Vessel Aegina, James Bridle
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Amidst the surge of new technology, what if creative making can help us regain our own agency and re-embody our world?
“Creation is about the relationship, not about the material.” ~ James Bridle
A new arts collective co-founded by @jamesbridle on the Greek Island of Aegina, Vessel has inspired us with new thinking on how embodiment can create agency.
Seagrass Architecture, a recent @vessel.aegina project looks at ways to work with one of the most abundant natural plants in the local community: Posidonia oceanica. The project involves co-constructing buildings with seagrass, mapping seagrass meadows, and supporting protective initiatives such as no-anchorage zones in the seas around the island.
Rather than treating a material as an inert resource, the team meets it as an organism. They understand it, work with it and create a relationship of mutual support.
Image care of Vessel Aegina
What excites us most about this project is how it invites people to find joy in the act of collectively creating an ecosystem of care. Through an embodied relationship with Seagrass, the community engages in a deeper sense of shared responsibility with the land.
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Stirring our Senses
Scientific and technological thinking has brought extraordinary advances, but it often distances us from our relationship as a body within a larger body of living systems. We break the natural world down into parts, analyze and de-animate it.
Yet if, as Ursula Le Guin once said, "Technology is a material interface with the natural world,” we have removed our own agency in the way our technological tools work. AI will soon run things on its own, and we will feel increasingly helpless.
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How It Moves Us, Forward
Let this project illustrate how we can engage with technology in ways that regain our own agency within complex systems, and reinforce what is generative rather than extractive.
Mutual seagrass building collaboratives and other examples, such as community-owned solar farms or mutual aid kitchens are not merely services or technologies; they are creative acts that embody and distribute agency back where they belong - on the ground, in joyful community.
Image care of Vessel Aegina
James Bridle
James Bridle is a British artist, writer, and technologist based in Athens, Greece. Their work bridges the intersections of digital technology, ecology, and political activism. They are best known for coining the concept of the "New Aesthetic" and for authoring the acclaimed books New Dark Age and Ways of Being, the latter of which expands artificial intelligence into a broader discussion about non-human intelligence, examining how technologies, plants, animals, and ecosystems all actively shape our world. His most recent work explores how we might regain and redistribute human agency in an increasingly AI dominated world.