James Bridle

James Bridle on ecological thinking: Why plants have agency

I was recently on Deutschlandfunk, German public radio, talking about ecological intelligence, plants, agency, consciousness, and much more. You can listen here: www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/james-bridle... (45mins, English)

'You want to imagine what this tastes like? Fuck you, says AI' Georgina Voss on how AI-generated images impact the way we look at photographs of food. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath.

For @vittles.bsky.social, I wrote about what happens food photography - a practice steeped in stagecraft - meets the synthetic horrors of AI images. Gorgeous original illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/you-want-t...

As I used to say about YouTube: "Boots, the high street chemist, is very useful, but if an appreciable number of people who popped in for a meal deal came out believing in a flat earth and the superiority of the white race, we would probably shut it down." I think the point still applies.

I don’t think solar panels will magically save us: I do think that the more of us actively engaged in the transition has benefits for the planet and our communities which will help us face an uncertain future. This is one way to do it.

It’s a nascent political form within the transition, and it’s #actuallyexistingsolarpunk: not just technology, but a shift in how we live. We can redistribute power. I’m helping to start an energy community where I live. You can too. We all can.

It’s not really about selling the excess: it’s about combating energy poverty and increasing energy democracy, while actually and actively changing the energy mix, and building community.

Home - ΥΠΕΡΙΩΝ HYPERION's purpose is to provide its members with clean and cheap energy and to develop services and actions that contribute to a fair energy transition.

It’s owned by the community, the community sells that power to the grid and gets money off their bills, and sells the excess. My friends at Hyperion Solar Community in Athens are a good example: hyperion-community.gr/en/

Energy communities are when a group of people get together to make their own power. You invest together in a renewable energy plant – could be solar, wind, hydro, or even storage, like a battery site.

We can do it together. We can form our own energy communities: www.rescoop.eu/toolbox/comm...

In that post about possibility, Ben talks about massive off-grid solar for direct use as one of the features of the coming transition – but there’s another aspect, which is more relevant to the point of the gift of the sun: you don’t have to go off-grid, or wait for governments to do something.

A metal frame holds a small solar panel out of an apartment window.

In New York, the brilliant www.solarpowerforartists.com is creating tiny window mounts for solar panels, accessible even to those who rent: energytransitiondesign.com/products/

Three solar panels engraved with a wheatsheaf, a poppy, and a calathus, symbols of the Eleusinian Mysteries, installed on a scaffolding frame at the archeological site of Elefsina, Greece.

I’ve used the microtransformers built for balcony solar installations in my solar panel artworks. This means they plug directly into the local network, without batteries or the grid, and power the gallery, institution or site hosting them (e.g. an archeological site): jamesbridle.com/works/things...

Two solar panels installed on an apartment balcony

But there’s more. Firstly, there are really interesting things happening around solar, driven by and shaping this transition, which you can meaningfully participate in. For example, balcony solar. This is solar at the scale not of a rooftop, or a garden, but a small apartment.

This is #actuallyexistingsolarpunk: the realisation that the tools we already have to hand are far more transformative, and more ecologically beneficial in every sense, than all the speculation around novel digital technologies: bsky.app/profile/jame...

A row of solar panels mounted vertically as a fence around the garden of a house in Germany.

In fact, this is already happening, as the FT reported last year. Once you factor in the savings on an electricity bill, it is already cheaper in the Netherlands and Germany to install solar PV panels as garden fencing, than to use wood: archive.is/elGzu

A comparison of a wooden fence panel (32.49 GBP) with a similarly sized solar panel (65.80 GBP)

Ben pointed out in that piece that the price of solar panels is getting so low, that you can buy a panel for just twice the price of a wooden fencing sheet the same size:

Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid. The cost of solar panels is plummeting, and this will flood the power grid with cheap electricity. But that’s just Act 1. We won’t stop building solar at the limits of the grid - we’ll build a lot mor...

Ben Jones wrote about this as “the magic lump of possibility” – the period of negative pricing when the sun is shining, when you can get so much done for free.

climate.benjames.io/solar-off-gr...

It’s hard to get your head around at first, but once those electrons are moving they really are “free” in the best sense, and you might as well use them for something (including storage for later, yes).

Solar tech is falling in price so fast that in many and increasing numbers of places we can have this kind of “free energy”.

This is not the gift of a government. This is the gift of the sun. And it has some really interesting implications… #actuallyexistingsolarpunk

Thinking about this photo again.

preparing for the working world in the age of AI or: seven things to tell your kids when they ask what they should study now, or what the point of studying is

I wrote this yesterday about what to tell young people who are worried about what work will be in the age of AI:

naomialderman.substack.com/p/preparing-...

The black, rainbow-hand imbued album cover on a vinyl sleeve.

Anyway, and more importantly, Robert's wonderful album is available to pre-order and listen in advance here: archaicfuturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/10000-... Enjoy!

A painting of a swiping fingerprint gesture in black and white.

I was also thinking a lot about Evan Roth's Multi Touch Paintings, which I've always loved, which document these intimate gestures we make every day www.evan-roth.com/~/works/mult... Here, "Slide to Unlock", 2013:

A self portrait of the artist Charles A Scuri made from computer-generated curves.

I should mention that this process was very much inspired by conversations with Robert about digital art and history. In particular, we were both very taken by Charles A. Csuri's "Sine Curve Man", a classic work of digital art from 1967.

Robert also created a video for one of the songs, using the process video, where you can see how the hand tracking works. Here's a taste of it:

A black album cover with a spray of skeletal hands, in rainbow colours, in the lower half of the image.

I wrote some code to track his hand movements during the course of that presentation, and it's these gestures that form the basis of the cover art for Robert's new album, 10,000 Rivers:

YouTube video by John Schroter Steve Jobs introduces iPhone in 2007

I spent some time watching Jobs' keynotes, particularly the original iPhone presentation from 2007. He uses his hands in so many ways: expressively, expansively, and of course, caressing that little screen over and over again: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnrJ...

In our discussions, Robert highlighted how Jobs was obsessed with death and immortality, and how this informed his product design: the desire to create perfect objects which would outlive him. One lyric in particular really struck me: "Nothing here is real that isn’t touched by these hands".

A while back my friend Robert Stillman, an amazing musician, got in touch and asked if I would design a cover for his new album. It turned out to be a concept album inspired by the life of Steve Jobs, as well as a bunch of other things, including my book, 'Ways of Being'.