Author Archives: Richard Coyne

The cultural, social and spatial implications of computers and pervasive digital media spark my interest ... enjoy architecture, writing, designing, philosophy, coding and media mashups.

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