AUTONOMOUS TRAP 001

James Bridle (2017)

What if we could free AI from corporate power to reimagine it as a tool for resistance and collaboration?  

You’re looking at a vehicle sitting in the middle of a parking lot, near Mount Parnassus in Greece, surrounded by a salt circle. The circle - a traditional form of protection in magical practice - is a trap for a self-driving car that relies on machine vision to guide it. The solid and dashed lines are a "no entry" pattern, directed inwards, so that the car, programmed to obey the road rules, cannot leave without breaking its own programming. The car is trapped.

Bridle wrote his own software, built neural networks and rigged up cameras to build his own self-driving car. Instead of subscribing to a singular version of technology sold to us by companies, he uses his agency to shape the technology himself. 

The artist shows the potential of human-machine relationships that invite different understandings of the world, resisting corporate power.  

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JAMES BRIDLE is a writer, artist and technologist. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. They are the author of New Dark Age (2018) and Ways of Being (2022), and they wrote and presented New Ways of Seeing for BBC Radio 4 in 2019. jamesbridle.com