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
Quantum Internet
How architecture keeps its secrets
Seven secrets
Secret architecture
Secret society
Secrets of the lodge
Camouflaged incitement
Fighting words
Crypto-conspiracy
CryptoArt 101
Decryptopolis
Deplatformed
Filter variables
What’s the use of variables?
Unclear thinking
Secret norms
Place is the code
Permeable portals
Parallel worlds
Hidden dimensions
How to fail at populism
High energy supstition
Counting letters
Speech to text
II V I and all that jazz
What’s popular
What comes next
Hidden beats
Is blogging obsolete?
Visitor rhythms
Tremble and drift
Visualising 2d discrete cosine transforms
Rhythmanalysis
Beyond average DCT for architects
The culture of the GIF
Subliminal messaging
Hiding one surface inside another
Ornament and crime
Steganography for architects
How to hide one picture inside another
Urbanise rasterise
Less is more: Signatures, cities and hash codes
Crypto-sceptics
Beware of this message
What a calamity!
Too cool for video
Architecture post-COVID
Living with virions [and Ro]
COVID couture
Patholopolis
The third great confinement
Pandi noir
Quarantine and geometry
China’s oceans of everyday data
The dissimulated city
Write me a city
Flightless cars
Digital cash 101
Pseudo-crypto currencies
The future of prediction
Shock and plunder
Surveillance capitalism and its discontents
Sociable encryption: The secret of the five keys
Glitch demons
Whispirators — In praise of whispers
Dark whisperers
The pleasures of the mouth
The word on the street
Perspecticide
Bulk data collection and privacy
Offensive media
The smart of the deal
Nested parentheticals
The platformization of cultural labour
Recursion again
Recursive cities
Getting what he deserves
What’s wrong with gamification?
Gamification 101
Wood-wide web
Is it getting harder to be good?
I am not a statistic!
Obfuscation and its remedies
Too much information
Obfuscate!
A thousand insides
Forked paths
City on a hill
Hacking the unicursal labyrinth
Unicursality
Infinite souq
Hacking the city of the future
The twist of the pen
Don’t go into the crypt!
Apocalypse then
The twist
Escapology 101
The treehouse
The lion and the jackal
Africa calling: How to say a lot with a little
Wild signs (Africa edition)
Eliminate the impossible
Riddle of the Sphinx
Unlocked
Architecture’s pragmatic turn
Tags and codes
Trash talk
One knock for yes two for no
Everything is code
A life of crime
Breaking and entering
Executive secrets
Improper arrangements
Iconophobia
No interpreter required
The immoveable typist
The memory wheel
Architecture and espionage
Organic cyberwars
Families and crime: Kompromat 102
Individual-1: Kompromat 101
Enter title here
Millennials and Morals
Second Life revisited
Disintegrated intelligence
AI revisited
Secret listening: Private, personal, portable podcasts
This man has a sign
A word in your ear: Podcasting for introverts
Haze
Stupid postmodernism
What a mess!
Bad players
Deviant play
Just Google it: Netnography in practice
The death of a public life
Fade to black: LiDAR in the age of extinction
Weaponise!
Rogue fan fiction: the peculiar case of QAnon
Least commitment principle
Hustle, twitter, bells and banter
Cooperation and complicity
Translate me
Rhematic architecture
Full indexical jacket
You can fool all the people some of the time
Undisciplinarity
Whatever works
Indexical architecture
On being a detective
Whatever happened to reality?
Signs in architecture and music
What’s wrong with iconic architecture
Invisible icons
Challenges of the sharing economy
Elect a clown; expect a circus
Hermeneutics and logic
Speak truth to power
A brief history of signs
What is pansemiotics?
When is a building like a bang?
What post humanists want
Four-fold reality
Hunch, symptom, clue
Shadow of a doubt
Inside out logic
Marx on nonsense
Nonsensical signs
Diagrammatics 101
Peirce decoded
The power of ten
What does a theory look like?
Triadomania
Semiotic shock
Index fever
Calculating belief
Climate change and doubt
Cracks and flaws
Pointlessness
On being clear and distinct
AI and advertising
What’s wrong with the sharing economy
Troll farming
Encrypted city
Romancing the blockchain
Share city
How smart are smart contracts?
Sign here ……………………
Decode this
An anti-hacker puzzle
Why hackers have to work hard
Immutable data
Dark web anonymity
The sarcophagus at the end of the Anthropocene
Postcard from Chernobyl
Wasting time in the bit economy
Is the Internet really evil?
Digital money
Is it ok to cite web pages in academic writing
Fake followers
Reverse analytics
Outsiders
What’s wrong with accelerationism
In bad taste
Politics as art
Emotional targeting
Automatic writing
Reverse image search
Armchair postmodernism
You have reached your destination
Brainwalks
End of nature
“Deconstructing” the curriculum
Less of one and more of the other
Inmate takes over the asylum
Network Nature
Garage labs and biohacks
Extreme tweeting for professionals
Unaugurate
No retreat: 360 video and the visible camera operator
The dark net wilderness
Biocentrism
The biolingual architect
Slime and goo
Lifeless architecture
Archi-memes
Are humans just machines for propagating tweets?
What is nature for?
Web of nature
Self-reliance and the accessorised self
The end of DIY
Your post-human descendants are simulating you
What does architecture represent?
What’s the point of symbols?
Whatever happened to architectural semiotics?
On being unbalanced
Is 360 degree video more real?
Is post-truth politics a thing?
The magic circle
What happens when the machine stops?
The well tempered intellectual
Nature as the site of hermeneutical play
Digital “detox”
Video game semiotics
Pokémon Go versus Ingress
Biosemiotics
Machine genomics
Only design will save Europe’s future
The great debate debate
Shakespeare on nature
Forests that think
There’s an app for that
Reading the book of nature
One with nature
Nature in retrospect
Smarter surfaces
Mixed feelings
What’s wrong with postmodernism
Sentient spaces
Nature games
Champions of the Anthropocene
Goodbye Holocene
How to be interesting
Cute and cuddly
The best there is
Evaluating the flipped classroom
Flipped classroom 103: Engagement
Flipped classroom 102: What a performance!
Flipped classroom 101
Animating spirits
Thinking naturally
Shape-shifting architecture
Trauma and fauna
The wisdom of animals
Is cyberspace real?
Unnatural acts
What’s wrong with the force
Cover up
Testing ethical acuity
The hermeneutical intractability of Asimov’s three laws of robotics
How to make a case out of a post
How animals make us think
Stupidities (Why cartoons have animals 3)
Wonders exposed
Like this
AI and imagination
Big corpus
Post-digital humanities
Refugees have smartphones too
Big Data: a non-theory about everything
Big data metaphysics
What’s wrong with post-digital cultures
Am I post-digital?
When did we become post-digital?
Indexcess
The enormous fly wheel
Best intentions
How geometry aids recollection
Blood lines
The empathy bus
Attending to the world
How to grow a project
Bear in the park
A sudden prospect
Aha moments
Frustration
The Internet as research tool
Introducing hermeneutics to an architectural audience
Natural enemies
Interactive architecture
Milking human kindness
Copy edits
Divided cities
Design hermeneutics revisited
What have the arts to do with ethics?
Academic writing and publishing online
Brand melancholy
Poiēsis
Nature and the city
Remaking the city
Making nature
Windowphilia
Profoundly bored
Against empathy
The animal within
Rich media overload
Vertigo on a stick
The singularity paradox
The big book of hermeneutics
Unsuccessful failure
The hook
Even more radical pedagogy
After dark
Emotional labourers
Good morning melancholia
Losing it
Writer’s block
Do digital devices influence your mood?
Nature versus smartphones
Back of shop
Social media help you to believe what you want to believe
Looking backwards
Eye contact
Space dehomogenised
Where does happiness happen?
Emotional words
What’s wrong with the digital humanities
Emotional contagion
Mood and movement (and dance)
You are now free to move about the cabin
What do maps do?
Moods and movies
A step up
Zeitgeist busters
Mood and movement (and trams)
How bored is your dog?
Time and tide wait for no one
Born of the Earth
Deconstruct that!
Nature-deficiency disorder
Refuge
Go outside and play
Why cartoons have animals 2
Music makes it better
Life-changing technologies
Unlocking nature’s secrets
Moody atmospheres and electric auras
The online scholar: A guide for PhD students
Wet and wild
Betwixt and between
Humanities in the wild
Turning the corner
Gathered round the hearth
Genius headgear
Showing off
What’s wrong with parametricism
Architectural pragmatics
Frequent feelings
Morphic fields
Enchanted places
How to slow down time
In meditative mood
Voices without bodies
The cult of the book
The benefits of walking
Feeling free in flight
Why experts are better than algorithms
What’s wrong with posthumanism
Bad metaphors
What I really meant to say
Absence of melancholy
Internet as evidence
The hegemony of good taste
Buying time
Let’s play
Art challenges life
Derrida for stand-ups
Melancholy urbanism
Some wild life
Signature city
Cappuccino epidemic
Pride of place
Mastering the universe
Freeways in the sky
Howling at the moon
Accentuate the negative
As the mood takes you
Digital mood modifiers
I’m in the mood for love
The past is a construct of the mind
Why music reaches the parts that architecture can’t
Delayed gratification
Pros and cons of Google Scholar
What’s wrong with the future
Are you aware of your brain?
Mood machines
Soft fascination
The melancholy medium
Your inner child
Well-being and geometry
The brain in the city
Oblivion
Swinging
Shallow reading
Richard on the Holodeck
Loose ends
Pleasure with malice
Is the high street ruining the Internet?
The happy medium
Ambient wit
Interpretation by design
Web of belief
Lego logics
What does it all mean?
Old enough to know better
Universities as interpretive communities
Shōjo Manga morals
Vitruvius does steampunk
What’s a modem?
Brand me
Cooperation or complicity
Manifestos and madness
The bliss of ignorance
Interpretive communities
Making friends
Bodies in motion
Audience disengagement
Spem in Alium
Situationist International and the mood of the times
We are all entertainers
How the Internet kills curiosity
Melancholy and media
Mad crowds disease
Unearthing the trickster function in Icelandic myth
Maximum graphic
Synesthesia anesthesia
Crowdfunding in the gift society
What’s wrong with this picture?
Ambience on demand
Heidegger and vertigo
Nomadology and colour
Intoxicated by colour
Haunted by media
Posh boys and mirror neurons
Why cartoons have animals
Exaggeration
Bauhaus geek
Data waste
The eye of the beholder
Urban occupy
Conservative hermeneutics
Architectural unconscious
Mystery philosopher fakes own death
What buildings want
Panoptic man
Circles and how to get out of them
Le Corbusier’s error
Meditation on a blunt instrument
The opposite of architecture
The reception of architecture
Arboreal architecture gets wrong end of the stick
Pictures devour reality
Inconspicuous architecture
Kim Jong-Il orz
Countercultural values
Why ask?
Almost to infinity
What has science got to do with it?
After affects
Sequel-baiting
The quantification of the intellect
Network notion
Amnesiac machines
3D passive unrealities
Accidental people
De-generation
Neuroscience eclipses AI
Game noir
Play anywhere
What are audiences for?
Portable memories
No way logo
Thought transfer
A nation addicted to smartphones
The secret life of games
Phone hacking enigmas
What were the skies like when you were young?
E-motion
LOL Security reproduces the trickster function
Obliquitous computing
Reality re-structured
Computer-supported collaborative distraction
All watched over by Ayn Rand
I am Spartacus
Against understanding
Being practical
This is not a hideout
Digital metaphors and the baroque
No-thing as it seems
Now is the winter of our disconnect
The Creosote Code
Derrida for Architects (index)
Hygienic reality
Wicked problems revisited
The sublime indifference of waves
We are all multiples
Architecture as the last fortress
The king’s speech impediment
Profile yourself (Narcissus on line)
Otaku architecture
Electronic commerce, philosophy and the Greek city
Zero Stars
Superlatives
Walking the line
Travel guidelines
Silent night
Chasing the line
Making a noise
Computer images and realism
Derrida and WikiLeaks
Brain Scans and Creativity
Architectural remainder
Architecture and Music
Being David Hockney
The Future is Unremarkable
Transilience
Hermeneutics and ethics
Design-led research
Research is a grey area
Written any good books lately?
Mass media schedules and generation Y
Where is that sound?
The Internet as hypertext or archive
Tuning as …
Pages
Structuralism in architecture: not a style but a tool for critique
The one and the many
AI article
Architectural Theory
Branded Meeting Places
Branded Meeting Places Final Report
Heidegger on technology
Secrets of writing for the web
Wired-Up Words
Writing texts that flow
Computers in Practice Report (PDF)
Conference Proceedings: Universities as Interpretive Communities 1993 (PDF)
Conference Proceedings: Gadamer, Action, Reason 1991 (PDF)
MSc by Research in Digital Media and Culture
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