Book Reviews and Author Interviews from All-Creatures.org




Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence By James Bridle

Interviewed by Marc Bekoff, Psychology Today / Animal Emotions

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Ways of Being
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
Available at BookFinder.com
ISBN-10:0374601119
ISBN-13: 978-0374601119

About the Author:

James Bridle is a writer and artist. His writing on art, politics, culture and technology has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and the Observer, Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, Frieze, Domus, and ICON. New Dark Age, his book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso in 2018, and is being translated into a dozen languages. In 2019, he wrote and presented New Ways of Seeing, a four-part series for BBC Radio 4. His artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions, including the V&A, Whitechapel, Barbican, Hayward, and Serpentine, and exhibited worldwide and on the internet.

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Humans Aren't the Smartest Among Earth's Diverse Intelligences

Mark Bekoff: I recently read one of the most original, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking books I’ve seen in a while called Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence by writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle, and I’m thrilled he could answer a few questions about his landmark book.

Why did you write Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines?

I’m an artist and writer. In the last few years, I’ve focused my practice around ecology and the environment, creating artworks on the theme of renewable energy and redistributing power, learning how to build physical, sustainable things, and trying to practice a more aware and regenerative life. At the same time as moving out of the city to a small island, I’ve tried to figure out what is useful in what I know about already—technology, the internet, AI—to bring to discussions of the planetary crisis.

Ways of Being is one outcome of this: an attempt to understand where we have gone wrong, how we misunderstand the world, the other beings in it, and how we relate to them. It is part of my own process of moving from a place of uncertainty and fear to one of agency and even hope, accompanied, I now find, by a whole host of new friends and collaborators.

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Please read the ENTIRE INTERVIEW HERE.


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