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