("JP")

“What I’m interested in is deep aesthetics: the universal or near-universal forms that elicit deep, subconscious positive or negative emotional responses. These deep aesthetics are changing, too, but not nearly fast enough to keep pace with rapid technological, political, and social upheaval around us.”

– Lane Rettig, on the importance of studying

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That for me is the poetics of encryption. Artists are already using generative AI as a tool to reimagine our relation to the perennial big ideas. Like: What is identity? What is spirituality? What is cultural heritage? How can the human resist the fast-moving disruption to our lives and to our long-standing imaginaries? These are the questions that... See more

The practice of software begins to resemble closely the practice of memoria and, specifically, the memory theatres of Camillo, which constitute memory as a public space; a kind of virtual architecture for an incomplete image of the world. Software begins to look like the closest medium to memory itself we have produced .

Legibility is a concept from James Scott’s seminal work, Seeing Like a State . It’s not a book that lends itself well to one-sentence summaries, but my attempt is “we assume that only what we can measure is real and everything that is real can be measured.”

The book is titled Seeing Like a State , because the idea of legibility as I’m using it here... See more

To this day, when someone wants to reference the dollar bill in a design, it’s noticeable how certain visual cues remain—even when the medium and the level of fidelity are completely different. Leveraging mental models from previously established fictions helps create a feeling of familiarity, which in turn helps people believe in the new, emerging... See more

Vernacular design outside of architecture

I've been thinking about how this idea applies to design in fields outside of architecture. Architecture is unique in its geographic, climatic, and cultural contexts, since the "localism" aspect is particularly relevant. But there are probably some parallels that could be drawn to modern software design,... See more