Category: Art

  • contract/bridge: Auger (2013), Speculative design: crafting the speculation

    Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: crafting the speculation. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 11-35. This justly well-cited paper is in some respects a tour through the work of Auger and others (mostly RCA-aligned, I think?) in the decade prior to its publication in 2013. My purpose in writing it up is to extract and summarise the methodological…

  • rocket from the crypto / two dead letters

    Chairman Bruce appears to be repubbing longreads from the now defunct Beyond The Beyond blog. This is a weird experience for me—distinctly atemporal, to use the man’s own term—because I recall reading this stuff at the time. And so it’s familiar and just-like-yesterday, but also so alienated and impossibly historical… I mean, I can’t recall…

  • some kind of code for consumerism at its most insidious

    I’ve got a little girl who’s seven, and she lives in a world that’s all potentially magic. Within her imagination, the possibility of supernatural things sits alongside school and real things. There’s no distinction. At the same time she’s kind of assaulted by magic. What she watches on TV, the magic there is some kind…

  • konst för alla

    From a visit to Malmö Konsthall yesterday afternoon. The have-a-go workshop is of course familiar from UK museums, particularly during school holidays. What was quite a surprise for me was that here, this stuff is just sat there, waiting to be used, without permission or supervision or justification… I’m pretty sure I could have just…

  • the axioms others take for granted are painful

    In which Stewart Hotston, a writer I was heretofore utterly ignorant of, propels himself into my need-to-read list: In the end all storytelling is political. There is no ‘entertainment only’ version of storytelling because for someone in the audience the axioms others take for granted are painful, disempowering and even oppressive. Only those who are…