"There are three broad themes during the semester.

1. Why stranger interactions in cities are meaningful

2. The spaces and the significance of the spaces in which strangers interact, and

3. How strangers 'read' each other, how they initiate interactions, how they avoid interactions, how they trust each other and how they fool each other, how they watch, listen and follow each other.

Then there is the secret theme. I want students to fall in love with talking to strangers, to do it more, and to make technology that creates more plentiful and meaningful interactions among strangers."

“I just got my Weegee + Barthes + Chris Alexander + IF + symbolic logic + narratology fancies tickled at once.” —Max Fenton at 2/19/12 7:39 PM

(Source: http://twitter.com/maxfenton/status/171393503849488384)

"So the N9 is not so much a product as a pointer. It will soon be impossible, or perhaps pointless anyway, to buy. Meego is a dead man walking and the hardware will live on in a new cloned and cared-for body, as the Lumia…

The Citröen DS was ultimately destined to befall the fate of mummification as a 'design icon' rather than a major commercial success. Numerous beautifully-maintained examples are still just about running, maintained by obsessives who spend their Sunday mornings patching up fuel sumps, buffing white leather interiors and browsing eBay for increasingly rare spare parts.

Perhaps as with the DS 19, the N9 will also end up maintained by an army of enthusiasts, a lost classic filed away in some museum of digital artefacts, an open-source movement supporting and extending Meego as a kind of avant-garde alt.OS, augmented by 3D-printed replacement physical parts or modded components, as with Leicas and Polaroids."

"In this way, I want to extrapolate from the specific case of Roland Barthes to develop a larger, concluding argument: that Barthes’ specific usage is illustrative of wider intellectual usage of card indexes as pre-digital creative media; in other words, not just as an archival device, but, crucially, as a key historical technology of invention. I intend this last term in the precise sense in which Derrida (1989) understands it, that is, as an oscillation between the performative and the constative, with the former working to disrupt itself (the performative) and the latter (the constative) – or what might be termed the unsettling operation of invention."

"‘But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images."<br />
<br />
—Roland Barthes 

“Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go). To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a “subject” (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.” –Roland Barthes, “Jeunes Chercheurs”