Tracking the 'render ghosts' – tech podcast

Artist James Bridle reveals his quest to trace the anonymous faces appearing on hoardings around our cities

Artist and writer James Bridle has been preoccupied for the last decade by a strange mission: to find the real-life counterparts of the people who appear in the architectural renderings that appear on hoardings around our cities. These photos were probably taken for a stock database, and now they live forever, suspended in the imagination of a space. James, who's now based in Athens, calls them the "Render Ghosts", and his long-running search - culminating in a recent installation in London - makes for a fascinating story about art and civilisation, at a time when the carefully sculpted ideals of our urban future are coming into conflict with the real lives people lead in cities.