notes…

I’ve been a huge admirer of Lindqvist for some time. Saharan Journey, Exterminate All the Brutes (which you might know from its HBO series adaptation by Raoul Peck, which I also highly recommend), and A History of Bombing are all unique texts, blending visceral, passionate reportage with high literary technique. I quote on a regular basis his line from Exterminate… which for me encapsulates the problem of knowledge and action in an era of over-whelming information: “You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.”

Dig Where You Stand was published in Swedish in 1978, and started a whole movement in Scandinavia and elsewhere. I’ve been telling people that it’s simultaneously the most boring and the most fascinating book I’ve ever read. The first part is because it’s largely a book about the Swedish concrete industry: its history, its structures, its employees and management, its role in society. But it is very much more than that. It’s a practical handbook for workers in any industry to excavate and relate the history of their own labour, and thus to better frame their present working conditions and industrial relations. And it’s much more than that too: by meticulously researching the history of worker’s lives, even as they are scarcely recorded in the official archives, Lindqvist shows how power, over time, appropriates the value of labour, and makes this – yes – concrete.

One chapter, for example, details the official holiday allowances of workers in a factory in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, as well as the unpaid seasonal layoffs which preceded this period. Then he shares excerpts from the diaries of the factory’s owner: their yacht trips, trips abroad, long weekends at their country house. Each moment of the owner’s leisure revealed as time stolen, directly, from the lives of his employees, who can neither afford, not have time for, such pleasures. Another chapter performs a similar analysis on worker’s housing, another on healthcare, and so on. A chapter on asbestos is particularly devastating: Lindqvist shows how deliberate cost-saving measures by management in the first half of the twentieth century manifest as both cancers in the lungs of workers later in life, and as actual capital in the accounts of the company.

“Thus history lives on in living people’s bodies. It lurks there and finally it kills. When the dead body is opened up, history can be found in the shape of silvery fibres – the last remnants of the air people breathed in the factories and workers’ homes of the 1910s and 20s.” [p. 115]

“For each year that Skånska Cement managed to avoid installing an electrostatic filter, the company could save some money at the expense of the workers and and the local population. This money has not disappeared. It is still there and today forms part of the capital of Industri AB Euroc.” [p. 122]

Lindqvist didn’t invent dialectical materialism. What he does in Dig… is critically twofold: he puts it to work, and he shows you how to do it. The book is a handbook, and includes boxed texts in every chapter showing you how to go and find this information yourself, where to find it – and how to ask questions of it. The result is more than information; it is agency.

Finally, Lindqvist points to a couple of examples of where workers have become involved in their work politically and culturally. He insists on the value of workers knowledge (in a chapter which compares the official Swedish dictionary with worker’s terms for their own tools, he writes: “you have knowledge that science has not” [p. 207]). And he writes particularly movingly of the work of retired engineers Tony Cundick, Ivan Fear, and Ron Plaster, who saved and restored the five huge steam engines at the Kew Bridge Pumping station:

“To me the steam engine is a time machine,” says Ron Plaster. “When I work on one of them, I feel it’s a way to enter history, knock off the rust, take it to pieces, clean it, polish it, oil it and start again. You can sense the odor of history, you hear it hissing and puffing when the steam is admitted. You can feel history tremble under the pressure, see it start slowly and begin to move, you see how history works — that’s what’s so fantastic.” [p. 240]

“To reconstruct an old text — that’s research” writes Lindqvist. ” To restore old murals in a church — that’s culture. But to get one of the largest and oldest steam engines of the world to move again, after having been in the scrap-yard for thirty years — what is that?” [p. 241]

One of the most interesting things about Lindqvist’s book is its legacy. In Scandinavia, it gave shape (and a name) to the emerging Dig Where You Stand movement, which saw tens of thousands of ordinary people (who Lindqvist termed “barefoot researchers”) join study groups and excavate their own histories and social conditions. In Germany, it helped inspire the widespread History Movement which advocated active popular engagement with the country’s recent past. Among many other things, the History Movement led to the literal digging up, by amateur archaeologists, of the rubble-strewn former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin: an action which in turn led to the preservation of the site, which is now the Topography of Terror museum.

Although it wasn’t published in English until 2023, unofficial translations circulated in Britain from the 1970s, including as part of the curriculum of the History Workshop, Raphael Samuel’s seminars at Ruskin College which also led to a broad history-from-below movement. I’m currently reading Workshop of the World, Verso’s recent edition of Samuel’s essays, which is leading me to all sorts of interesting places, like the Pleb’s League, a worker’s self-education collective founded in the mining communities of South Wales. In the 1920s the League collectively published a series of textbooks on subjects such as psychology, finance, and imperialism. I’m looking forward to going to the Marx Memorial Library to read them.

TL/DR: I asked ChatGPT to design a chair based on a pile of scrap wood, and then I built the chair.

A while ago I wrote about how I wanted an AI for carpentry. Specifically, I didn’t want something which replaced me, or the interesting bits of work, but something more like a smart carpenter’s mate, to do some of the sums and make interesting suggestions, and leave me to do the fiddling and the sanding. A collaborator, not a god.

Here is the wood that was knocking around on my balcony, left over from a few things:

And here is the prompt I gave OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4:

I have a pile of scrap wood and I would like to make a chair. I have a saw, a drill, screws, and wood glue.

Please give me step by step instructions for making a chair from the following materials, using as little wood as possible.

4 pine panels:

• 18, 180, 490 mm
• 18, 255, 490 mm
• 18, 255, 490 mm
• 18, 255, 490 mm

1 plywood sheet:

• 4, 480, 850 mm

1 L-shaped laminated chipboard sheet:

• 15, 280, 410 mm missing 130, 135 mm cutout

1 20mm diameter dowel, 1900 mm long

1 pine or fir plank

• 20, 95, 1300 mm

5 wood beams

• 50, 50, 890 mm
• 50, 50, 900 mm
• 50, 50, 980 mm
• 50, 50, 980 mm
• 50, 50, 1030 mm

There was a bit more to it than that: I had some issues formatting the prompt in a way that didn’t crash the chat client, and we also went back and forth on a backrest. I also tried to push for a more interesting design, in the way I described in the original post, but this resulted in something I could not make (materially and physically) – and wasn’t very interesting either. You can read the whole transcript here.

So, this is what we settled on:

Materials Needed:

• Plywood Sheet: For the seat.
• Pine Panels: For the backrest.
• Wood Beams: For legs and support structure.
• Dowel: For additional bracing.
• Tools: Saw, drill, screws, and wood glue.

Cutting Plan:

1. Seat: Use the plywood sheet to cut a rectangular seat, 480 mm x 400 mm.
2. Backrest: Select one pine panel (255 mm x 490 mm) and trim if necessary to match the width of the seat for aesthetic continuity.
3. Legs/Support Structure:
   • Front Legs: Cut two pieces from the beams to the desired seat height (about 450 mm).
   • Rear Legs/Backrest Support: Use the longer beams (980 mm or 1030 mm) and cut them so they can serve both as rear legs and extend upward to support the backrest. The total length should support a standard seat height plus the backrest height, roughly 900-1000 mm depending on your desired backrest angle and height.
4. Seat Supports: Use leftover wood or the pine/fir plank to create support planks that run underneath the seat for added stability. Cut these to match the width of the seat (400 mm).

Assembly:

1. Prepare the Seat: Attach the support planks to the underside of the plywood seat using wood glue and screws for extra stability. Space them evenly to distribute weight.
2. Attach Legs:
   • Front Legs: Secure the front legs directly to the underside of the seat at its corners with screws and wood glue.
   • Rear Legs/Backrest Support: Align the rear legs so they support the seat and extend up to support the backrest. Attach them to the underside of the seat and the lower end of the backrest.
3. Install the Backrest: Attach the backrest to the extended rear legs using screws and glue. Ensure it’s firmly in place and offers comfortable support.
4. Bracing with Dowel: For additional lateral stability, use the dowel to create cross-braces between the legs. Cut the dowel into pieces that fit between the legs under the seat and halfway up the rear legs/backrest supports.

Finishing Touches:

• Sand the chair thoroughly to smooth out any rough edges and corners.
• Apply a finish of your choice to protect the wood and enhance its appearance.

This approach makes efficient use of your materials while providing a sturdy, comfortable seat with a backrest. The extended rear legs contribute to a streamlined, elegant design, and the under-seat supports ensure durability and weight distribution.

Based on this description, I worked up a rough plan that made sense. I tried to be as literal as possible. I suspected that the dowel braces between the legs would be necessary, and they very much were:

The chair did not take very long to build – even on a narrow balcony, in the dark – and I didn’t try too hard to make it nice. My saw is not very good; I sanded things down a bit; I glued where necessary. I tried to interpret the instructions as literally as possible. I decided where the screws and glue should go (twelve screws). You can sit in the chair.

My first impression of the chair was that this is what you get when you ask someone who has read a lot about chairs, but has never sat in one, to design a chair, which is exactly what it is. To be fair, it did a pretty good job.

My main concern building it was that the plywood seat was much too thin. It still feels very thin when you sit in it: it creaks and gives. But it holds – so far – and it’s perhaps more comfortable than a thicker, more rigid seat would have been.

It is what I wanted in that regard: minimalist – in the sense of using the absolute minimum of material – and it pushes at the boundaries of what I would have done myself.

My go-to example of what I mean here is the Optometrist Algorithm, which I wrote about in New Dark Age. The Optometrist Algorithm was designed, by Google, to improve nuclear fusion experiments. It’s an algorithm which works alongside human researchers, as a collaborator, serving to push their exploration of a problem space just a little bit further, or in novel directions, than they would do alone.

I would not have designed this seat: I would have used another piece of thicker wood. And this would probably have been less efficient. This is all the wood I had left at the end (from the pieces which ChatGPT selected):

The one change I would make would be to cut that remaining bit of ply down and use it to laminate the seat, doubling its thickness. Maybe.

The chair also felt too big. Here’s a size comparison with an IKEA folding chair:

That’s still not terribly clear, but it’s much taller, and deeper, than most chairs I have (I doubted the dimensions so much I clarified, in the chat, which way round the seat should be). But, again, I’m not sure I disagree. I’m 6’0, and it feels the right size – it makes me feel like a lot of chairs are too small for me. Plus, again: efficiency. It used all the wood. It does look very big though. It looks a bit weird. A slightly uncanny chair.

I’m not including here the images that ChatGPT made to accompany the instructions; you can see them in the transcript, but they’re not very helpful, and don’t match the descriptions in a useful, technical way. They are still the same sort of thing though: generic images of chairs, rather than generic descriptions of chairs.

I’m still a bit disappointed that other prompts which asked the programme to go a bit crazier with its design didn’t pan out. Perhaps a chair isn’t the best thing for playing with here: humanity has converged on pretty much the best minimal chair design possible without AI’s help, it’s hard to improve on that. But it’s nice that after years of trying to peer inside the machine, I get to explore in more practical ways what comes out of it.

It should be noted that this chair is built on the stolen labour of everyone who’s ever put something on the internet (including many who passed centuries before the internet was invented). The energy use is not good. I didn’t make this with ChatGPT: I made it with a partial history of all previous chairs, and I held myself back from making it “better”. But it’s something to think with.

I learned to make chairs from Enzo Mari, Donald Judd, my grandpa, YouTube. What the machine is good at is numbers, efficiency, tolerances (maybe). What can we do with that which is more interesting than putting people out of work? Which is more, genuinely, generative? Which is more interesting than more computers? Which, ultimately, builds agency rather than contributing to our general disempowerment us? That, at least, is what I mean by collaboration. We learn together.

Edit 19/3/24: As a couple of people have pointed out, this feels like the opposite of generative AI. The machine can only use the tools and materials I have to hand: it’s restrictive, yet paradoxically more productive as a result. Something to think about.

An installation at Kunthaus Zurich on the theme of media history, education, and the technology of attention.

Some time ago, I was commissioned to write an essay about children’s media and the capture of attention by the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University. You can read that essay in full, but here’s an excerpt, which concerns the research done by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in the 1960s, which led into the development of Sesame Street:

One of the workshop’s key innovations was a device Palmer termed “the distractor”. Initially on visits to “poor children in day-care centres” and later in specially designed observation laboratories, Palmer and his colleagues would set up a television showing Sesame Street episodes, and next to it they would set up a slide projector, which would show a new colour image every seven and a half seconds. “We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine,” said Palmer. “We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea.” Observers would sit at the side of the room and watch a group of children as the episodes played, noting what held their attention and what didn’t every six and a half seconds for up to an hour at a time.

Individual characters, short skits, and even whole episodes lived or died by the distractor. By the time they got to broadcast, the show’s attention rating averaged around 85 to 90 percent, and some reached 100 percent, as the crew learned to trust the distractor and absorbed its lessons. For Palmer, the distractor enabled the team to hone Sesame Street into a finely tuned educational instrument: “After the third or fourth season, I’d say it was rare that we ever had a segment below eighty five percent. We would almost never see something in the fifty to sixty percent range, and if we did, we’d fix it. You know Darwin’s terms about the survival of the fittest? We had a mechanism to identify the fittest and decide what should survive.”

I’ve been fascinated by the Distractor ever since I first read about it. It seemed to embody so many things I was fascinated by, from visual attention, to the use of technology to capture and hold attention, to the origins of children’s screen-based media and what’s happened to it, and even randomness.

I find the device particularly mesmerising because I don’t know how I feel about it. The research performed by CTW in the 1960s and 70s laid the groundwork for screen-based educational programming worldwide, and Sesame Street made a positive difference to the lives of millions of children, especially for many from disadvantaged backgrounds. At the same time, it marks a moment in which technological solutions were chosen over social ones, and education was outsourced to screens and corporations. Today, techniques developed by educationalists in the 1960s are deployed in automated systems, such as mobile apps and social media, and make possible the global ‘attention economy’, under which human attention is treated as a resource to be captured and exploited.

This fascination has caused me to spend a not inconsiderable amount of time tracking down references, descriptions, and actual data on the Distractor, its use and results, from the Children’s Television Workshop archives in the Mass Media & Culture collection at the University of Maryland (thanks to Michael Henry, Laura Schnitker, and James Baxter at UoM for their invaluable and generous assistance). Initially, I was just interested in reconstructing the contents of the slideshow, but when I was offered a commission by Kunsthaus Zurich last year to develop a new work for their digital programme, I decided to restage the mechanism in its entirety.

The above is the only photographic image I’ve found of the Distractor in operation, and I’m not sure it’s representative of most set-ups, although it’s certainly evocative, with the white researchers staring down at a black child, fingers poised on their electronic devices, while Kermit appears on one screen, and some kind of modernist architecture pops up on the other. The CTW archives contain a number of reports on the Distractor, including one entitled “The Sesame Street Distractor Method for Measuring Visual Attention”, published by Leona Schauble of Sesame Street Research in July 1976, and containing the following diagram:

For the Kunsthaus Zurich installation – which opened in May and is on view until Spring 2024 – I used this layout, sourcing period furniture and television equipment from Swiss second-hand sites (the installation does include a contemporary Parker Jotter – although only an expert would spot the differences between it and the model first introduced in 1954). The television shows the first ever broadcast episode of Sesame Street, from 1969, while the carousel slideshow, set to advance every seven seconds, contains ninety or so randomly-selected images from collections of vintage slides purchased on ebay and elsewhere.

Some of the most fascinating artefacts in the CTW archives were the original “Distractographs”: hand-drawn analyses of the results of the Distractor sessions, where researchers would plot the childrens’ attention over time, as they watched episodes of Sesame Street and other shows, while the Distractor attempted to do its work. For the installation, I reproduced half a dozen of these by hand to hang on the walls of the gallery:

(The wall colours, by the way, were chosen based on Pantone’s Sesame Street colour range.)

Finally, to accompany the installation, an online work continues the work of the Distractor into the present day. This work can be found at distractor.jamesbridle.com – visiting this page will present you with a random work from the Kunsthaus’ collection, together with information about its title, creator, and provenance. You can set this webpage to be the default new window or tab page in your browser settings, in order to constantly distract yourself with art (it’s quite nice, I promise).

Huge thanks to curator Mirjam Varadinis and to everyone at the Kunsthaus for their support in making this work happen. Particular thanks to Tony Kranz for his excellent and patient technical assistance throughout.

More information about the programme is available at digilab.kunsthaus.ch.

This is a lecture given at the Festivaletteratura, Mantova, Italy, in September 2013, about legal personhood, non-indigenous species, terraforming, colonialism, floods, and more-than-human relations. It was given without notes and the transcript below has only been loosely edited for clarity, so please forgive mis-speakings, typos, confusions, and lack of references.

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Hello. Thank you for that introduction, thank you very much for having me; it’s a real pleasure to be here. I’m here representing my most recent book which is called Ways of Being in English and Modi di Essere in Italian and it’s a book about realizing that we are surrounded by all forms of intelligence that manifest not just in humans but in animals, plants, microorganisms of all kinds; perhaps also in in natural systems, in ecologies, in the very fabric of the world around us. Essentially, intelligence is not something that only happens inside human heads – it’s a thing that doesn’t just happen inside heads at all – but it happens when bodies meet, when we meet the world, and it’s a process by which we can come to know the world better.

There’s a lot of stories about that in my book – I talked about some of them on Friday evening if some of you were there. I wasn’t sure what I was going to talk about this afternoon but I thought I’d tell a couple of stories – some of which are in the book some of which aren’t – and also to try and bring them together with some more recent thinking that I hope is interesting… so I’m going to do that.

This is the Whanganui river in the North Island of Aotearoa, or New Zealand. It’s a huge river, it’s about 300 kilometers long, it drains a watershed of some 7,000 square kilometers, and if you’ve heard of it at all it’s probably, as I did, because in 2017 it was granted legal personhood: the river became a person under the law.

What does this mean? It means that historically when we have tried to relate to the environment through legal structures and by extension through social and political structures we’ve treated the environment as being a series of objects; a series of objects largely on which humans act: mine; extract; in the case of the river: divert; draw water; pollute and so on and so forth and so the only way to address the damage that might be happening to the river is essentially to to find the people who are doing it and find ways of changing them and punishing them because the river itself is just a thing: it doesn’t have any legal standing.

There’s this growing movement in in ecological law around the world to give non-human beings of all kinds – animals, plants, whole ecosystems like the river – their own kind of legal standing so that instead of saying it’s our responsibility to protect the river we say the river has its own rights. The river has its own right to life, to flowing, to be clean, to be healthy, to support all the communities, human and non-human, which live alongside it. And this attempt to give some kind of real meaningful recognition to non-humans plays out in different ways depending on the legal systems, the local traditions. There’s a big movement in the US for example to give zoo animals legal personhood and to say they have the right not to be imprisoned. We could go further and say animals have the right not to be kept on farms, not to be killed for food, these kind of questions. Legal personhood would reshape our relationship to non-humans in really important ways.

I often think that those are also kind of insufficient because we know that the law always lags behind what we need from our relations. It’s taken us thousands of years to get to where we are now which barely includes most humans; many, many humans are still excluded from our systems of law in various ways and the law has always been late coming to that and I don’t think legal personhood is some magic way that will solve that problem. But I think it’s interesting and it’s particularly interesting in the case of the Whanganui river because this wasn’t just a case of an existing legal system expanding to sort of grudgingly include the river but it was a result of centuries of protest by the Maori peoples who lived alongside the river and who have always considered the river to be a person. So under the Maori cosmology the river was also – has always been – a being that they have lived alongside and have had reciprocal relations with and have had a responsibility towards, and after a couple of hundred years of campaigning what happened was some of those Maori principles became incorporated into the colonial law of New Zealand to shift the kind of ways in which the river was thought about.

So while again imperfect in all kinds of ways, one of the main things is that the river now has representation within human communities, both in the law but also in the form of a couple of Maori Elders who speak for the river to bring another perspective on what is good for the river and how we could live with it better. There’s a beautiful line in some writing that I was reading about the river from one of the activists involved in the campaign to give the river personhood, where they said that what’s happening when you make this change in law but you also set up the culture that makes that law possible through the appointment of these kind of Guardians, the people who might speak for the river, is that you move from a position of saying “what do we want for the river?” to a position of “what does “the river want and how do we get there together?”

So this change that gives the river this idea of personhood is a shift in thinking to a position where we acknowledge that the river has its own needs and desires and that those matter – and of course that they matter to us as well; that by being in this kind of reciprocal arrangement we might actually change our relationship to the Earth in in far more broad ways.

A smaller example of something similar is happening on the River Aller in Somerset in England, where I come from, where a stretch of the river several miles long has been – one of the terms for this is rewilding – essentially the people who manage the area have said that they’re not going to decide what happens to the river anymore, they’re not going to bridge it, they’re not going to embank it, they’re not going to stop it flowing in any particular way; in fact they’ve cut channels into the side so that it changes its flow or it starts to change its flow and then they are going to let it do whatever it wants: they’re going to let the river flow wherever it wants.

This river for probably thousands of years has been shaped by human activity. People have moved it because they want to grow crops or grow trees, they’ve poisoned it in all kinds of ways, but this decision has been made to say we’re going to let we’re going to leave it alone and find out what the river wants. And even though this has only been going on for for five years or so the results are also already kind of amazing: the river has started to create new wetlands, it has started to stay longer in the soil so it doesn’t dry out in summer, so you have much more verdant fields, more things growing, it floods a little but less and in a way that is far far less destructive to the ecosystem around it and it’s home to vast amounts more life. The biodiversity increase is incredible. If you go there and walk around it, as you approach it, the sound of life gets stronger you can hear creatures buzzing and as you walk grasshoppers flow around your feet and the difference between that and the kind of agricultural land that surrounds it is huge, and the river is becoming healthier and in turn that affects the kind of human activity around it as well. Organic farming increases and other kinds of things because they have to in order to protect the river and respect its rights in this way. So changing the river is also a change in ourselves.

This is a friend of mine who I meet regularly, and who’s interesting to me. This is a lionfish – has anyone seen a lionfish before or know what they are? They’re very interesting, very beautiful, very strange creatures. I live on an island called Aegina which is near Athens in the Saronic Gulf in Greece, at the top of the Aegean coming off the Mediterranean, and I go diving and I meet these guys quite regularly – but I shouldn’t because they’re not from here, they’re very new to the place. Lionfish are indigenous to the Indian Ocean and for 10 million years that’s where they lived, that’s where they evolved, that’s where they changed, but for the last 20 or so years they’ve been spreading through the Mediterranean, and that’s the result of a few things.

Well, really, essentially, two things. They are what’s called Lessepsian migrants: Ferdinand Lesseps was the name of the French engineer who built the Suez Canal. When the Suez Canal was constructed humans basically cut through several millennia of geological separation between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean and over the last hundred years or so hundreds of different species have been making their way up through this new passage into the Mediterranean. And the other reason that they’re doing that of course is climate change. The Mediterranean is getting warmer and so it’s becoming more hospitable to all of these various species.

The lionfish were first spotted in the Mediterranean about 20 years ago in a very small population, but they’ve been spreading slowly and surely. They’ve now been found as far west as Sicily and they only actually made it up into the Aegean Sea five years ago, they were first spotted off my island three years ago, but now if you go diving you’ll see half a dozen of them on a particular dive. This human activity is completely reshaping the Mediterranean and these creatures have arrived and they are spoken of in in the terminology you’ve probably heard of: of invasive species, this terminology that implies that these creatures are alien, that they don’t belong here, that this is not the place for them and we should be doing all we can to eradicate and destroy them.

Now that’s a language that’s familiar for most of our relationships, again not just to the natural world but also to other humans. We see that there’s some kind of stable state and we we don’t like the change and we don’t like the others who are coming in. Much of the discussions in biology around non-indigenous species tries take pains not to use human terminology for these creatures and I think that’s bad, as I might say a bit more about later, but even so I have a real problem with that narrative just from the perspective that I see them and I meet them on a regular basis and I am also new to this place. They arrived on this island the same time that I did, three years ago. Who am I to tell this creature that it doesn’t belong here, not least down to the fact that I am deeply responsible for it being there.

The lionfish are in the Mediterranean and around my Island because of a history of colonialism and imperialism, through the building of the Suez Canal, that I am, particularly as a British person, deeply involved in and also because of the current human activities of climate change. There’s a line that I always come back to from the British Sri Lankan writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan who wrote of colonial relationships in Britain from the perspective of non-indigenous peoples: “we are here because you were there.” These migrants are coming here because we went elsewhere and changed the world in ways that they are responding to and that’s the same for these of these creatures. We have to work out other ways of living alongside this change that is occurring, that doesn’t repeat those same mechanisms of treating the other essentially as something unwelcome and to be destroyed.

Of course you have a local variant of that here in Mantova: the lotus flowers that are growing in the lake, which are fascinating and beautiful like the lionfish, and also of course quite recent arrivals. I heard the beautiful story last night on a boat on the lake that the arrival of the lotus flower was in part the result of a love affair; that the botanist who first introduced them to the lake did so as part of their relationship with the person who was responsible for the water quality of the lake itself – that it was an act of love and beauty to introduce these things that are still seen as beautiful but also now regarded as some kind of pest.

It’s quite extraordinary – to me at least, coming to that ecosystem fresh – the extent to which it’s an entirely artificially created space. Not only have the lotus flowers only been there for a hundred years, the fish that swim under them were introduced by German sport fishermen, apparently the Ibises that fly and wade amongst them and wade are escaped zoo animals – good for them! – so this entire landscape is as far from any historical idea of somewhere natural as we could possibly imagine. And yet we still think that we can manage it in this way, that we can control the landscape in this way, in ways that will only ultimately result in more confusions like this occurring.

And it strikes me particularly what a long, ongoing process this is because of course it’s not just the introduction of the lotuses into the lake. The lakes themselves are entirely artificial creations, created back in I think the 11th, 12th, 13th centuries for the defense of Mantova. The draining of the swamp was an act of geoengineering, of transforming the landscape that is just as transformative as present climate change in terms of the biodiversity that it destroyed, the way that it reshaped the landscape [and human livelihoods]. We’ve been doing this for some time.

It reminds me particularly of another landscape from England, again from where I’m from originally from, the east of England, an area known as the Fens. For again most of history, or the most of history in which Britain was an island which is actually not even that long, the east of England was very wet and boggy and marshy and this was this area known as the Fens, which was underwater a lot of the time much like the area around here would have been a thousand years ago. In fact these processes happen at the same time and for the same reasons: politics and defense and controlling the landscape.

So between the 1100s to about the 1600s this landscape, the Fens, which was thousands and thousands of square kilometers of marsh, of bog, of these kind of wetlands that were incredibly productive in and of themselves, areas not just of biodiversity but of huge ranges of human habitat, of different kinds of ways of living, they were were drained. The water was put into canals and rivers and lakes like it was here and those landscapes were transformed. And that was done for a couple of reasons: it was done in part for agricultural reasons, that even though the these marshes were incredibly bountiful and the people who lived in them harvested all kinds of fruits and grains from them that grew there naturally, they farmed them, they grazed animals seasonally, they used the rushes to make baskets and housing – again just like was done here – the modern monocultures of wheat agriculture and so forth were instituted instead because the land was enclosed by landlords who could make more money out of it and selling it that way.

And that is destroying the land. The land around here is becoming exhausted, the use of fertilizers and so forth is destroying the soil, the crops won’t actually go on much longer. But it was also done for political reasons: it was done because the people who lived there were rebellious and they didn’t like being ruled by the king and they frequently retaliated against the tax collectors who came in and so on and so forth. And so the pacification of the landscape, the way this landscape was destroyed, was also a pacification of the people. It was a way of bringing those people under control, turning them from free people into serfs, peasants who lived under landlords and owed all their labour to them. It was one of the earliest transformations of Capitalism, which has not been around forever but has been a deliberate process of turning people from people who lived in reciprocal relationships with the land in which they found themselves into producers of capital for the for the upper classes who took over and transformed those landscapes.

What’s particularly fundamental for me about that story – as well, again, as a British person – is that’s how we learned to do colonialism. We developed the techniques of colonialism internally within Britain: the peoples of the east of England, as well as the peoples of Scotland and Wales and most of the rest of the islands were the first people to be colonized by the British – which is not quite the same as all the people who live there – and they practiced it there not just through this transformation of landscape but also through things like collective punishment, of destroying whole villages because they would try and stop the waterworks and so on and so forth. So these changes in landscape have always been tightly tightly tied to political processes, and there is no transforming once again our relationship to landscape and our understanding of landscape and our living and our health within landscapes without political processes as well.

What we do to the Earth we do to one another. The climate catastrophe is pretty much first and foremost a kind of colonial, Imperial catastrophe that builds on what we’ve been doing to the Earth for centuries long before just fossil fuels and so on and so forth and that’s what I meant when I said that it’s vitally necessary to rethink how we think about something as particular as invasive species – or non-indigenous species I should keep calling them and try to remind myself to do so – because for a long time I was very like scientists who work on this, I was quite nervous of making this explicit connection between non-human and human migrants because it’s all too easy to dehumanize people already and if you start to say “well, you know, the lionfish or the lotus flower they belong to the same category of things” it might increase that dehumanization. But I think that’s just a symptom of having it the wrong way around: we are capable of treating the Earth in this way because we are capable of treating each other this way. Racism is the first thing that then goes on to produce speciesism which ultimately produces our sense of human superiority that allows us to treat the Earth as a kind of resource to be extracted, as a thing to be to be used for our own benefit, not to be considered a person, a thing with its own life that in turn produces among other things the climate and biodiversity crisis of the present moment. These things are all deeply, deeply connected.

This has been brought home to me in violent form; it keeps being brought home to me in violent forms in various ways. After a summer of wildfires in which my island luckily escaped fire, but was repeatedly engulfed in smoke and ash – we had days in which it hurt to breathe outside, friends have lost their houses – last week my house, my garden were under about a meter and a half of water. You might have heard of the floods that have been occurring in northern Greece, which are horrific. They weren’t as bad on our island but this was the result of the same storm that sent down a meter and a half of rain over a few days, that washed out quite large areas of the island. I don’t know if anyone here has experienced flooding and if you haven’t I really hope you don’t.

I had never experienced anything like this and it was deeply frightening, on a deep, physical, bodily level, to feel as if the Earth itself was trying to hurt us. It was hard not to personify in such a strong way when the roads and streams and the hillsides next to your house which all summer have been dry turn within minutes into rivers. The question of “what does the river want?” becomes quite powerful, becomes quite serious, because in that moment the water wants to get to the sea and it quite obviously doesn’t really care about anything that stands in its way. It felt like a very violent and direct reassertion of the willfulness, of the personhood, of the beinghood of the Earth, but not one with which I or anyone else was in very good relationship with. We were not having a good relationship in this moment.

And yet in some way, on another level, even while this was occurring – and this is the feeling that I tried to hold on to – on another level I was entirely not separate from it, or this was an emphasis on the complete inability of ourselves to separate ourselves from it. While feeling this fear, this physical, animal terror at the actions of the weather, I both felt it as a being – I managed to hold on to that feeling – this is not chance, this is a process, this is a system of things that are happening, this is an event that is part of a climatic system, that is part of a global system that includes us and our actions and the lives and livinghoods of everything else that lives there. And it’s a system of which I am fundamentally a part; that I am utterly Inseparable from, that we are all inseparable from.

We are the weather. We are the river. We are the Earth, that is part of this process that is happening. And I don’t yet know entirely what that means for us. I know that feeling and that understanding is fundamentally important. I know that continuing to ask the question of “what does the river want?” will remind us that the other beings that we share the world with have their own needs, desires, hopes, fears, and by listening to them and working with them we will in turn shift our own relationship towards them, that will in turn, in time, and not without some quite terrible things happening in the future, shift the whole system of the earth towards some kind of better place. But at the moment that system is in huge turmoil. It’s trying to shift in all of these frightening ways into a kind of new relation but we are part of that system. We are the weather, we are the water, and we are the world, and we need to shift ourselves along with it and change our place within it if we hope to make any kind of better relation in the future.

I went off to the mountain alone for a few days this week, which is a longer and more interesting story than this one. And because I didn’t want the internet with me, I picked up one of these.

It’s a Nokia 105 (4th ed). 4G, Dual SIM. Calls, SMS, Alarm, Snake. No data, no photos. Battery lasts about a month.

I bought it from a big shop in Athens where I also bought a Moleskine notebook. Both items cost 22 Euros. Something is obviously wrong about both ends of that but here we are.

I don’t know why I still find this interesting, but I fell in love with it a little. Partly because it’s so small and feels so reliable – robust, but also trustworthy. You press a button, it goes ding, NOKIA appears, you can almost feel it groping around for a signal and then tying on fast. Get SMS; send SMS; turn it off again. Unlike a smartphone, it feels like an actual connection, rather than a constant assault from the outside.

The other thing that I liked was that I felt like I could build it. I don’t mean full toaster, but I’ve used all these basic components before: some kind of board, power, some kind of display, connect to a SIM card etc. (In particular, the State of Sin robots are basically mobile phones: Arduino boards connected to a sensor (including a microphone…), a display, and a GSM shield with a Hologram IoT SIM.)

I think it’s this: the level of technology I am most comfortable with (and I mean actively happy not just oblivious to) is that which I materially understand to the point of being able to build a basic, toy version of.

I’ve used the metaphor of plumbing here before. I probably shouldn’t plumb a whole house (although I am about to try) and certainly should not design a whole city sewerage system. However, I have a pretty robust mental model of what’s going on, which means I don’t have to worry about it – and, crucially, I can tell when something is not right.

Corollary: If I can’t make that little toy version work, even in my head, I think there’s an inherent level of distrust and uncertainty there, which I’m pushing down and ignoring to get on with my day. I suspect most of us are doing this most of the time, and it’s not healthy. That feeling should be reserved for actual magic.

Something something minimum viable model, knack, agency. Working on this.

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P.S. Compare/contrast the above image and thoughts with e.g. this post. Trying not to go backwards / trying to go somewhere more interesting, again.

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Last month, Navine and I opened SUPER KIOSK, pictured above, at the Thessaloniki Biennial:

SUPER KIOSK is a standalone structure made from 100% reclaimed wood, featuring rainwater collection and solar purification, solar-powered tea-making with a selection of endemic Greek mountain teas, and hand-made ceramics. SUPER KIOSK was a collaboration between James Bridle and Navine G. Dossos (representing Vessel), and students from the Architecture school at the university of Thessaloniki. It was inspired by the work of Walter Segal, Dimitris Pikionis, and the history of DIY, self-build, and regenerative construction. The installation is set within the historic courtyard of the Islehane museum, which, through its history as an orphanage and technical school during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, links back to the Kapodistrian Orphanage in Aegina as well as Vessel’s vision of an engaged, collective future.

SUPER KIOSK is on show at the wonderful Islehane museum in Thessaloniki until the end of May, and you can find out more on my website, and through the Biennial. More photos here.

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To mark five years since the original publication, Verso Books have released a new edition of NEW DARK AGE, my book about the culture of network technology and the nature of knowledge in the digital age. It has a natty new green jacket:

To mark the reissue, I’ve written a new afterword, which examines some of the things that have and haven’t changed about technology in the last half-decade. You can read an excerpt from this afterword, looking at the current cycle of Artificial Intelligence hype, published in The Guardian this week:

The lesson of the current wave of “artificial” “intelligence”, I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished. We deserve better from the tools we use, the media we consume and the communities we live within, and we will only get what we deserve when we are capable of participating in them fully. And don’t be intimidated by them either – they’re really not that complicated. As the science-fiction legend Ursula K Le Guin wrote: “Technology is what we can learn to do.” […]

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WAYS OF BEING is currently appearing in a number of languages and some magnificent new jackets, including the Italian and Brazilian editions below. Dutch, German, French, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and other translations are either out now or on their way. And you can now pre-order the English paperback in US and UK editions, if you somehow haven’t got a copy yet…

It’s been a pleasure talking about the book in various places. You can listen to or read my interview with Emergence Magazine online here:

We think so much like computers today because they’ve defined what is thinkable. And so for me, rethinking the computer rethinks what is computable, and therefore rethinks what is thinkable at all about the world.

My conversation with Krista Tippet for her On Being podcast (together with transcript) can be found here:

Everything is equally evolved. Everything has been on this planet for as long as everything else. Everything has been in this universe for as long as everything else. Nothing is more evolved than anything else. Everything has been evolving for the same length of time. Everything has been becoming for the same length of time. […] And that immediately destroys any idea of hierarchy or division for me that might shape or inform that splitting and clumping that’s been the last century of scientific legacy and that we are finally getting rid of.

And I talked to one of my favourite writers, Claire Evans, for Grown by Ginkgo magazine:

I don’t think there is such a thing as an artificial intelligence. There are multiple intelligences, many ways of doing intelligence. What I envisage to be more useful and interesting than artificial intelligence as we currently conceive of it—which is this incredibly reduced version of human intelligence— is something more distributed, more widely empowered, and more diverse than singular intelligence would allow for. It’s actually a conversation between multiple intelligences, focused on some narrow goals.

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I have a few exhibitions coming up and in progress. I am participating in Face to Face, an exhibition about identity and identification at the National Museum, Wroc?aw, and Perfect Behaviors, an exhibition about the quantification of everyday life, at OGR Torino. I’m particularly pleased that Windmill 003 (for Walter Segal was selected for Renaissance 3.0, Peter Weibel’s final exhibition at ZKM, which explores the use by artists of the tools, methods and programs of science.

Seagrass conservation is critical for mitigating climate change due to the large stocks of carbon they sequester in the seafloor. However, effective conservation and its potential to provide nature-based solutions to climate change is hindered by major uncertainties regarding seagrass extent and distribution. Here, we describe the characterization of the world’s largest seagrass ecosystem, located in The Bahamas. We integrate existing spatial estimates with an updated empirical remote sensing product and perform extensive ground-truthing of seafloor with 2,542 diver surveys across remote sensing tiles. We also leverage seafloor assessments and movement data obtained from instrument-equipped tiger sharks, which have strong fidelity to seagrass ecosystems, to augment and further validate predictions.

Tiger sharks support the characterization of the world’s largest seagrass ecosystem [TL/DR: they strapped cameras to tiger-sharks, who helped them survey seagrass meadows]

The partaking of the kykeon marked the climax of the famous autumnal ceremony at Eleusis, performed for nearly two thousand consecutive years and whose initiates included essentially all the great names of Greek antiquity. Claims for the potency and revelatory effect of the kykeon and the profound nature of the secrets revealed at the Eleusinian celebration are widespread in Greek literature and historical writings, so there can be little doubt that the rite was of major importance to the course of Greek civilisation or that the potion must have been more than a symbolic sacrament like the Christian Eucharist of bread and wine: the kykeon surely contained a powerful psychoactive substance similar to one of the major vision inducing and psychedelic plant alkaloids that Western science has only recently rediscovered.

Mixing the Kykeon [on the various candidates for psychoactive elements in the Eleusinian mysteries]

Until about a century ago, most people knew a great deal about their immediate material world. Fewer and fewer do today, as commodities circulate with ever greater speed over greater distances. Because of the sheer complexity of contemporary production, even the people who do have professional responsibility for making things – the engineers and factory workers and chemists among us – tend to be specialists. Deepened knowledge usually also means narrowed knowledge. This tends to obscure awareness of the extended production chains through which materials, tools, components and packaging are sourced. Nobody – not an assembly-line worker, not a CEO – has a comprehensive vantage point. It is partly a problem of scale: the wider the view comes, the harder it is to see clearly what’s close at hand.

Material intelligence, Glenn Adamson [falls short of full demand for agency, and slides into aesthetic appreciation, but I like the phrase]

Mari’s choice to embed pedagogical clarity into the very structure of his furniture is a powerful antidote to the obscurity of contemporary production processes (and, by extension, their products), which are usually conceived in such a way that the technologies, skills, supply chains and forms of labor converging in the realisation of most everyday objects remain largely invisible to the final users. This built-in impenetrability is further compounded by the distractions of marketing typical of today’s attention economy. Even the adoption of an apparently innocuous format such as the how-to manual—a staple of DIY culture and amateur craft—becomes a tool of empowerment against a system designed to ensure, says Mari, that “the number of ignorant people be the largest possible.”

Furniture As Comrade: Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione

Anthropomorphic wooden cult figurines, sometimes called pole gods, have been found at many archaeological sites in Central and Northern Europe. They are generally interpreted as cult images, in some cases presumably depicting deities, sometimes with either a votive or an apotropaic (protective) function. Many have been preserved in peat bogs. The majority are more or less crudely worked poles or forked sticks; some take the form of carved planks. They have been dated to periods from the Mesolithic to the Early Middle Ages, including the Roman Era and the Migration Age.

Anthropomorphic wooden cult figurines of Central and Northern Europe

Whether the corporation should be considered a person is a matter of active academic and public debate. Here, we examine whether, and in what ways, ordinary citizens conceptualize the corporation as a person. We present evidence that corporations are anthropomorphized, but only to a certain degree. Compared with other entities, the average corporation is considered about as similar to a person as an ant. Corporations differ in the extent to which people are willing to grant them personhood however, and this pattern is predicted by how salient the organization’s mental and moral traits are. This process of anthropomorphization has important downstream consequences, increasing support for granting legal rights and responsibilities to corporations. Because our studies show that this relationship also obtains for animals, we conclude that perceptions of corporate personhood draw on a more general set of rules for assessing an entity’s personhood.

Corporate Insecthood [via Matt]

“Ignorant humans! Heedless, unable to recognize in advance the difference between future good fortune and future bad. In your heedlessness, you have made a big mistake, a mistake without remedy.“

Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 255

In one of her last public speeches Ursula Le Guin called for “realists of a larger reality”. She underlined that we need people “who can see alternatives to how we live now. Who can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”

In 2021, those real grounds for hope might seem even more fragile or unsteady. The tentative new ways, or rediscovered old ways of living can easily become overwhelmed with increasingly shrill demands to ‘return to normal’. Yet how ’realistic’ are these demands? What can be considered ’normal’ today, next week, next year or the next decades? Instead of returning to ways that have led to our current problems, what other ways of living, being and working could be more realistic?

Becoming Realists of a Larger Reality – fo.am