British artist James Bloom uses AI to render the human body's movements dysfunctional as he generates them, and records the sequence in the form of a flip book.
James Bloom's Half Cheetah project uses real-time Reinforcement Learning AI models. Each piece presents 3D scans of humans running on a never-ending journey toward an unknown destination, while a second RL model analyses their motion and dynamically reorders it according to alternative goals, often producing loops of repetition or failure. What emerges is an abstract, perpetual flow of body movement: a functioning software that has no utility but nevertheless exists.
The publication Half Cheetah, designed as a flip book, translates this infinite sequence into print and offers a deeper understanding of the project through a text by curator and critic Bronac Ferran and a conversation between the artist and Mark Leckey.
James Bloom is a London-based artist who uses technological innovation as a method to generate perceptual problems.
His online artworks connect their participants in real-time but have utility and functionality engineered out, upending the structure of the networks they exist within and revealing possibilities for autonomy.
He takes deliberately complex code-based and material production techniques and combines them in unintended ways, often to the point of failure, triggering new states.
