Before I start to analyze Autonomous Trap 001 by James Bridle I should establish a few dearly held personal beliefs. I don’t like the idea of authorial intent. I dislike it because it puts too much focus on the individual who creates, taking away focus from the context in which they created, the individual who consumes, and the environment in which they consume. I dislike it because it comes with the implicit assumption that artists control their work or that they somehow own it. Perhaps if so much of amateur criticism weren’t dedicated exclusively to answering questions that start with “what did they mean…”, or perhaps if I weren’t surrounded by a mechanism of capital built on intellectual property then I would feel less strongly about this. As it stands I have fun telling people that there are no such things as authors.
This makes it difficult for me to consider art as effective or ineffective, except to consider the effect that it had on me. It’s a somewhat selfish outlook, but it comes with the understanding that I am really judging my own subjective experience, not the piece by itself.
That said I found that my reaction to Autonomous Trap 001 was precisely what the Bridle intended, so even from this lens that I dislike the piece succeeds. Oh well.
The first reaction I had to Autonomous Trap 001 was to chuckle a bit. It’s cute! I immediately liked the concept of trapping a self driving car using traffic symbols. I had fun imagining a hapless driver waking up from their morning commute/nap only to realize that their car had failed to bring them to work. I liked to mischief of it. I liked the little 001 at the end of the title, and the implication that there would be more of these popping up all over the world. Just from this first small reaction I had judged that I ‘liked’ the piece. Taste is subjective of course, but this one aligned with mine.
Once I found out that the circle was made of salt and not just painted on the road, I knew that this would probably be my favorite piece of the lot that we were examining. All my life the idea of magic symbols has held some kind of guttural appeal to me. I think it may be the reason I like programming and math so much. I get the same reaction from the fact that symbols on a page can predict facts about reality, or that characters on a monitor can make a robot move or make a computer render images. It feels like magic to me, or at least as close to magic as the real world can get. Of course, magic is by definition not real, so even if people could make objects move with their minds we would just call that physics or technology. If all this piece had been was a spray-painted circle with a car inside I would have liked it much less.
The salt circle is reminiscent of a purifying circle for a séance. This evokes the idea that the thing trapped inside is some kind of demon. I find this to be an apt metaphor, at least with my cultural background for demons. In my experience demons are painted as misunderstood, helpful creatures just as often as they are portrayed as embodiments of chaos. This is approximately how I feel about self driving cars, and about automation and artificial intelligence as a whole. It’s clearly useful, dangerous, and often misunderstood or even demonized. It has the capacity to change the world, one way or another. That’s quite the platitude, I know, but it’s notoriously hard to predict the future history of technology.
My only criticism is of the context this piece was presented in. I didn’t like having to hear the artists interpretation, nor what Beckett Mufson from Vice had to say about it. In a perfect world I think it would have just been the photo of a car in the salt circle, and a small plaque that read “Autonomous Trap 001 – James Bridle – 2017 – salt on pavement.” I don’t care that it’s not really an autonomous car, but I still would have preferred not to know, for the sake of suspension of disbelief.
Finally, I liked the fact that the piece was ephemeral. The salt has long since washed away, and the only records of it are the photographs. It reminded me of Andy Goldsworthy. I don’t know why ephemeral art appeals to me so much, but I think it’s because when a piece doesn’t last for very long I can be sure that it will never be owned or sold. No one is ever going to pretend like they own this piece, because it no longer exists.