b. 1980, London, UK
James Bridle is an artist, writer, and technologist based in Greece and London.
With a long-standing investigative interest in modern network infrastructure, government transparency, and technological surveillance, their artistic practice positions itself at the intersection of art, science, and political activism. In particular, they explore how the acceleration of technological advancement creates new ways to represent our physical world and affects our perception of the future by increasingly blurring the lines between the virtual and the real. Their work incorporates software programming, social media, photography, installations, architectural rendering, and maps.
Bridle’s New Aesthetic (2011) research project has spurred lively debate and continues to inspire critical and artistic responses across many disciplines. They have also focused their inquiry on addressing the now ubiquitous, yet invisible technologies and operations of drone warfare in projects such as The Drone Shadow series (2012), in collaboration with designer Einar Sneve Martinussen, and Dronestagram (2012), an Instagram account displaying aerial views of the approximate locations of drone strikes. Awarded with an Honorary Mention from Ars Electronica 2013, this project continues to draw wide attention and has stimulated vigorous discourse on the moral and political implications, as well as the experiential knowability, of anonymous warfare.
Bridle’s installations and works have been commissioned by The Photographers’ Gallery, London; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; FACT, Liverpool; and MU Eindhoven. Their artworks have been shown at major international institutions including the Barbican and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Serpentine Galleries, London; MoMA, New York; MAK, Vienna; Witte de With, Rotterdam; KW, Berlin; PinchukArtCentre, Kiev; HkW, Berlin; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; ZKM Karlsruhe; and National Arts Center, Tokyo.
Bridle’s work has been featured in The Guardian, The Daily Mail, New York Magazine, and The New Statesman, among others. Their writings appear in publications including Wired, ICON and The Observer, where he contributes a regular column on publishing and technology. They are a member of the Really Interesting Group and give regular lectures at conferences worldwide, including SXSW, Austin; dConstruct, Brighton; and Lift, Geneva. James Bridle was creative technologist in residence at the Lighthouse, Brighton and Eyebeam in New York.
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.
