Yesterday François Bar came by the design studio to chat. He offered a perspective on a technology that made it impossible to believe the instrumentalists perspective. What we off-handedly refer to as “technology” is always about social institutions and cultural practices and never any less. It is no more “neutral”…

Alex Galloway came by to do a short talk discussing his new game “Kriegspiel” based on Guy Debord’s “The Game of War” This is a curious strategy game that Debord created while in the midst of a bit of a creative flat-spin. It was created in an artisinal mode, with 5 hand crafted editions constructed with a collabora…

Ack. This is one that drives me a little batty. Technology — friend or foe? Well, neither, of course. It’s how the technology is used that determines its normative dimensions. Right?

In order to do interdiscplinary work, it is not enough to take a ‘subject’ (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a new object, which belongs to no one. Roland Barthes in “The Rustle of Language”(1)

"..the next order of business is to define design. The great American modernist Charles Eames offered the following: ‘A plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose’ (Eames, 1972). This definition situates design as a problem-solving discipline, with problems here defined and sol…

(Essay for Share Festival Catalog 2008)

Via Fabien on the 7.5th Floor, I came across an illustration by Karen Martin starting to map the field of Urban Computing. It’s not a field, of course — closer to a large set of intersecting practices and broader disciplines swirling about those practices. Two things to be said. First about visualizations and illust…

Super excited. Next week on Saturday at 2pm I will be speaking at the Share Festival in Torino.

This call invites submissions for a special issue related to and about digital cultures of California. Internationally, California is a phenomenon in terms of its relationship to creating, consuming and reflecting upon the era of digital technologies. From the legendary garage entrepreneurs, to the multi-billion dol…