Dick Tracy, Mad Men and Wall Street: A Brief [His]Story of Mobile Affect
On the 3rd of April 1973 a group of nervous engineers and curious journalists gathered in the Hilton Hotel in New York City for a highly anticipated launch. At the centre of the attention was Marty Cooper, an affable Motorola engineer credited with the invention of the DYNA T-A-C 8000X, the world’s...
Dialectics on Wheels – The Racing Bike 'Read' and Experienced as a Vivid Invitation to Both Incarnation and Extension
Most people have tried it: Being passed by sweaty cyclists on the bike lane at high speed. A moment of horror and rippling cold sweat. They always come from behind and pass you with a few centimeters distance. Yet another rash of virile death-defying in the narrow traffic corridors of the city. Reck...
The Image-creating Impulse
Heraclitus was one of the first philosophers in ancient Greece. He lived over 2500 years ago in the city of Ephesus, in what is now called the west coast of Turkey. Not very much is known about his life and person. What consists of his oeuvre today is handed down to us by secondary sources. How coul...
’Schwamping’ – Deciphered as the Zeitgeist at Sea and On the Road
Just over 200 years ago, the German master thinker G.W.F. Hegel, made philosophy dynamic. Instead of comporting stiffly world images and celebrating and circulating eternal ideas, philosophical thinking had to bring the time of concept, i.e. summarize his time in thoughts. The claim sounded and mean...
How is Technology Addressing Us?
The shiny slick surfaces of our dark screens look innocent. They seem to be waiting quietly and patiently to be filled with ‘content’. But once loaded, design wars are ongoing – and the winning or losing of such a battle decides about what kind of user will be called into existence by the screen. In...
Eyes Touching Fingers Seeing
The world I perceive by touching has texture, weight and temperature, but lacks perspective and color. The world I perceive by seeing has perspective and color, but lacks texture, weight and temperature. The two worlds that touch and vision describe don’t seem to have much in common. I can grasp an...
Coordinated Inauthentic Selves
In a passage from “The Semiotics of Tourism,” Jonathan Culler lays out the central paradox of authenticity (the passage was in fact the headnote to literary critic Julia Straub’s introduction to an essay collection called Paradoxes of Authenticity): for something “to be experienced as authentic it...
Nightly Vertigo
I don’t like driving, or even biking, at night. The thing is that when it’s dark, I have difficulties perceiving depth. I have a tough time distinguishing between what is far and what is close, to the extent that I might assume, driving a car, that a car ahead of me is far further away than it...