Cartography, landscape and territory

The word landscape is fashionable. It has become thoroughly modern and triggers heated debates on concepts like territory and map. But the most decisive impetus to “canonise” the predominant word and concept of landscape has come from laws, which refer back to the idea of territory and protection. This makes clear the need for cartography. Maps are not an image like any other: they strive to bring order to the world; they serve to classify and qualify. Yet maps cannot reproduce the totality of the landscape or its evolution: when it abstracts, a map falsifies, departs from reality, simplifies and caricatures it

Architectures of the invisible hand : envisioning capital in Joseph Conrad’s Singapore

In recent years, critical attention has shifted away from the subject of Conrad’s imperial politics and towards his representation of late nineteenth-century global capitalism, which extends panoramically from the business houses of London, Brussels and San Francisco to commodity frontiers as diverse as Malay tobacco plantations, African ivory lands and Latin American silver mines. This paper explores Conrad’s engagement with capitalism and its representability within his portrait of late nineteenth-century Singapore in the wake of a financial crisis. Drawing on Susan Buck-Morss’s ‘Envisioning Capital’, as well as Fredric Jameson’s essay on architecture and finance, ‘The Brick and the Balloon’, the paper reads Conrad’s proto-postmodern urban landscape and porous, ethereal architecture as evidence of the visual and representational difficulties generated within a major colonial ‘laboratory’ of liberal economics. Yet, by shifting in focus from the city to its outlying plantations, Conrad is seen to confront abstract capital with territory, ether with matter, and free-market narratives of the ‘invisible hand’ with the absent cause of racialized and indentured plantation labour

Mixed Reality Interiors: Exploring Augmented Reality Immersive Space Planning Design Archetypes for the Creation of Interior Spatial Volume 3D User Interfaces

Augmented reality is an increasingly relevant medium of interaction and media reception with the advances in user worn or hand-held input/output technologies endowing perception of the digital nested within and reactive to the native physical. Our interior spaces are becoming the media interface and this emergence affords designers the opportunity to delve further into crafting an aesthetics for the medium. Beyond having the virtual assets and applications in correct registration with the real-world environment, critical topics are addressed such as the compositional roles of virtual and physical design features including their purpose, modulation, interaction potentials and implementation into varying indoor settings. Examining and formulating methodologies for mixed reality interior 3D UI schemes derived from the convergence of digital media and interior design disciplines comprise the scope of this design research endeavor. A holistic approach is investigated to produce a framework for augmented reality 3D user interface interiors through research and development of pattern language systems for the balanced blending of complimentary digital and physical design elements. These foundational attributes serve in the creation, organization and exploration of interactive possibilities and implications of these hybrid futuristic spatial interface layouts.M.S., Digital Media -- Drexel University, 201

1973-1974 Course Catalog

1973-1974 Course Catalo

The retreat from alienation in cognitive science

This thesis examines the relevance of Hegelian-Marxian theory to modern day philosophy of cognitive science. It is suggested that certain key Hegelian-Marxian ideas and themes, such as ‘externalization’, ‘praxis’ and ‘dialectics’, have parallels in modern day cognitive science and that, in some instances a direct connection can be traced from Marxian theory to recent cognitive science, via intermediaries such as Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty and Levins & Lewontin. It is also suggested that the overarching trajectory of cognitive science is one that can be usefully understood in Marxian terms as a ‘retreat from alienation.’ Taking this as one’s starting point enables one to unify otherwise disparate perspectives under a single banner. In addition it provides one with a means of evaluating individual accounts, such as Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s ‘Embodied Mind’ and Clark and Chalmers’ ‘Extended Mind’. Conversely, some recent cognitive scientific accounts, such as Kirsh & Maglio’s work on ‘epistemic action’, offer further illumination of ideas that are ambiguously expressed in Marxian theory

Vortex

Vortex. Visual Aural Textual. One language is an interdisciplinary art form — improvising the visual, aural and textual mediated by technology and revealing that one language exists at their intersection. These three separate art forms have largely been held by our culture as distinct subjects. They have been connected in a documentary way by our most popular communications media, film and television — yet they have less frequently been used as pure interdisciplinary form with which to explore their own synergy. Perhaps the oldest form to express the singularity of sound text and image is the ancient OM chant. As a performance medium and compositional theory, Vortex is a catalyst for a deeper level of communication than we experience with any one or two media. It is documented by means of performance, gallery presentation, research and publication

A Lexical Description of English for Architecture: A Corpus-based Approach

Every knowledge community has a distinct type of discourse and a linguistic identity which brings together the ideas of that discipline. These are expressed through characteristic linguistic realizations which are of considerable interest in the study of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) from many different perspectives. Despite the fact that ESP is a recent area of linguistic research, there is already a varied literature on academic and professional languages: English for law, business, computer and technology, advertising, marketing and engineering, just to mention a few. According to Dudley-Evans (1998:19), the development of ESP arose as a result of general improvements in the world economy in the 1960’s, along with the expansion of science and technology. Other relevant factors were the growing use of English as the international language of science, technology and business, and the increasing flow of exchange students to and from the UK, US and Australia