Friday, December 2, 2016

James Bridle - Waving at the Machines

Notes from a talk given by James Bridle called Waving At The Machines, given in 2011.


  • James Bridle coined the term "New Aesthetic"
  • Render ghosts - live in the buildings we haven't built yet. Inhabit a world of imagination. A world that share boundaries with ours.
  • He began to notice digital influence in real life - "come out of a digital way of seeing"
  • Activity happening all the time around us that we don't see - wifi signal
  • "Glitchy" effects - in music and art
  • Minecraft - graphics highly influential
"Giving the real world the grain of virtual
  • Making visible the digital - parametricism - avant garde, complex forms, eruptions of the digital into the physical
  • Digital real estate
  • Gerhard Richter - "new" stained glass window
  • Jens Hesse - data moshed oil paintings
  • David Bown - Tele-Present Water - "real" animation of ocean in real time
  • Computers allow us to see through time - satellites remember - before/after photos
  • "There wasn't supposed to be an after"
  • Cameras ability to recognise faces - training
  • Racist camera, limitations to technology
  • Filters on photos - changing reality
  • Cameras see and hear frequencies that we cannot - fundamentally different way of seeing the world
  • Imaginary places - the sky on trap street
  • Dutch royal family property removed from Google Maps
  • Urban camouflage 
  • Pixels really good at hiding things - tricks the eye, "removes" it from view
  • Digital camouflage - hiding in infrared as well
  • Aesthetic effects - new interactions in the world
  • Tricking technology - facial recognition software
  • QR codes bad, ugly, please no one
  • Glitches are computers' attempt to speak
"The machines aren't very smart yet"
"They live on the boarders of our world"

  • hashtag BotYodeling
  • We see through satellites, through cameras, through technologies
  • Entering into a dialogue with the machines
  • Multi-touch finger paintings - Evan Roth - visual aesthetics meet human behaviour
  • Ethical negotiation
  • Shaping feelings and culture
  • New nature in the world

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