Arlene Goldbard told me late last week that David Harding, the man who more or less invented the idea of the town artist, has died.

I have linked to the self-description on his website, and to one of the obituaries you can find online. More will undoubtedly follow, and rightly so.

Over the past few years, a massive industry has emerged around dumb phones and the concept of logging off.

But is ditching your smartphone actually the answer?

Lev Manovich argues that the database is replacing central perspective as the dominant symbolic form by which we make sense of our world. In this he follows the work of Ernst Cassirer, whose Philosophy of Symbolic Forms defines the task of humankind as seeking “the categories of the consciousness of objects in the theoretical, intellectual sphere” and suggests that this “starts from the assumption that such categories must be at work wherever a cosmos, a characteristic and typical world view, takes form out of the chaos of impressions.”.

This essay is simply me thinking aloud about some of the issues and questions that this raises.