Month: February 2014

The prob­lem of “the two cul­tures” is not, in fact, a prob­lem at all. There’s a rea­son that art and sci­ence are dis­tinct. They don’t just work in dif­fer­ent ways; they work on dif­fer­ent things. Sci­ence address­es exter­nal real­i­ty, which lies out­side our minds and makes itself avail­able for objec­tive obser­va­tion. The arts address our expe­ri­ence of the world; they tell us what real­i­ty feels like. That is why the chain of con­silience rup­tures as we make the leap from mate­r­i­al phe­nom­e­na to the phe­nom­e­na of art.

we might have found our­selves in an iron­ic sit­u­a­tion where in order to ful­fil architecture’s core ambi­tions it might have to become less archi­tec­tur­al. It might have to mod­el itself on more youth­ful and vig­or­ous forms of cre­ative practice

More­so than sim­ply play­ing games, mak­ing and hack­ing games is a great way to inves­ti­gate the world around us. It forces us to com­pare the dig­i­tal mod­els of our games with the men­tal mod­els in our heads.

On March 28, 2011, a man who calls him­self Kurt J. Mac loaded a new game of Minecraft. As the land­scape filled in around his char­ac­ter, Mac sur­veyed the blocky, pixel­lat­ed trees, the cloud-draped moun­tains, and the wad­dling sheep. Then he start­ed walk­ing. His goal for the day was sim­ple: to reach the end of the uni­verse. Near­ly three years lat­er, Mac, who is now thir­ty-one, is still walk­ing. He has trekked more than sev­en hun­dred vir­tu­al kilo­me­tres in a hun­dred and eighty hours. At his cur­rent pace, Mac will not reach the edge of the world, which is now near­ly twelve thou­sand kilo­me­tres away, for anoth­er twen­ty-two years.