What this blog site is about
I draw on philosophy and cultural theory to help understand current affairs, architecture and developments in digital technology. These are not opinion pages, though my strongly held view that academic reflection really matters as we try to understand contemporary living may seep through. These posts are scheduled to appear each Saturday (mostly) and for an unspecified period.
Many thanks to those who’ve contributed comments. WordPress sends me an email every time a comment is posted, even for comments on older posts. So I’ll endeavour to respond. I have developed some of the themes shown here in books. See the list of books in the right menu. Suggestions are welcome. Pictures in posts are my own where not otherwise acknowledged (e.g. AI-generated), or are screen shots of grids of relevant images from search engine results.
This is also an experiment in abbreviation, and an experiment in using current issues as inroads to themes normally requiring lengthy argument.
Latest 100 posts
- Outdoor update
- The singing animal
- The AI skillset
- Cyberbullies
- Mood making
- Guilty secrets
- Gathered round the bath
- What lies around the corner
- Life by the fire
- Is anyone paying attention?
- Reverse parametrics
- Truth and image
- Bohemian melancholy
- The enchanted garden
- Mobility and contemplation
- Surprise videos
- A place to meditate
- A compendium of marvels
- Voices without bodies 2
- The clone and I
- Thinking about walking
- My first video clone
- Experts versus algorithms
- The “intellectual cyborg”
- Metafiction and metaphor
- The threat
- Metafiction and melancholy
- Pastimes revisited
- A tissue of citations
- How to explain art
- Not everyone isn’t unhappy
- What was I thinking!
- Beyond attention
- Geometry and affect
- Am I in AI?
- Easy reading
- AI does history
- Faroese chain dancing
- Vintage futures
- A digital time capsule
- ChatGPT as trickster
- Adaptive re-use of digital content
- Pause for effect
- 2011 and all that
- 2010 redux
- Mood tags
- Clonecasting
- The enthusiastic clone
- The purloined voice
- Predicting AI “misconduct”
- Mnemonic infidelity
- AI shopping
- Local AI
- Mining Reddit
- AI sycophancy
- AI and the devil
- Esoteric AI
- Urban unconcealment
- Beyond urban metrics
- Urban AI
- Mobile AI does fieldwork
- The future of writing
- Evidence and absurdity
- Absurdum explicandum
- Explain this …
- The meta-reasoning illusion
- AI explains itself (again)
- Mobile AI and place
- Inferring a book from its index
- Ubiquitous AI
- AI reveals all
- LLM plans a lesson
- DIY professional service automation
- Friction in the machine
- Coming to terms with AI
- LLMs and the web
- The Quid Pro Coaster
- Dialectic between the verbal and the visual
- From text to image via LLM
- AI briefs an architect
- Share your expertise
- Smashing the context window
- AI profiles you
- Post-creative AI
- Easy reading
- Too much feedback
- AI fever dreams
- Chain of thought
- AI explains itself
- A jolly AI adventure
- A Dubliner’s guide to AI
- AI in the apocalypse
- AI through the looking glass
- A critical AI dictionary
- Curate your AI
- Choose your critic
- AI as critic
- Meaning and attention
- Extending large language models
- Urban scripts and contest
Latest 25 posts (with extracts)
- Outdoor update
In May 2014 I published an online article (blog post), the contents of which were expanded in my book Network Nature: The Place of Nature in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). The title of the online article was “Nature deficiency disorder” #193. It included 9 reasons people might feel nature settings offer benefits. My…More - The singing animal
Looking back at my “Newsletter” entries of 2014, I saw an article on music, Music makes it better #190, followed by Why cartoons have animals 2 #191. In this multi-referential world of online adapting and publishing, I recall that the title of the latter refers to an even earlier post exploring the oddity of our…More - The AI skillset
I’m presenting an update to my reflections of April 2014 that I titled Life-changing technologies #189. That entry was an update on a report we wrote in the 1990s based on interviews with architectural practitioners. Now we are a further twelve years on from that update. Even without the benefit of a new cache of…More - Cyberbullies
Why had Australia banned mobile phones in schools? The ban was to reduce classroom distractions, improve academic concentration, and curb cyberbullying. That summary is from a Google search on my opening question, which demonstrates a further challenge to learning posed by instant in-hand access to AI-enabled Internet search. Such search-based shortcuts to information and insights…More - Mood making
I’m reviewing my post of 22 March 2014 Moody atmospheres and electric auras (#188). I stand by the account of mood that started with that post and later developed into a book length treatment (Mood and Mobility: Navigating the Emotional Spaces of Digital Social Networks. MIT Press, 2016.). One point requires emphasis. The creation of…More - Guilty secrets
In my post of 15 March 2014 — The online Scholar: A guide for PhD students (#187) — I suggested a list of points for a researcher to consider as they integrate online media into their writing processes. I even ran a few workshops on the theme for our University’s Institute for Academic Development (IAD).…More - Gathered round the bath
The proto-architect Vitruvius described the importance of a clearing in the forest and the establishment of a fire around which people would gather for warmth and communion. The “hearth” established the siting and meaning of the “dwelling house,” and hence settlements and eventually towns and cities. I revisited that proposition in the recent post Life…More - What lies around the corner
I’m revisiting a sequence of three posts from February-March 2014: #184 Turning the corner, #185 Humanities in the wild, and #186 Betwixt and between. They each fit a theme that later informed the writing of my book Network Nature: The Place of Nature in the Digital Age, published in 2018. Whether in nature or architectural…More - Life by the fire
In 2014 some of us conducted experiments using an EEG headset for measuring brainwaves in human beings as they move through outdoor settings. Around that time I stumbled across a Star Trek episode called “Spock’s Brain.” I referenced the confluence between science fiction and emerging consumer-available neural headware in my post of 1 February 2014…More - Is anyone paying attention?
The ease with which I can be seen, heard and otherwise monitored has increased since January 2014. That was the arbitrary date of my post #180 titled Showing Off. Thanks to digital networks and displays it’s easy to put yourself “out there” as part of a strategy of personal presentation (e.g. as an online influencer),…More - Reverse parametrics
I’m revisiting my post of 18 January 2014 #179 What’s wrong with parametricism. As that post is ostensibly about computer-generated 3D building forms, it fits my previous reflections on AI generated photo-real static pictures and animated videos. See post Bohemian melancholy. Diffusion-based image generation can certainly generate images of 3D architectural forms. I uploaded one…More - Truth and image
I’ve reviewed my post of 11 January 2014 #178 Architectural pragmatics. In that post I rehearsed the argument that architectural theorists and practitioners need worry less about whether a particular philosophical position is correct than what difference its adherence makes to one’s actions. I’m thinking of Freud on concepts of the unconscious, Derrida on the…More - Bohemian melancholy
I’m following on from the post #177 Frequent feelings of 4 January 2014 with an illustration. There’s a private hotel-guesthouse on the outskirts of Kandy in Sri Lanka called Helga’s Folly. The owner (Helga De Silva Blow Perera) describes it on Booking.com as an “Anti Hotel Residence.” All the public rooms are packed with antique…More - The enchanted garden
I’m revisiting my post #176 Morphic fields 28 December 2013. In that I continued the theme of enchantment. One of the possibilities or byproducts of enchantment is that inert, inanimate objects bear the possibility that they are alive, similar to how human beings and animals are alive: statues come to life, trees salute you, a…More - Mobility and contemplation
I’m reprising my blog post from 21 December 2013, #175 Enchanted places. There I quoted from Christopher Street’s book on ley lines, mythic lines that cross the landscape connecting significant places, in which he asserts that “numinous nature” is best sensed “in the peace and tranquility of the atmosphere that surrounds them, simply by sitting…More - Surprise videos
I’m updating my post of 14 December 2013 #174 How to slow down time, which started with a reference to slow motion video capture. Slo-mo recordings via smartphone struck me as a way of revealing what is otherwise hidden from view by extending our ability to attend to temporal detail. I created a slow-mo video…More - A place to meditate
I returned recently from two and a half weeks in Sri Lanka, where the copious images of the Buddha are not confined to temples but permeate the everyday visual field — roadside shrines, hilltop monuments, domestic altars, hotel gardens, municipal roundabouts. Amongst their roles in the landscape, statues of the Buddha serve as exemplars of…More - A compendium of marvels
Are there things that are truly odd in the world, or is it odd that anything exists at all? I put those questions to ChatGPT as I checked out some museum objects last week, while immersed in the geometries of IM Pei’s celebrated Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. Amongst many artefacts, there were…More - Voices without bodies 2
I’m reprising the post of 30 November 2013 called Voices without bodies. The blog continued the reflections in my book The Tuning of Place: : Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media published by MITPress in 2010. Here’s the original with some updates — assisted by ChatGPT. Question to Siri:“What’s The Wizard of Oz about?”Siri: “It’s about some Dorothy, her intelligent assistants, and her…More - The clone and I
I asked ChatGPT why I should use video cloning of my own appearance and voice. The response continues a thread in which I had already consulted about the reprise of my old 2013 posts. The response discloses some interesting points about time, identity, the labour of recording, and the reception of video content. My self-cloning…More - Thinking about walking
I’ve managed to link my cloned avatar (using HeyGen) to my cloned voice (via ElevenLabs) so that it reads the content of my blog from November 2013 called The benefits of walking (#170). The process was straightforward. The content pertaining to Aristotle’s four causes is fairly dense. For people interested, some material is easier to…More - My first video clone
My post #169 published on 9 November 2013 was titled Feeling free in flight and continued the theme of the cyborg. The cyborg is just one of a number of virtual hybrid human media entities. Another obvious example is avatars of players in video games. Recently, it’s been possible to combine video and audio presentations…More - Experts versus algorithms
I’ve been revisiting the post from 2 November 2013 about algorithms, drawing impetus from the book by Daniel Kahneman Thinking fast and slow. I titled my post Why experts are better than algorithms (post #168). I’ve just listened to the post recited slowly and with gravitas by the synthetic voice of John Rhys Davies (attached).…More - The “intellectual cyborg”
My post from 26 October 2013 called “What’s wrong with posthumanism” addressed the concept of the cyborg. By most accounts, the cyborg is an ambiguous category of human being whose functional performance is sustained by artificial supplementation and enhancements — from reading glasses to prosthetic limbs. The original proposition came from NASA scientists who identified…More - Metafiction and metaphor
Most fictional writing makes generous use of figurative language: hyperbole (exaggeration), anthropomorphism, simile. This much is obvious. As a reminder, here’s a fragment of imaginative writing from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city.…More
Category: Architecture
- The AI skillset
- Gathered round the bath
- What lies around the corner
- Reverse parametrics
- Bohemian melancholy
- Metafiction and metaphor
- How to explain art
- What was I thinking!
- Faroese chain dancing
- Adaptive re-use of digital content
- Pause for effect
- 2011 and all that
- 2010 redux
- AI fever dreams
- Mandala and metaphor
- Intentional systems
- Cryptographic City
- Of what do AIs dream?
- Lucky places
- In here and out there
- Panpsychism and pragmatism
- Panpsychism and the origins of the city
- An intelligent conversation about architecture
- City of gold
- Bitcoin City
- Exaggeration (revisited)
- “Blockchain for architects” revisited
- Advise, advocate, lobby, conspire
- The advocate
- Hash blogs
- Hiding messages in DNA
- Nano-origami
- DNA cryptography
- Urban cryptography
- Life in the metaverse
- Urban affordances
- Cities as media
- The sky alphabet
- The secret machine
- Cryptography and the Baroque
- Useless encryption
- Truth, lies and architecture
- Key exchange: It’s a wrap!
- Elliptic fields
- Sharing a secret number
- Elliptic trapdoors
- RSA public key encryption
- Asymmetric key encryption
- Primes
- Failure for sale
- Shibboleth
- Quantum Internet
- How architecture keeps its secrets
- Seven secrets
- Secret architecture
- Secret society
- Secrets of the lodge
- Decryptopolis
- Filter variables
- Secret norms
- Permeable portals
- Parallel worlds
- Hidden dimensions
- What’s popular?
- What comes next?
- Hidden beats
- Beyond averages: DCT graphics
- Hiding one surface inside another
- Ornament and crime
- Steganography for architects
- How to hide one picture inside another
- Urbanise rasterise
- Less is more: Signatures, cities and hash codes
- What a calamity!
- Architecture post-COVID
- Patholopolis
- Flightless cars
- The word on the street
- Perspecticide
- The smart of the deal
- Nested parentheticals
- The platformization of cultural labour
- Recursive cities
- I am not a statistic!
- Too much information
- Obfuscate!
- A thousand insides
- Forked paths
- City on a hill
- Hacking the unicursal labyrinth
- Unicursality
- Infinite souq
- Hacking the city of the future
- The twist of the pen
- Don’t go into the crypt!
- The treehouse
- Eliminate the impossible
- Riddle of the Sphinx
- Unlocked
- Architecture’s pragmatic turn
