Ceremony/In a Lonely Place
Thoughts after John Durham Peters’ book Speaking Into the Air — a History of the Idea of Communication
dorkbot
A nice walk through the East End last night to DorkBot London in Limehouse. The highlights: Peter Cusack’s LF magentic audioscapes of Highbury and Islington underground station (south-bound platform, I think), and The Institute of Applied Autonomy‘s fine collection of DARPA website scrapings and repurposing of military technology and aesthetics for urban activism. Crucial performance requirement for their GraffitiWriter robot: it has to move faster than a cop. Very good stuff. Cheap beer, too.
Entrances to Hell
It’s Friday afternoon, with a hangover. Today the best thing on the Internet is The Catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell. Lovely. Oh and it’s raining as well…
Kafka on Communications
From a letter to Milena, quoted in Speaking Into The Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, by John Durham Peters: Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on their way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity sees this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it’s no longer any help, these are evidently inventions made …
Where the Action Is
I’ve been reading Paul Dourish’s Where The Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, a good introduction to issues and perspectives of designing with embodied action in mind, although he doesn’t really get very far with actual guidelines. Favourite quote (which opens the section on ‘Wittgenstein and the Meaning of Language’): Like Elvis Presley, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) had a professional career that fell into two distinct phases. Vegas Wittgenstein? Maybe. Nothing radically new in the book, but a decent overview of the field, with a nicely phenomenological slant (no mention of Bachelard though). For me, the most interesting discussion was …