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