taCity

Author: Oli

  • Jurassic World and Personal Technology

    Jurassic World is a film about dinosaurs isn’t it? Well yes and no. Like all good films, the subtexts run rather differently to what we actually see on screen. So while we see giant dinosaurs taking chunks out of each other, we’re also witnessing a rather subtle commentary on social relations,…

  • What needs to be done in the next 5 years…

    The exit poll that the BBC announced at 10:00:01pm on Thursday started it. By midnight it wasn’t really sinking in. By 3am it was becoming increasingly apparent. By 6.30am, it was all but confirmed. By 7.30am, I was on my way to RHUL Towers with an overbearing sense of an…

  • #AAG2015 afterthoughts

    The Annals of American Geographers annual conference this year was in Chicago, and as usual, was a hectic 5 days of sessions, networking, partying and pontificating. The ante seemed particularly high this year, there was a heightened sense of a complex mix of emotional states; excitement (perhaps a symptom of being…

  • Students and their role in Critique

    There is a current wave of student occupations across London. KCL, LSE, UAL, Goldsmiths  have all been targeted, and I’m sure more are brewing. The LSE occupation was the first (that I noticed anyway) and they are calling for a “Free University of London” and aiming to create an “open, creative and…

  • Reflections on the Aylesbury Occupation

    At the same time that the nation tuned into the first TV debate of the 2015 general election, the Aylesbury Estate occupation reportedly ended. One event saw a bunch of lowlifes bickering about how to run a doomed institution, the other? Well….

  • Exploring our Techno-Societies: A Kickstarter Project

    The intensification of technology is a process that we can no longer ignore. Stephen Hawking recently said Artificial Intelligence could end mankind, televisions are spying on us, Hollywood blockbusters warn of dystopic futures. These ‘big’ ideas about technology are critical to the debate about what it means to be human…

  • REFlections on REF2014

    With all dust settling over the REF2014 and the chin-stroking in full force, much of the critique of the practice seems to be focused on the vacuity of the entire exercise, and how multiple universities have spun the results to make themselves as good as they possibly can be. Vacuous,…

  • My networking is not working!

    Last May, I gave a keynote talk at a CreativeWorks London event, called ‘Joining the Dots’. I was asked to talk about a paper I co-authored (with Tim Vorley and Richard Courtney) that focuses on the networking paradigm, but to a more ‘business-friendly’ environment. While I have recently been working more on…

  • Walking the Berlin Wall

    One cannot have failed to notice the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall over the weekend. Coupled with Remembrance Sunday, it has created a milieu of memorialisation over the weekend that has invoked process of grief, global strife, hegemonic power, activism & resistance, personal loss and spirituality. There has been…

  • Badiou on Fidelity

    The last of these XX on YY posts (as I’ve now finished the book!) is Badiou on Fidelity. It is linked to his notion of the Event, and his idea of ethics which are for me, extremely useful way of theoretically configuring subversion and how to engage in Deleuzian lines…