James Bridle is a writer and artist. His writing on art, politics, culture and technology has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and the Observer, Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, Frieze, Domus, and ICON. New Dark Age, his book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso in 2018, and is being translated into a dozen languages. In 2019, he wrote and presented New Ways of Seeing, a four-part series for BBC Radio 4. His artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions, including the V&A, Whitechapel, Barbican, Hayward, and Serpentine, and exhibited worldwide and on the internet.
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Humans Aren't the Smartest Among Earth's Diverse Intelligences
Mark Bekoff: I recently read one of the most original, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking books I’ve seen in a while called Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle, and I’m thrilled he could answer a few questions about his landmark book.
Why did you write Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines?
I’m an artist and writer. In the last few years, I’ve focused my practice
around ecology and the environment, creating artworks on the theme of
renewable energy and redistributing power, learning how to build physical,
sustainable things, and trying to practice a more aware and regenerative
life. At the same time as moving out of the city to a small island, I’ve
tried to figure out what is useful in what I know about already—technology,
the internet, AI—to bring to discussions of the planetary crisis.
Ways of Being is one outcome of this: an attempt to understand where we have
gone wrong, how we misunderstand the world, the other beings in it, and how
we relate to them. It is part of my own process of moving from a place of
uncertainty and fear to one of agency and even hope, accompanied, I now
find, by a whole host of new friends and collaborators.
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