Windmill 03 (for Walter Segal)

Installation artist and technology author James Bridle’s »Windmill 03 (for Walter Segal)« alludes to multiple ideas from different eras of the past and connects them to visions of the future. Bridle, who lives in Greece, follows a philosophy of self-empowerment and diligence. The dedication of the piece to Walter Segal is only logical, as this German-British architect developed a DIY method for constructing houses in the 1970s.

Bridle was inspired to create »Windmill 03« in part by a scene from Werner Herzog’s film »Lebenszeichen« (1968), which pans across a Greek landscape featuring a characteristic group of rotating windmills. This energy collective is responsible for irrigation in the arid climate. In 1970, John Reynolds wrote about the landscape of Crete: “the plain of Lassithi, where a multitude of mills, moving in the breeze like a field of white campions, produces what must surely be one of the strangest man-made landscapes in the world.”

Bridle connects ideas from the mechanical age to the matrix-based modular construction systems created by designer Ken Isaacs. At the same time, they take inspiration from the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, which sought out new paths to ecological awareness and the democratization of tools and technologies. »Windmill 03« and the collective of windmills are icons of “hippie modernism,” or as Bridle calls it, a “hippie renaissance” – a different modernity that is not founded on the annihilation of the past in a never-ending stream of innovation.