There’s been a lot on reddit lately about Lego bricks: How many Legos, stacked one on top of the other, would it take to destroy the bottom brick? There’s lots to learn from toy construction sets, not least how creativity happens … or doesn’t. In the first flush of enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and automated…More
What does it all mean?
Art provides a soft target for opinion and prejudice. I recently read a comment at the end of a Huffington Post blog about the 2012 Turner prize winner (Elizabeth Price): “most of the stuff is self-indulgent nonsense that couldn’t possibly mean anything to anyone other than the artist.” Meaning is tricky. Think of meaning as…More
Old enough to know better
Sylvain Chomet created the animated films Belleville Rendez-Vous and The Illusionist. His earlier successful short film was called The Old Lady and the Pigeons. Art and entertainment often draw on the skilful manipulation of stereotypes, and their exaggeration. Skilful animators such as Chomet make their characters sufficiently recognisable and true to type, but with a…More
Universities as interpretive communities
If Thomas Eddison thought that the phonograph “could keep the voices of the dead alive,” then what about those new photocopiers that enable you to feed in stacks of A4 sheets of type and deliver PDFs to your email address, ready for processing via OCR, and re-publishing. Dormant publications on lost or unreadable storage media…More
Shōjo Manga morals
Shōjo Manga is a genre of Japanese graphic novel, animation and merchandising that’s marketed for a young female audience. Search images for “Princess Tutu” for some saccharine sweetness laced with cute gooeyness. You could be forgiven for thinking it’s kids’ stuff. But whatever manga is, it’s not innocent. We are not 14 anymore. Transformation features…More
Vitruvius does steampunk
Steampunk is an aesthetic movement that visualises the future as predicted during the Industrial Revolution … or as we imagine it might have been predicted. Think of flying to the moon in a space vehicle clad in steel plates and sliding windows held together by heavy bolts and rivets, and propelled by the properties of…More
What’s a modem?
A note from the past: Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a class of computer-based technologies that assist people to get in touch with each other, a facility taken for granted in universities since the inception of the Internet and electronic mail (email) in the 1970s, and now finding its way into the business world. What are…More
Brand me
Social media encourages, and even requires, personal branding. According to a leading self-help book on brand and image, your personal brand is “what people say about you when you are out of the room.” So I guess my brand is, “When is he going to get back with those coffees!” Mark Globé identifies the prominence…More
Cooperation or complicity
According to Karl Marx “crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social source of crime must be destroyed” (p.154). Liberal democracies modify this to something like: crime must not only be punished in the individual, but the social sources of crime must be held to account. So the liberal press directs anger…More
Manifestos and madness
There’s something careless, wanton, dangerous, arbitrary, crazed, and appealing about overstatement. The author of the recent graffiti vandalism of a painting at the Tate Modern (Guardian) has a website called the Manifesto of Yellowism — which highlights the madness of all manifestos. A flourish of satirical art-speak tells us, “In the context of Yellowism, all…More