RELATED TERMS: Actant; Defamiliarisation; Liminality; Design, the Buddhisms, Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics According to Edwin Heathcote (2025), the interiors in David Lynch’s films suggest that, “our environment is somehow theatrical, temporary, a dream – an expression of the subconscious.” Lynch, while working with production designers, “conceived of these rooms as spaces with every bit as muchContinue reading “Narrative Environments – Lynchian Set Design”
Author Archives: aparsons474
Black Studies
RELATED TERMS: Afrofuturism; Afro-Pessimism; Critical Race Theory; Whiteness Studies Writing in 2020, Dhanveer Singh Brar and Ashwani Sharma contend that, “In a manner similar to ‘French’ post-structuralism in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. Black Critical Thought offers an urgently needed – if not always satisfactory – grammar to address the racial faultlines of UK knowledgeContinue reading “Black Studies”
Hallucination and Confabulation
RELATED TERMS: Large Language Models; Paradox of the Anonymous: When We Wake [Snippets 9]; One way of conceiving the co-dependence or collaboration between human agency and artificial intelligence (AI) agency is to consider it through the lens of the metaphors used to understand the processes of Large Language Models (LLMs). Smith, Greaves and Panch (2023), forContinue reading “Hallucination and Confabulation”
The Paradox of the Anonymous: When We Wake [Snippets 9]
RELATED TERMS: History; Large Language Models; Hallucination and Confabulation “The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s great study of 19th-century Paris, is in Jameson’s phrase an unfinished ‘collection of clippings’.” “Benjamin thought of writing a book consisting entirely of quotations; Wittgenstein contemplated writing one consisting entirely of jokes.” (Terry Eagleton, 2021) Walter Benjamin and Brian Eno, in differentContinue reading “The Paradox of the Anonymous: When We Wake [Snippets 9]”
Snippet Methodology [Snippets 8]
RELATED TERMS: Collage, Montage, Assemblage and Bricolage; Large Language Models Roger Berkowitz (2024) sets out a warning of the limitations of snippets if taken as a sole, self-contained method without a framing methodology. He says in an interview, “if I wanna cite a quote about freedom I can just say “Google, find me a quoteContinue reading “Snippet Methodology [Snippets 8]”
Design, Axiology and Value – Part 1
RELATED TERMS: The Commodity; Design History; Libidinal Economy – Part 1 “Valuing is a form of ranking” (Kelleher, 2015) Preamble The question for design practices running through the following text is whether they partake in keeping us focused on, in the words of Issberner and Lena (2023), “a naive faith in progress, consumerist ideology andContinue reading “Design, Axiology and Value – Part 1”
The Twentieth Century, America, Americanisation [Snippets 7]
RELATED TERMS: In 1932, Gertrude Stein wrote that America is, “the oldest country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century, and since all the other countries are now either living or commencing to be living a twentieth century life,Continue reading “The Twentieth Century, America, Americanisation [Snippets 7] “
Large Language Models
RELATED TERMS: Promptography; Hallucination and Confabulation; World; World-Building In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have become synonymous with the idea of artificial intelligence (AI). In order to train these chatbots, as Jack Apollo George (2024) notes, technology companies are employing human annotators or ‘data quality specialists’. The companies and the LLMsContinue reading “Large Language Models”
Arendt, Phenomenology and the Design of Narrative Environments [Essays]
RELATED TERMS: Design of Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments – Environmental Psychology in Architecture 1 Arendt’s phenomenological method Hannah Arendt seldom referred to herself as a phenomenologist and she is not usually included in textbook treatments of the subject (Moran, 2000: 287). She had no particular interest in the phenomenological method and did not explicitlyContinue reading “Arendt, Phenomenology and the Design of Narrative Environments [Essays]”
Sloterdijk and the Design of Narrative Environments [Essays]
RELATED TERMS: Design of Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments; Narrative Environments – Environmental Psychology in Architecture 1. Envelopes Bruno Latour points out that when it is said that ‘Dasein is thrown into the world’ [1], as does Heidegger, the significance of the preposition ‘into’ is often overlooked. Peter Sloterdijk, however, Latour notes, does not overlook it and indeedContinue reading “Sloterdijk and the Design of Narrative Environments [Essays]”
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