Hybrid: Move Fast and Break Things: Control, Progress and the Black Box

James Bloom

Alex May

“Move fast and break things” was the mantra that defined a decade of technological acceleration, privileging scale, speed, and optimisation over reflection and consequence. In this joint talk, artists Alex May and James Bloom reclaim the phrase as a critical lens, debating the role of artistic agency within contemporary automated and opaque “black box” systems.

Drawing on contrasting practices - one based on structural control, the other on systemic rupture - the talk examines how artists can meaningfully intervene in technological culture.

Learning points and educational uses:

• Understanding artistic and general agency within AI-driven and algorithmic systems
• Critical perspectives on “black box” technologies and automation
• Comparing approaches to creative coding: building from first principles versus stress-testing systems
• Exploring failure as a productive artistic and research method
• Examining ethics, authorship, and responsibility in computational art
• Relevant to teaching in digital art, creative coding, AI ethics, media studies, and interdisciplinary art–technology programmes.

James Bloom is a London-based artist who uses technological innovation as a method to generate perceptual problems.

His online artworks connect their participants in real-time but have utility engineered out, upending the structure of the networks they exist within and revealing possibilities for autonomy. He takes complex code-based and material production techniques and combines them in unintended ways, often to the point of failure, triggering new states.

Alex May is an internationally recognised artist known for his innovative exploration of the intersection between art, science, and technology, with a focus on creating multi-layered works that resonate with the human experience in a digital world.

His body of work utilises creative software he has written and a wide range of digital new media forms including video sculpture, algorithmic photography, interactive robotics, photogrammetry as memory, 3D printed sculpture, virtual and augmented reality apps, video projection mapping, generative algorithms and biological sonification, with roots in experimental performative software, video and sound art.

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This event is brought to you by: Computer Arts Society

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