Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Tokyo Metro doing an escape room tie-in for Exit 8 is a little on the nose, but why not I guess

August 11, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

A movie made of dust and mold (complimentary)

Poster for SANITORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (Quay Brothers, 2024)

July 23, 2025 at 8:51 AM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

I wonder if one legacy of the VR/metaverse etc. hype cycle is companies have given up hoping people will *voluntarily* adopt new tech

(excerpt from @bcmerchant.bsky.social newsletter)

"Big tech’s deployment of AI has been both relentless and methodical, the study finds. By inserting AI features onto the top of messaging apps and social media, where it’s all but unignorable, by deploying pop-ups and unsubtle design tricks to direct users to AI on the interface, or by pushing prompts to use AI outright, AI is being imposed on billions of users, rather than eagerly adopted." From https://open.substack.com/pub/bloodinthemachine/p/how-big-tech-is-force-feeding-us

July 23, 2025 at 7:05 AM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Will be circling the incomprehensible rotaries with newfound respect now that I know they can keep out self-driving cars

"If you literally just yielded there until there was a gap, you might be sitting at the roundabout for two hours," said Bauchwitz, who studies the self-driving car industry. "Just go out to Fresh Pond and drive around there, and you'll see what I mean."

From https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/01/business/waymo-self-driving-boston-drivers/

July 2, 2025 at 1:22 PM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Finally a Thai restaurant willing to tell customers not to use chopsticks lol

Spoon/fork box with long explanation (in Japanese) why using chopsticks is not authentic and will kill the vibe please don’t do it

June 13, 2025 at 3:06 AM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Turning back to VR for a moment, I appreciate this smart framing of Meta’s headsets—that even if you don’t see ads when you turn them on they should still be considered ad-driven devices, since that’s ultimately what’s paying for all of it (Ali Bar-Zeev interviewed by Gabriele Romagnoli)

The Quest 3 is the cheapest high-quality headset ever. Are we finally there?

Avi Bar-Zeev: It's an impressive device, but I have philosophical issues with it. Meta can afford to sell it cheap because it's subsidized by ad revenue. Even if they're not running ads on the headset yet, the money keeping that division alive comes from ad dollars. I don't think we had to rush into making the cheapest possible headset. The market isn't ready for it.

April 17, 2025 at 1:56 AM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Poster for my Global Mediations Lab workshop on global ramifications of the computational image, April 25 at MIT. Schedule/rsvp at globalmediations.mit.edu/cpci/

Photo of tangled electrical wires around a pole, followed by text: Cultural Politics of the Computational Image. Panel names: Biometric Images, Generative Images, Infrastructural Images. April 25, 14E-304, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

April 11, 2025 at 3:35 PM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Coming up later this afternoon, for your pleasure/discomfort #scms25

Academic panel description: "N9 ROUNDTABLE
The Discomforts and Pleasures of Synthetic Vision in VR,
AR, and 3D Scanning.
Chair: Dennis Lo • James Madison University
Da Ye Kim • New York University • “Mirrors without Light: A Study of Mirrors in VR”
Ariel Rogers • Northwestern University • “Spectatorship in VR: Movement, Stasis, and Agency”
Caroline Klimek • University of Toronto Scarborough • “Virtual Sovereignty: Reclaiming VR at Festivals”
Dennis Lo • James Madison University • “Ecological Witnessing through Spatial Computing”
Paul Roquet • Massachusetts Institute of Technology • “The Vernacular Scan”

April 5, 2025 at 7:57 PM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Cows, speaking through the ambient surround

(from: www.bbc.com/future/artic...)

“One difference between humans and many animals is their use of the environment. Cornips has found cow communication leans on its surroundings more than ours. She observed one herd where individuals used their bodies to bang on an iron fence to communicate with the rest of the herd at feeding time, which she views as a type of language. She noticed cows responding to her differently depending on whether she entered a barn with solid walls or open sides: since cows on different farms are surrounded by different physical features, this offers distinctive opportunities for linguistic expression. Cows, she argues, develop diverse languaging practices - almost like dialects - where meaning depends on the shape of their surroundings.”

February 9, 2025 at 1:43 AM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

For when you really can’t deal but still feel like you should stay informed, there’s Tokyo MX’s “Healing Time and Headline News” (top story chyron + cat video and soft piano, to dull the pain)

TV showing white cat watching a door in a blue-striped room, with news ticker running at the bottom

January 23, 2025 at 1:15 PM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

TIL a Nakaya Fujiko fog sculpture on a cold winter’s day is actually really cold 🥶

January 10, 2025 at 6:03 AM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Reminded of this today in line for hatsumōde. Someone near us was watching a k-drama all the way up to their turn at the shrine. Impressive multitasking!

This afternoon at Kanda myōjin, a long line of people wait to make their first shrine visit of the year

January 3, 2025 at 12:50 PM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

The spread of so-called ‘kamikaze drones’ have to be one the most disturbing developments in consumer media tech in recent years. And it’s only going to get worse

“Everyone at the front knew the sound of drones. Even soldiers who had yet to see firsthand the hunter-quadcopter's grisly effects had witnessed onscreen an uncountable number of peers die from the attacks, brought to them by the messaging app Telegram. War-related Telegram accounts posted constantly updated streams of short videos showing the fates of soldiers chased by drones. The accounts accumulated together as a sort of DeathTube, an expanding montage of cornered men frantically doing whatever they could to survive, only to die nonetheless, each spending his last seconds alive as an unwilling extra in the public visual chronicle of the rise of homicidal flying machines.”

January 3, 2025 at 2:51 AM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Slithering into 2025

Tall wooden slats with painting of white snake welcoming the new year

December 31, 2024 at 10:21 PM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Compare for example Japanese critic Kuniharu Akiyama in 1966 (my summary)

“Akiyama notes he has been warning against this "music for design" since the mid-1950s and sees it as a major threat to the integrity of music as an art form. Not only does BGM reduce music to serving as a tool of commerce, but musically it tends toward pale imitations of earlier musical genres. BGM arbitrarily loots music of the past, creating a shoddy mixture of classical and popular (foreign) music styles. Tapping into a fear of miscegenation, Akiyama argues background music, unlike "pure" music, flattens all genres into a "mixed-blood" amalgam of stitched-together musical cues. He frets many composers in Japan are already moonlighting as producers of commercial BGM and warns this can be a slippery slope into mediocrity. Without realizing it, a…

…composers entire musical output becomes contaminated by these side jobs selling their music as a functional backdrop for someone else’s product line.” (from Ambient Media, p35-36)

December 21, 2024 at 1:27 PM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

This kind of panic about background music contaminating ‘real’ music has been around a long time—just go back and read critics worrying over Muzak at its height. If anything, it’s remarkable how little of this is unique to the ‘streaming era.’ From harpers.org/archive/2025...

“This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds-as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming
era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It's not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-Al software.”

December 21, 2024 at 1:10 PM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

Went to hear the evala show at the ICC (Shinjuku)「現われる場　消滅する像」. What a treat to have the entire venue dedicated to the works of a single sound artist, and mostly in the dark

Multi-channel speaker installation in dark room (from 「evala　現われる場　消滅する像」)

December 19, 2024 at 5:14 AM

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

While obviously better if it disappeared completely, I’m enjoying how the ‘smoking room’ in one of my local Tokyo work cafes just keeps getting smaller and smaller over time (originally was the size of the outer walls here)