I’ve just completed an essay for a special edition of Architectural Theory Review in honour of my friend and former colleague Adrian Snodgrass, who passed away last year. Adrian introduced me to structuralism, semiotics and hermeneutics. In part of that essay I reference the writing of the literary theorist and cultural semiologist Roland Barthes (1915-1980).…More
Tag Archives: Derrida
How to explain art
Here is an audio of a sequence of blog posts I published in 2013. Some were written while on a trip back to Australia after an absence of 16 years. These reflections of a traveller later informed my books Mood and Mobility, Network Nature, and Derrida for Architects. My current challenge is to see what…More
Derrida on AI
The radical philosopher Jacques Derrida challenged the conventional belief that speech precedes writing, arguing that writing is fundamental to language’s structure and meaning. Current large language models, reliant on text, support Derrida’s theory, emphasizing the enduring and analyzable nature of written language compared to the ephemeral and context-dependent qualities of speech. (Word count: 50)More
Voice chat
The latest incarnation of large language models (e.g. ChatGPT) generates convincing spoken responses to spoken input. You can talk (as well as type) to your AI, as if on a smartphone. It’s called “voice chat,” and I used OpenAI’s new voice chat app on my smartphone to enter into a conversation clarifying certain aspects of…More
Nothing beyond text
In explaining the political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712-1778) autobiographical book Confessions, the continental philosopher Jacques Derrida observed that there is nothing to support Rousseau’s claims about his relationships with his family members, other than what the text discloses. Derrida generalises this observation to the controversial proposition that any attempts to ground spoken or written assertions…More
The dissimulated city
As anyone who plays video games or works with digital media will tell you, a simulation of a city is a model or image of a city. A simulated city (as in SimCity™) is similar in some respects, but not the same as a brick and concrete city. Now consider the related word dissimulation. Something…More
Write me a city
I’m interested in cryptography and the city, as a way of thinking about the supposed smart city. The graphic part of cryptographic might make us think of drawing, but it has most to do with writing. Etymonoline.com describes the common abstract noun ending -graphy as a “word-forming element meaning ‘process of writing or recording’ or…More
Recursion again
In mathematics and computer programming, a recursive definition is one that defines a process in terms of itself: a branch of a tree is a branch that ends in smaller branches. That’s recursive as the definition of a branch in this case refers to a definition of a branch. A program that draws a branching…More
What’s wrong with postmodernism
Training and professional competence offer no immunity against casual and unguarded opinion. In spite of my training, like any novice, I’m keen to identify certain buildings as postmodern. Such structures are usually signalled by a triangular pediment somewhere, or an arch, semi-classical columns, axial symmetry, and they are of monumental scale, or out of scale. Such buildings are also…More
Flipped classroom 101
What is a lecture? In the 1980s with Jacques Derrida’s radical hermeneutics in full flow, we read about and practiced the lec(ri)ture, an inversion of the lecturing format — the insertion of laughter (ri) into the standard, conventional idea that knowledge could be delivered by talking to a group of people sitting in front of you. Scholar of English literature Gregory Ulmer asserted…More