Newsletter archive (and About)

What this 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 Tuesday and for an unspecified period, though the line is unbroken from August 2010!

I have developed some of the themes shown here in books. See the list of books in the right menu. 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 25 posts (with extracts)

  • Do AIs have feelings?
    Feelings are in the body, but emotions are in language. How does this proposition impinge on the question of whether AIs have feelings?More
  • This is not the age of AI
    Labels like “age of AI” simplify complex issues, overshadowing individual experiences and who defines them.More
  • Reiterate that
    Explores rhythm vs. repetition in nature, music, and AI language models—complex yet fascinating interactions.More
  • AI and autochthony
    How attachment to the soil engenders identity, dignity and transhuman transgression.More
  • Outdoor update
    The article discusses nature’s benefits, technology’s role, and evolving engagement with AI in nature.More
  • The singing animal
    The reflections on human-animal interactions reveal complexities in emotional responses and perceptions of non-human animals.More
  • The AI skillset
    AI reveals and reshapes architectural practice, highlighting tasks, roles, and knowledge responsibilities previously overlooked.More
  • Cyberbullies
    I examine cyberbullying through the lens of the play function in society.More
  • Mood making
    Creating mood is an active labor involving making, influencing our experience of places.More
  • Guilty secrets
    The post discusses integrating AI into research practices, emphasizing its evolving role and implications.More
  • Gathered round the bath
    I start from Vitruvius’ celebration of the hearth, progress to the central role of bathing, and use AI to generate some videos.More
  • What lies around the corner
    Revisiting old posts, I explore the allure of hidden prospect, and illustrate with some AI video.More
  • Life by the fire
    I recruit AI to animate an old photograph to illustrate companionship round an open fire.More
  • Is anyone paying attention?
    How AI seems to be paying attention to users and their every word.More
  • Reverse parametrics
    The post explores challenges in deriving 3D models from AI-generated images, highlighting diffusion model limitations.More
  • Truth and image
    Pragmatism emphasizes actions over philosophical correctness, illustrated with a synthetic video.More
  • Bohemian melancholy
    I discuss AI video generation at Helga’s Folly, exploring themes of melancholy and perspective.More
  • The enchanted garden
    I explore enchantment, transforming objects from inert to alive via AI video, mixing delight with horror.More
  • Mobility and contemplation
    Signifiers of visual enchantment illustrated by some AI-generated videos of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka, and the Faroes.More
  • Surprise videos
    Update on synthetic video creation and the surprise element. Illustrated with scenes from a Buddhist cave in Sri Lanka.More
  • A place to meditate
    Sri Lanka’s Buddha statues embody meditation, blending spirituality with public engagement and encouraging “distributed meditation” practices.More
  • A compendium of marvels
    The author explores existential oddities while examining manuscripts in a Qatari museum, using AI insights.More
  • Voices without bodies 2
    The post reflects on the evolving significance of voice in technology and cinema.More
  • The clone and I
    Video cloning produces uncanny effects. I demonstrate with my own cloned voice and image.More
  • Thinking about walking
    I linked my cloned avatar and voice to re-present this article from 2013 about walking.More

Latest 100 posts

First 10 years of posts

Posts

 

  1. Quantum Internet
  2. How architecture keeps its secrets
  3. Seven secrets
  4. Secret architecture
  5. Secret society
  6. Secrets of the lodge
  7. Camouflaged incitement
  8. Fighting words
  9. Crypto-conspiracy
  10. CryptoArt 101
  11. Decryptopolis
  12. Deplatformed
  13. Filter variables
  14. What’s the use of variables?
  15. Unclear thinking
  16. Secret norms
  17. Place is the code
  18. Permeable portals
  19. Parallel worlds
  20. Hidden dimensions
  21. How to fail at populism
  22. High energy supstition
  23. Counting letters
  24. Speech to text
  25. II V I and all that jazz
  26. What’s popular
  27. What comes next
  28. Hidden beats
  29. Is blogging obsolete?
  30. Visitor rhythms
  31. Tremble and drift
  32. Visualising 2d discrete cosine transforms
  33. Rhythmanalysis
  34. Beyond average DCT for architects
  35. The culture of the GIF
  36. Subliminal messaging
  37. Hiding one surface inside another
  38. Ornament and crime
  39. Steganography for architects
  40. How to hide one picture inside another
  41. Urbanise rasterise
  42. Less is more: Signatures, cities and hash codes
  43. Crypto-sceptics
  44. Beware of this message
  45. What a calamity!
  46. Too cool for video
  47. Architecture post-COVID
  48. Living with virions [and Ro]
  49. COVID couture
  50. Patholopolis
  51. The third great confinement
  52. Pandi noir
  53. Quarantine and geometry
  54. China’s oceans of everyday data
  55. The dissimulated city
  56. Write me a city
  57. Flightless cars
  58. Digital cash 101
  59. Pseudo-crypto currencies
  60. The future of prediction
  61. Shock and plunder
  62. Surveillance capitalism and its discontents
  63. Sociable encryption: The secret of the five keys
  64. Glitch demons
  65. Whispirators — In praise of whispers
  66. Dark whisperers
  67. The pleasures of the mouth
  68. The word on the street
  69. Perspecticide
  70. Bulk data collection and privacy
  71. Offensive media
  72. The smart of the deal
  73. Nested parentheticals
  74. The platformization of cultural labour
  75. Recursion again
  76. Recursive cities
  77. Getting what he deserves
  78. What’s wrong with gamification?
  79. Gamification 101
  80. Wood-wide web
  81. Is it getting harder to be good?
  82. I am not a statistic!
  83. Obfuscation and its remedies
  84. Too much information
  85. Obfuscate!
  86. A thousand insides
  87. Forked paths
  88. City on a hill
  89. Hacking the unicursal labyrinth
  90. Unicursality
  91. Infinite souq
  92. Hacking the city of the future
  93. The twist of the pen
  94. Don’t go into the crypt!
  95. Apocalypse then
  96. The twist
  97. Escapology 101
  98. The treehouse
  99. The lion and the jackal
  100. Africa calling: How to say a lot with a little
  101. Wild signs (Africa edition)
  102. Eliminate the impossible
  103. Riddle of the Sphinx
  104. Unlocked
  105. Architecture’s pragmatic turn
  106. Tags and codes
  107. Trash talk
  108. One knock for yes two for no
  109. Everything is code
  110. A life of crime
  111. Breaking and entering
  112. Executive secrets
  113. Improper arrangements
  114. Iconophobia
  115. No interpreter required
  116. The immoveable typist
  117. The memory wheel
  118. Architecture and espionage
  119. Organic cyberwars
  120. Families and crime: Kompromat 102
  121. Individual-1: Kompromat 101
  122. Enter title here
  123. Millennials and Morals
  124. Second Life revisited
  125. Disintegrated intelligence
  126. AI revisited
  127. Secret listening: Private, personal, portable podcasts
  128. This man has a sign
  129. A word in your ear: Podcasting for introverts
  130. Haze
  131. Stupid postmodernism
  132. What a mess!
  133. Bad players
  134. Deviant play
  135. Just Google it: Netnography in practice
  136. The death of a public life
  137. Fade to black: LiDAR in the age of extinction
  138. Weaponise!
  139. Rogue fan fiction: the peculiar case of QAnon
  140. Least commitment principle
  141. Hustle, twitter, bells and banter
  142. Cooperation and complicity
  143. Translate me
  144. Rhematic architecture
  145. Full indexical jacket
  146. You can fool all the people some of the time
  147. Undisciplinarity
  148. Whatever works
  149. Indexical architecture
  150. On being a detective
  151. Whatever happened to reality?
  152. Signs in architecture and music
  153. What’s wrong with iconic architecture
  154. Invisible icons
  155. Challenges of the sharing economy
  156. Elect a clown; expect a circus
  157. Hermeneutics and logic
  158. Speak truth to power
  159. A brief history of signs
  160. What is pansemiotics?
  161. When is a building like a bang?
  162. What post humanists want
  163. Four-fold reality
  164. Hunch, symptom, clue
  165. Shadow of a doubt
  166. Inside out logic
  167. Marx on nonsense
  168. Nonsensical signs
  169. Diagrammatics 101
  170. Peirce decoded
  171. The power of ten
  172. What does a theory look like?
  173. Triadomania
  174. Semiotic shock
  175. Index fever
  176. Calculating belief
  177. Climate change and doubt
  178. Cracks and flaws
  179. Pointlessness
  180. On being clear and distinct
  181. AI and advertising
  182. What’s wrong with the sharing economy
  183. Troll farming
  184. Encrypted city
  185. Romancing the blockchain
  186. Share city
  187. How smart are smart contracts?
  188. Sign here ……………………
  189. Decode this
  190. An anti-hacker puzzle
  191. Why hackers have to work hard
  192. Immutable data
  193. Dark web anonymity
  194. The sarcophagus at the end of the Anthropocene
  195. Postcard from Chernobyl
  196. Wasting time in the bit economy
  197. Is the Internet really evil?
  198. Digital money
  199. Is it ok to cite web pages in academic writing
  200. Fake followers
  201. Reverse analytics
  202. Outsiders
  203. What’s wrong with accelerationism
  204. In bad taste
  205. Politics as art
  206. Emotional targeting
  207. Automatic writing
  208. Reverse image search
  209. Armchair postmodernism
  210. You have reached your destination
  211. Brainwalks
  212. End of nature
  213. “Deconstructing” the curriculum
  214. Less of one and more of the other
  215. Inmate takes over the asylum
  216. Network Nature
  217. Garage labs and biohacks
  218. Extreme tweeting for professionals
  219. Unaugurate
  220. No retreat: 360 video and the visible camera operator
  221. The dark net wilderness
  222. Biocentrism
  223. The biolingual architect
  224. Slime and goo
  225. Lifeless architecture
  226. Archi-memes
  227. Are humans just machines for propagating tweets?
  228. What is nature for?
  229. Web of nature
  230. Self-reliance and the accessorised self
  231. The end of DIY
  232. Your post-human descendants are simulating you
  233. What does architecture represent?
  234. What’s the point of symbols?
  235. Whatever happened to architectural semiotics?
  236. On being unbalanced
  237. Is 360 degree video more real?
  238. Is post-truth politics a thing?
  239. The magic circle
  240. What happens when the machine stops?
  241. The well tempered intellectual
  242. Nature as the site of hermeneutical play
  243. Digital “detox”
  244. Video game semiotics
  245. Pokémon Go versus Ingress
  246. Biosemiotics
  247. Machine genomics
  248. Only design will save Europe’s future
  249. The great debate debate
  250. Shakespeare on nature
  251. Forests that think
  252. There’s an app for that
  253. Reading the book of nature
  254. One with nature
  255. Nature in retrospect
  256. Smarter surfaces
  257. Mixed feelings
  258. What’s wrong with postmodernism
  259. Sentient spaces
  260. Nature games
  261. Champions of the Anthropocene
  262. Goodbye Holocene
  263. How to be interesting
  264. Cute and cuddly
  265. The best there is
  266. Evaluating the flipped classroom
  267. Flipped classroom 103: Engagement
  268. Flipped classroom 102: What a performance!
  269. Flipped classroom 101
  270. Animating spirits
  271. Thinking naturally
  272. Shape-shifting architecture
  273. Trauma and fauna
  274. The wisdom of animals
  275. Is cyberspace real?
  276. Unnatural acts
  277. What’s wrong with the force
  278. Cover up
  279. Testing ethical acuity
  280. The hermeneutical intractability of Asimov’s three laws of robotics
  281. How to make a case out of a post
  282. How animals make us think
  283. Stupidities (Why cartoons have animals 3)
  284. Wonders exposed
  285. Like this
  286. AI and imagination
  287. Big corpus
  288. Post-digital humanities
  289. Refugees have smartphones too
  290. Big Data: a non-theory about everything
  291. Big data metaphysics
  292. What’s wrong with post-digital cultures
  293. Am I post-digital?
  294. When did we become post-digital?
  295. Indexcess
  296. The enormous fly wheel
  297. Best intentions
  298. How geometry aids recollection
  299. Blood lines
  300. The empathy bus
  301. Attending to the world
  302. How to grow a project
  303. Bear in the park
  304. A sudden prospect
  305. Aha moments
  306. Frustration
  307. The Internet as research tool
  308. Introducing hermeneutics to an architectural audience
  309. Natural enemies
  310. Interactive architecture
  311. Milking human kindness
  312. Copy edits
  313. Divided cities
  314. Design hermeneutics revisited
  315. What have the arts to do with ethics?
  316. Academic writing and publishing online
  317. Brand melancholy
  318. Poiēsis
  319. Nature and the city
  320. Remaking the city
  321. Making nature
  322. Windowphilia
  323. Profoundly bored
  324. Against empathy
  325. The animal within
  326. Rich media overload
  327. Vertigo on a stick
  328. The singularity paradox
  329. The big book of hermeneutics
  330. Unsuccessful failure
  331. The hook
  332. Even more radical pedagogy
  333. After dark
  334. Emotional labourers
  335. Good morning melancholia
  336. Losing it
  337. Writer’s block
  338. Do digital devices influence your mood?
  339. Nature versus smartphones
  340. Back of shop
  341. Social media help you to believe what you want to believe
  342. Looking backwards
  343. Eye contact
  344. Space dehomogenised
  345. Where does happiness happen?
  346. Emotional words
  347. What’s wrong with the digital humanities
  348. Emotional contagion
  349. Mood and movement (and dance)
  350. You are now free to move about the cabin
  351. What do maps do?
  352. Moods and movies
  353. A step up
  354. Zeitgeist busters
  355. Mood and movement (and trams)
  356. How bored is your dog?
  357. Time and tide wait for no one
  358. Born of the Earth
  359. Deconstruct that!
  360. Nature-deficiency disorder
  361. Refuge
  362. Go outside and play
  363. Why cartoons have animals 2
  364. Music makes it better
  365. Life-changing technologies
  366. Unlocking nature’s secrets
  367. Moody atmospheres and electric auras
  368. The online scholar: A guide for PhD students
  369. Wet and wild
  370. Betwixt and between
  371. Humanities in the wild
  372. Turning the corner
  373. Gathered round the hearth
  374. Genius headgear
  375. Showing off
  376. What’s wrong with parametricism
  377. Architectural pragmatics
  378. Frequent feelings
  379. Morphic fields
  380. Enchanted places
  381. How to slow down time
  382. In meditative mood
  383. Voices without bodies
  384. The cult of the book
  385. The benefits of walking
  386. Feeling free in flight
  387. Why experts are better than algorithms
  388. What’s wrong with posthumanism
  389. Bad metaphors
  390. What I really meant to say
  391. Absence of melancholy
  392. Internet as evidence
  393. The hegemony of good taste
  394. Buying time
  395. Let’s play
  396. Art challenges life
  397. Derrida for stand-ups
  398. Melancholy urbanism
  399. Some wild life
  400. Signature city
  401. Cappuccino epidemic
  402. Pride of place
  403. Mastering the universe
  404. Freeways in the sky
  405. Howling at the moon
  406. Accentuate the negative
  407. As the mood takes you
  408. Digital mood modifiers
  409. I’m in the mood for love
  410. The past is a construct of the mind
  411. Why music reaches the parts that architecture can’t
  412. Delayed gratification
  413. Pros and cons of Google Scholar
  414. What’s wrong with the future
  415. Are you aware of your brain?
  416. Mood machines
  417. Soft fascination
  418. The melancholy medium
  419. Your inner child
  420. Well-being and geometry
  421. The brain in the city
  422. Oblivion
  423. Swinging
  424. Shallow reading
  425. Richard on the Holodeck
  426. Loose ends
  427. Pleasure with malice
  428. Is the high street ruining the Internet?
  429. The happy medium
  430. Ambient wit
  431. Interpretation by design
  432. Web of belief
  433. Lego logics
  434. What does it all mean?
  435. Old enough to know better
  436. Universities as interpretive communities
  437. Shōjo Manga morals
  438. Vitruvius does steampunk
  439. What’s a modem?
  440. Brand me
  441. Cooperation or complicity
  442. Manifestos and madness
  443. The bliss of ignorance
  444. Interpretive communities
  445. Making friends
  446. Bodies in motion
  447. Audience disengagement
  448. Spem in Alium
  449. Situationist International and the mood of the times
  450. We are all entertainers
  451. How the Internet kills curiosity
  452. Melancholy and media
  453. Mad crowds disease
  454. Unearthing the trickster function in Icelandic myth
  455. Maximum graphic
  456. Synesthesia anesthesia
  457. Crowdfunding in the gift society
  458. What’s wrong with this picture?
  459. Ambience on demand
  460. Heidegger and vertigo
  461. Nomadology and colour
  462. Intoxicated by colour
  463. Haunted by media
  464. Posh boys and mirror neurons
  465. Why cartoons have animals
  466. Exaggeration
  467. Bauhaus geek
  468. Data waste
  469. The eye of the beholder
  470. Urban occupy
  471. Conservative hermeneutics
  472. Architectural unconscious
  473. Mystery philosopher fakes own death
  474. What buildings want
  475. Panoptic man
  476. Circles and how to get out of them
  477. Le Corbusier’s error
  478. Meditation on a blunt instrument
  479. The opposite of architecture
  480. The reception of architecture
  481. Arboreal architecture gets wrong end of the stick
  482. Pictures devour reality
  483. Inconspicuous architecture
  484. Kim Jong-Il orz
  485. Countercultural values
  486. Why ask?
  487. Almost to infinity
  488. What has science got to do with it?
  489. After affects
  490. Sequel-baiting
  491. The quantification of the intellect
  492. Network notion
  493. Amnesiac machines
  494. 3D passive unrealities
  495. Accidental people
  496. De-generation
  497. Neuroscience eclipses AI
  498. Game noir
  499. Play anywhere
  500. What are audiences for?
  501. Portable memories
  502. No way logo
  503. Thought transfer
  504. A nation addicted to smartphones
  505. The secret life of games
  506. Phone hacking enigmas
  507. What were the skies like when you were young?
  508. E-motion
  509. LOL Security reproduces the trickster function
  510. Obliquitous computing
  511. Reality re-structured
  512. Computer-supported collaborative distraction
  513. All watched over by Ayn Rand
  514. I am Spartacus
  515. Against understanding
  516. Being practical
  517. This is not a hideout
  518. Digital metaphors and the baroque
  519. No-thing as it seems
  520. Now is the winter of our disconnect
  521. The Creosote Code
  522. Derrida for Architects (index)
  523. Hygienic reality
  524. Wicked problems revisited
  525. The sublime indifference of waves
  526. We are all multiples
  527. Architecture as the last fortress
  528. The king’s speech impediment
  529. Profile yourself (Narcissus on line)
  530. Otaku architecture
  531. Electronic commerce, philosophy and the Greek city
  532. Zero Stars
  533. Superlatives
  534. Walking the line
  535. Travel guidelines
  536. Silent night
  537. Chasing the line
  538. Making a noise
  539. Computer images and realism
  540. Derrida and WikiLeaks
  541. Brain Scans and Creativity
  542. Architectural remainder
  543. Architecture and Music
  544. Being David Hockney
  545. The Future is Unremarkable
  546. Transilience
  547. Hermeneutics and ethics
  548. Design-led research
  549. Research is a grey area
  550. Written any good books lately?
  551. Mass media schedules and generation Y
  552. Where is that sound?
  553. The Internet as hypertext or archive
  554. Tuning as …

 

 Pages

 

  1. Structuralism in architecture: not a style but a tool for critique
  2. The one and the many
  3. AI article
  4. Architectural Theory
  5. Branded Meeting Places
  6. Branded Meeting Places Final Report
  7. Heidegger on technology
  8. Secrets of writing for the web
  9. Wired-Up Words
  10. Writing texts that flow
  11. Computers in Practice Report (PDF)
  12. Conference Proceedings: Universities as Interpretive Communities 1993 (PDF)
  13. Conference Proceedings: Gadamer, Action, Reason 1991 (PDF)
  14. MSc by Research in Digital Media and Culture

Some categories

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