New Ways of Seeing: James Bridle's BBC radio show about networked digital tools in our "image-soaked culture"

James "New Aesthetic" Bridle (previously) is several kinds of provocateur and artist (who can forget his autonomous vehicle trap, to say nothing of his groundbreaking research on the violent Youtube Kids spammers who came to dominate the platform with hour+ long cartoons depicting cartoon characters barfing and murdering all over each other?).

So there's no one better poised to comment on the way that the meaning of images is changing thanks to networked digital tools that have created an "image-soaked culture" where the meaning of those images can change from moment to moment and person to person?

Bridle has created a new radio series for BBC Radio 4: it's called New Ways of Seeing, a riff on John Berger's seminal 1972 art-criticism series Ways of Seeing.

The show kicks off with profiles of artists like Ingrid Burrington (previously) and Trevor Paglen (previously), whose work reveals the hidden-in-plain-sight invisible architecture of the internet, from unassuming buildings that house major internet backbone exchanges to the undersea cables that service them. Then it gets even more interesting, with work on artificial intelligence narratives designed to change the perception of women to 3D printing as a means of reclaiming looted and lost artifacts taken by the Gulf Wars.

In the first episode of New Ways of Seeing, I meet artists such as Ingrid Burrington and Trevor Paglen, who explore this hidden architecture of the internet. In New York, Burrington takes us inside 32 Avenue of the Americas, an art deco temple to telecommunications dating from 1932, when it was the headquarters of AT&Ts transatlantic network.