James Bridle: Se ti sabir + My delight on a shining night

British writer and artist James Bridle (1980) focuses on the discussion about technology, digitization, the nature of intelligence and its consequences for our society. His critical films invite reflection without being intrusive or falling back on written or spoken argumentation, as in My delight on a shining night (2018).

This film documents the flamingo population in the Limassol salt lake that served as a number station broadcast site from the 1970s to 2008. These stations broadcast endless sequences of numbers, probably coded spy messages, a technique commonly used in the Cold War. According to Bridle, My delight is a film about ​“the shimmering infrastructure of control and surveillance and the exuberant life of the birds and ourselves, between information and ecology, between computational prediction and embodied observation.”

Se ti sabir (2019) is a monologue and essay consisting of shots of some pieces of land belonging to the ​“Maastricht Formation” and a reflection on different forms of intelligence. Central is our attitude towards ​“non-human” forms of knowledge. In an era in which we are learning more and more about different forms of intelligence that can populate our world, we simultaneously create computer systems that increasingly take over our cognitive and creative processes. Se ti sabir tries to imagine a new attitude towards other forms of intelligence, which may allow us to better understand not only each other but also the beings that surround us and those that we create ourselves.