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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. Themes developed here form the basis of companion books for a course on digital media and culture. Suggestions are welcome. All pictures in posts are my own where not otherwise acknowledged.

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
Roll over links to see summaries in some cases (starts with most recent)

Posts

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