Gradient Ascent
UK/GR 2017
12:00min
Autonomously driving cars are a reality. Even with dramatic setbacks their technology becomes an active form of story telling, overtaking the original role of mythology for predicting and understanding our future. James Bridle, artist and author of New Dark Age (2018) is dissecting technological routines and reveals the unpredictability of their often commercial and therefore non-transparent implementations.
In Gradient Ascent, named after an optimization algorithm that is used in machine learning, the viewer is following a self-driving car up to Mount Parnassus in Greece: the classical home of the Muses and thus art and knowledge. The journey is accompanied by a narrative on mythology and progress inspired by René Daumal’s surrealist novel Mount Analogue (1952).
James Bridle *1980, lives and works in London, UK.
The on-going screening series Phantom Horizons
presents digital as well as analogue works that question the paradigm of linear perspective, seeking a new kind of “status perspective” [Bedeutungsperspektive]. The latter was a development of ancient and medieval painting, in which the size of figures is determined by their hierarchical significance. Extending this approach using the methodology of deconstruction and the possibilities of contemporary film creation, the presented works open up multifaceted, unseen horizons.
Curated by Robert Seidel | www.robertseidel.com
