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Blog archive (and About)

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, 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.

Blogs home page

Posts

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

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