Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

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

Metafiction and melancholy

A metafiction typically reflects on the writing process of the author as the work is being written. Either fictional characters assume the role of the author of the piece, or actual authors weave themselves into the story and reflect on their own processes. Metafiction is an appropriate genre with which to explore melancholy. Scholars have…More

Pastimes revisited

I’m looking back at some of my blog posts from 2013. The posts canvas the topics: gaming culture, time management, design transitions, and online inference. As it happens, they each circle around the subject of evidence. Evidence is material for narrative, delay, aesthetic judgement, and inference. Let’s Play introduces the sociability of play, including video gaming…More

A tissue of citations

I’ve just completed an essay for a special edition of Architectural Theory Review in honour of my friend and former colleague Adrian Snodgrass, who passed away last year. Adrian introduced me to structuralism, semiotics and hermeneutics. In part of that essay I reference the writing of the literary theorist and cultural semiologist Roland Barthes (1915-1980).…More