Velcro City Tourist Board

velcro city tourist board

a blog by Paul Graham Raven

science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats

go beyond the injunction of innovation

An interview with the principals of the Design Friction atelier: When we teach Design Fiction or Speculative Design in schools, as many design educators have certainly heard it before us, there is a common misconception among students about these types of design postures. Since Speculative Design productions aren’t for sale, it would mean there is
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Climate Change 🙜 Futures 🙜 Social Theory

13 Mar 2020
interrupt your text

McKenzie Wark interviewed at Bomb Magazine: I’m interested in writing that engages with the way people read now. If you are a literary person, perhaps you and your friends are on Twitter or Instagram and share photos of favorite passages from the books you happen to be reading. I certainly do. So, I wanted the
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Criticism 🙜 Philosophy 🙜 Social Theory 🙜 Writing

12 Mar 2020
10MAR20 / accessions

Didn’t take me long to work out how the requisitioning system works around here.
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Accessions

10 Mar 2020
“A revenant hybrid narrative”: Söderström, Paasche & Klauser (2014), Smart cities as corporate storytelling

Söderström, Paasche & Klauser (2014) “Smart cities as corporate storytelling”. City 18(3), pp307–320 This paper makes a loose grab of Callon and Latour’s early-A-NT notion of translation through “obligatory passage points” for the formation of scientific truths, and uses that lens to look at IBM’s construction of a “smart city” story which positioned it as
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Reading Journal

10 Mar 2020
inside among the outsiders

Sean Guynes on Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: … whereas most utopian novels before Le Guin sent an outsider into the utopian society, tracing their voyage through the social, economic, and political structures of the “better” worlds offered by Gilman’s Herland or Bellamy’s United States, Le Guin cut the narrative in half, shuffled the deck, and
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Futures 🙜 Science Fiction 🙜 Social Theory

9 Mar 2020

Who is Paul Graham Raven?

“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”

Paul is consulting writer, researcher, theorist and foresight practitioner, as well as an author and critic of science fiction literature. More details can be found on the About page of this blog.