Andromeda
Plate MC27415 (Andromeda field), 11 September 1934, Harvard Plate Stacks (Center for Astrophysics).
JP
Notes and log entries.
Latest posts
A break in their own isolation
The qualities described by Sheila and Aaron – being ‘open to learning and helping,’ learning to ‘let go’ of obsessive mastery of a topic or project, valuing ‘enrichment’ – and, in other interviews, of being a ‘constant learner’ who is not ‘arrogant,’ who can ‘ask more questions’ – suggest a social and moral reframing of the ideal interdisciplinary scientist. This reframing depends on scientists’…
Exquisite corpse
A poet writing ‘with’ ChatGPT is again just enjoying their own abilities to mine what they index as gems from a resource. Exploring a landscape or a cave system or an ancient megalith is a far more apt metaphor for so-called ‘co-creative’ activity – sure, the environment may appear to attend to you over time, but let’s make no mistakes about the dramatic unevenness in the scales of these mutual…
Latency at the interface
On June 5th, I’ll be participating in Latent Futures, an online seminar organised by Professors Jen Ross and Richard Sandford. This event challenges the conventional view of futures as distant projections, exploring instead both processes already unfolding and possibilities concealed within our present arrangements.
Perhaps they had simply migrated elsewhere
[Interviewer:] You yourself are an avid hiker and explorer. These are moments when you contemplate what ties us to the territories we traverse, their myths and legends, their wondrous and unsettling creatures. Is your book born of an attempt to connect these two universes that dwell within you: the ultra-contemporary digital world of design and innovation, and that of past myths? [Nova:] Indeed,…
Keeping track: 2025-W3
Attention stretched thin across winter’s grey, voices cast into future rooms as old stories assume new weight.
Gimbal: 2025-W2
Face-first into the new year, last of the winter application blitz amid frost and an oscillating half-grief.
Performing smallness in Barcelona
Later this month, I’ll be taking a slow journey to Barcelona – looping through France via Lyon and LUMA Arles, before joining my collaborator Tim in Tarragona. We’ll be presenting at Híbrides, a three-day event exploring ‘small embodied data,’ sharing our ongoing exploration of how software might perform ‘smallness.’
Adding a chair to a desk scene
‘Design that is also research is what we learn in the actual designing of things; of keyboards and desks and tables and chairs and lamps and switches. In making those things and thinking about the people who will touch and use them you generate knowledge, understanding and insight about the future. […] A reason these renders take so long is that even adding a chair to a desk scene forces me to ask…
Organised Atoms in Cornwall
Rapid log-note; later expanded into → Backwards to the Ground — Counter-Technologies and Geological Time (2025, external)