The article discusses nature’s benefits, technology’s role, and evolving engagement with AI in nature.More
Tag Archives: nature
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
Beyond attention
I’m still reviewing my blog posts from 2013. In keeping with the unstructured nature of blogging, I didn’t plan sequences of posts to follow particular themes. However, a thread does emerge from this sequence of six posts — that of attention. Soft fascination (138) introduces the theory that sustained concentration on a task induces “attention…More
Attending to the city
In the book Network Nature, I explored how people attune themselves to the natural world — or at least, how we attune to that part of our spatial experience that we are inclined to describe as “natural.” We also attune to artifice, such as urban environments. Cities present a spectrum of stimuli that shape our…More
The pleasures of the mouth
The soft human voice signifies comfort. Some would say that parental cooing and burbling sends babies to sleep. That affinity with the voice persists into later life. Thanks to telephones and mobile phones, the voice-in-your-ear is ubiquitous in contemporary life — compounding opportunities for the voice to do its work. The soft voice, breath, the…More
Index fever
In writing about the post-digital condition, media commentator Florian Cramer identified a “semiotic shift to the indexical”(22) and away from symbols. The indexical relationship is a direct connection between an object and its sign, as if the sign is caused by its object (as smoke or soot are caused by fire). According to C.S. Peirce,…More
What does architecture represent?
For the architectural semiotician, buildings and building elements operate as signs, pointing to something other than themselves. So for the semiotician one of the key roles of architecture is to represent. For the semiotically informed, the things of nature are amongst the targets of representation, evident in floral and foliated ornamentation, frescoes of nature scenes, shapes that resemble tree…More
What’s the point of symbols?
Symbols are getting a bad name. More precisely, symbols of bad things are gaining more airtime than symbols of good things — lately. Take for example walls. Last month Andrew Solomon wrote in the Guardian “Walls are concrete symbols of exclusion, and exclusion is seldom a diplomatic move.” There’s the prospect of a wall at Calais to curb…More
Whatever happened to architectural semiotics?
Few would deny that architecture communicates, and in that sense is a language, or at least like a language. As pointed out by the philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco architecture does something else as well: it functions. So a substantial tiled roof not only communicates protection from the elements, but functions to provide such protection. Occasionally the two become…More
The magic circle
When I was a kid, the Magic Circle was well known as an association of stage magicians. Those within it knew the rules of the illusions and had to keep them secret. The other meaning of magic circle is obvious: a circle that is magic. Perhaps it’s the former that the philosopher Johan Huizinga had in mind when…More