James Bloom :: The Learning Body

A body that learns to walk without being born, falling and rising without flesh or memory. A machine that dreams of movement, searching for grace while stumbling within its own obsession. In this endless motion, suspended between animal and metal, between human and algorithm, Half Cheetah by James Bloom opens a space of perpetual beginning.

With this work, Bloom creates a radical field of interrogation between body, technology, and the desire for progress.

Presented in 2025 in an immersive room in Abu Dhabi Art Fair and destined for an experimental publication with Mousse Publishing, the project positions itself at the intersection of aesthetics, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of movement. It manifests as digital art, yet also as an embodied reflection on the very nature of learning, capacity, and their deconstruction.

At the core of the project is a Reinforcement Learning agent that learns to control a quadruped body in a 3D environment. This process, requiring millions of steps and days of optimization, mirrors in unexpected ways the trajectory of human motor development, from initial incapacity to the gradual conquest of skill.
The AI becomes a mirror of ontogenetic growth, yet within a disembodied, computational domain.

Bloom then transfers the trajectories of this learning process onto 3D scans of human bodies, re-skinned with inorganic materials such as metal and stone. The result is a series of hybrids oscillating between organism and object, between the living and the artificial. What emerges is a vision of what it means to “inhabit a body” when that body itself is the product of calculation and transfer.

A second AI agent intervenes to reorganize the movements according to abstract aesthetic goals. This action interrupts the linear flow of progress, breaking the sequence of optimization and producing movements that alternate between competence and incoherence.

As Bloom describes, it is a real-time deconstruction of the impulse oriented toward an end.

This gesture becomes a critical statement on contemporary culture: a challenge to teleology and to the narrative of guaranteed advancement. Half Cheetah reveals that every movement, even when optimized, can be fractured, destabilized, or rendered absurd. The work exposes not the triumph of the machine, but its constitutive fragility.

As installation, the work produces an immersive experience that denies resolution. Artificial and hybrid bodies move incessantly without ever arriving at a definitive state. The viewer is confronted with a continuum of attempts, partial achievements, and falls. The sound of steps and constant friction against the ground creates a rhythm that oscillates between recognition and alienation. It becomes a dance of the unfinished, where progress remains an open horizon never fulfilled.

This generates a powerful philosophical effect. The artwork emerges as a metaphor for a contemporary condition defined by relentless optimization, both technological and personal, yet locked in cycles of permanent dissatisfaction.

The forthcoming publication with Mousse Publishing expands this idea.
Structured as a flip-book, it will present the Half Cheetah figures running from page to page, reiterating the same tension across the sequence. Here the printed medium extends the artwork itself, transforming the book into a perpetual motion machine frozen in repetition.

Half Cheetah stands as more than an experiment in digital aesthetics.
It is a critical act toward the myth of progress.
The work shows that every body, whether human, animal, or artificial, exists within a constant state of tension between capacity and collapse, between order and disarticulation.

Bloom delivers an image where AI becomes not supremacy or threat, but an instrument for thinking through limit, instability, and incompletion as constitutive conditions of being.

In this way, Half Cheetah aligns with artistic practices that employ technology as a means of interrogation rather than celebration, returning to us the vertigo of living within a world where movement endlessly renews itself without end.