velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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An attenuating peninsula of possibility
Via @dronemodule, a Kim Stanley Robinson joint on utopia as transgenerational revolutionary project, in which he gets more than a little Harawayian: “… the seven billion people we have, and the nine to ten billion people we’re likely to have, exist at the tip of an entire improvised complex of prostheses, which is our technology…
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Gimbal Lock (Degrees of Freedom)
It isn’t unpredicted, more unplanned. This failure-state inheres in poor design a limitation in my arm, my hand my robot heart. This space, now undefined degenerates, dimensions folding in collapsing down to null infinitudes; the target sweeps through zenith, and I spin rotating through the same old attitudes. My wrist is bound by singularities: a…
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Year’s End / Year’s Best
Well, this has been a memorably weird and hectic year. I’m tapping out this post in an old apartment in the middle of Cambridge, Mass., US of A, having decided (for diverse reasons) that I’d rather be here with friends for the holiday season than back in Blighty, stuck out in the Sheffield badlands with…
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The Naked Lunch: Christmas and capitalism
Here’s a great opening ‘graph for a seasonal cyberpunk satire: “I heard my first Christmas music of the year in District 1. It was the 1st of August, 27ºC outside and All I Want For Christmas was drifting out of a market stall dedicated to selling Santa hats.” Only it’s not from a piece of…
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Dancing about architecture
So yesterday I was at the Birmingham School of Architecture, playing guest reviewer for Masters-student group and individual project-work for one of the four school “studios”. Reason I got the invite is that Mike Dring and Rob Annable are apparently both fans of my Infrastructure Fiction talk, which they’ve included in their studio syllabus; the current…
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].”