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