Sign in

Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social
1.3K followers 497 following 232 posts

other spatial mediations | proquet.mit.edu

PostsRepliesMedia
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
(Flusser voice) Into the Universe of Vaguely AI-Generated Conference Presentations
000
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
The gap between adding a language to a model and including the community that speaks it in governance is not a technical limitation, writes Sofia Magdalena Olofsson. It is a political choice, she says. www.techpolicy.press/the-multilin...
techpolicy.press
The Multilingual AI Gap Is Not Closing. It Is Being Rebranded.
The gap between adding a language to a model and including the community that speaks it in governance is a political choice, writes Sofia Magdalena Olofsson.
01013
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Not sure I’ve ever gotten whiplash from a list of verbs before
120
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Giving a talk on my new research at @harvardusjapan.bsky.social this coming Monday at noon, in person and streaming! Zoom registration at us-japan.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/japane...
Poster for Weatherhead talk by me, "Japanese Approaches to the Computational Image," April 6, 2026, 12-1pm.
181
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
They reset the link, so it should work now
110
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
I thought so, but yes I'm seeing the login too. Will check
110
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Giving a talk on my new research at @harvardusjapan.bsky.social this coming Monday at noon, in person and streaming! Zoom registration at us-japan.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/japane...
Poster for Weatherhead talk by me, "Japanese Approaches to the Computational Image," April 6, 2026, 12-1pm.
181
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
I have a brief essay on karaoke enclosures in the new Lee Bul catalogue, part of a retrospective currently on at M+ (Hong Kong)
Cover to Lee Bul: Life and Work, eds. Doryun Chong and June Yeong Kwak, 2025first pages of essay: Paul Roquet, "Karaoke and the One-Person Space"Accompanying image from Lee Bul, "Live Forever II" installation view (2001)
030
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Exciting this is out -- lost count of how many times I've recommended people read the original dissertation
051
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Glasses promising to lower your cognitive load that depend on you being too cognitively overloaded to realize you shouldn't be wearing them
011
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
If you're in the neighborhood this weekend, I'll be presenting the Saturday keynote at this Harvard conference. Part of my project on Japanese CGI beyond simulation. Really just here to share the slick poster design though
Poster for Harvard East Asia Society conference: "Delineations" February 13-14, 2026 https://heasconference.hsites.harvard.edu/
060
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
Wednesday night at the Global Mediations Lab: Paul North (co-editor of the new edition of Capital) joins us to talk mediation in Marx
cmsw.mit.edu
Paul North, “Real Mediation, The ABCs of Marx’s Capital”
This new translation exposes the way Capital's central element, value, gets produced and circulates through mediation between disparate processes. This talk will present the ABCs of Marx’s analysis with special focus on the role of mediation.
000
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
That article makes me realize I don’t really care if students can recite the plot. It’s not about enforcing one particular form of attention. I do still dream of in-person screenings, because there are some things you just can’t perceive at all without a bigger screen, or a bigger group
041
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
11am/8pm (Boston time) tomorrow!
032
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
11am/8pm (Boston time) tomorrow!
032
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
Great topic (and I appreciate this long list of related vocab)
networks.h-net.org
CfP Severing Ties in Japan – Zetsuen (disconnection) in Japanese Culture and Literature | H-Net
Dear list members,please find below the Call for Papers for a conference on phenomena and discourses of disconnection (zetsuen) in Japanese culture and literature.Best wishes,Elena Giannoulis Severing...
020
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Join us for a follow-up conference to Cultural Politics of the Computational Image, this time online. Friday, January 23, day/night. Register for the zooms at: globalmediations.mit.edu/cpci-workshop/
Poster for "More Cultural Politics of the Computational Image," Friday Jan 23, 2026. 

Schedule
SESSION 1. 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM EST  
Amitabh Vikram (Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University), “Holy Pixels: Temple CCTV, Darshan Livestreams, and Crowd Vision”
Ann Wang (University of Pennsylvania), “Amphibious Tropics: Automation, Extraction, and the Imaging (Making) of Malaysia’s Geospatial Landscape”
Hansun Hsiung (Durham University), “NHK Engineers Meet Media Theory: The Televisual Image in Japan’s ‘Informationalizing Society’”

SESSION 2. 8:00 – 9:30 PM EST
Ding-Liang Chen (National Tsing Hua University), “Prospecting Resource: Early Satellite Vision and War Ecologies in Southeast Asia”
Joia Duskic (UCLA), “The Procession Does Not Proceed, It Gets Prompted from the Sidelines”
Yedong Sh-Chen (Harvard University), “Under the Chinese Skin: A Digital Dermatology of Video Games”

Register at https://globalmediations.mit.edu/cpci-workshop/
033
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Given ambient audio capture is now mainly being used in medical contexts to record interactions with patients, it's helpful to think of Meta et al.'s 'always recording' strategy as basically turning all of life into one endless doctor's appointment
ctol.digital
Meta Buys Your Conversations: Inside the Limitless Acquisition That Signals Silicon Valley's Ambient Audio Bet
Meta's acquisition of Limitless AI for its always-listening Pendant signals Big Tech's ambient audio strategy, raising privacy concerns despite coherent strateg
011
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
TIL about the tradition of satirical computer vision papers that propose using computer vision to automate the recognition of 'good' computer vision papers
0345
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
Congrats, looks great!
010
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
“In the rare cases when the bot makes a mistake, they strap on a VR headset and use joysticks to manually control grasp and place the drink back on the shelf […] In a typical eight-hour shift, they take over the robot about 50 times, and it takes up to five minutes each time to resolve the error.”
restofworld.org
Japanese convenience stores are hiring robots run by workers in the Philippines
Filipino tele-operators remotely control Japan’s convenience store robots and train AI, benefiting from an uptick in automation-related jobs.
040
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
Hurrah, congrats!
110
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
Conversely, if you taught classes approaching AR/VR critically, that learning is just as relevant today ; )
120
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 27/08/2025
Someone at Kodansha keeps inviting art animators to make VR films and it's great (newest one is a Wada Atsushi critique of mental health care in Japan/defense of imaginary cats)
youtu.be
Venice Immersive 2025 - If You See A Cat
YouTube video by BiennaleChannel
040
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
Tokyo Metro doing an escape room tie-in for Exit 8 is a little on the nose, but why not I guess
Campaign train poster
051
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
The real 2.5D
news.mit.edu
MIT tool visualizes and edits “physically impossible” objects
The “Meschers” tool from MIT CSAIL represents “physically impossible” objects commonly found in M.C. Escher’s illustrations by converting both images and 3D models in 2.5-dimensional objects. The tool...
030
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
A movie made of dust and mold (complimentary)
Poster for SANITORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (Quay Brothers, 2024)
040
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
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
021
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Pau Pitarch @paupitarch.bsky.social · 12/07/2025
Cindi Textor's wonderful _Intersectional Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility_ is available for free download. With chapters on Yi Kwangsu, Kim Saryang, Kim Sokpong, Yi Yangji, Yu Miri and others.
luminosoa.org
Intersectional Incoherence | University of California Press
Intersectional Incoherence stages an encounter between the critical discourse on intersectionality and texts produced by Korean subjects of the Japanese empire and their postwar descendants in Japan,...
063
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13
globalmediations.mit.edu
Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab
043
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13
globalmediations.mit.edu
Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab
043
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Dan Hassler-Forest @danhf.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
An open letter of resignation from myself and many other book series editors at Amsterdam University Press, following its recent acquisition by the notoriously exploitative academic publishing conglomerate Taylor & Francis.
27027
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
My sense is GPS *does* have something to do with AI, but in the sense of training people to do what a computer tells them to do rather than trust what they see in front of them. Technologies against situational awareness
030
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
This is a laundry list of rhetorical strategies to defend the adoption of a given technology for the purposes of advancing an ideology & economic regime: inevitability, unquestioning praise of “innovation,” buy-in from concerned stakeholders, assurances that partnership is not capitulation. 1/n
9481199
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
Conversely, I really appreciated the interviews in the book noting how an album someone might only ever play once can still be incredibly important to them. Made me realize at some point I had internalized the idea of replay value as some kind of inherent good. But good for who?
010
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
Finished @lizpelly.bsky.social’s fantastic MOOD MACHINE. The part on the re-muzakification of ambient really tracks with frustrations I’ve heard from musicians lately. If you only go online, it’s as if the history of ambient music has been rewritten to foreground more background-friendly styles
130
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
(to clarify, incomprehensible as in some drivers get very confused, not why they're there in the first place)
010
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
Rotaries are great when they work as intended. The real problem with these is they are operating at like 5x the traffic they were designed for
110
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
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/
130
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
I mean I get it but also, yeah. Somehow this reminded me of Werner Herzog’s flex about his low shooting ratio, so I googled it and… of course someone has shared it on LinkedIn as ‘lean working’ inspiration🤦🏻‍♂️
010
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Working here in a more neutral sense of being at work all day, but I sense her book (a big bestseller in Japan last year) was mainly aimed at office workers under pressure to advance their careers but who felt guilty about not reading as much—so closer to your latter group?
110
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Posted about this before but this is basically Miyake Kaho’s argument about why working people stop reading novels—if you’re trained to skim for action items/takeaways then all that other novely stuff just becomes inefficient noise
280
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 25/06/2025
We also looked at institutions & nations that are producing the most surveillance. Top inst: 1.MSFT 2.CMU 3.MIT 4.Chinese Univ of Hong Kong Top nations: 1.USA 2.China 3.UK If an institution, nation or subfield authors papers with downstream patents, most are used in surveillance patents. 6/
a, Institutions and nations that have produced the most CVPR papers with downstream surveillance-enabling patents. For each institution or nation, most patented papers have been used in surveillance-enabling patents. b, Percentage of patented papers used in surveillance-enabling patents, stratified by institution, nation and subfield. For each institution, nation or subfield that has published at least ten papers with downstream patents, we show the percentage of these papers that have been used in surveillance-enabling patents (vertical grey bars) (n = 13,804, n = 18,272 and n = 19,413, respectively). We found a pervasive norm: if an institution, nation or subfield authors papers with downstream patents, most are used in surveillance-enabling patents. (Vertical grey bars are frequently above the 50% threshold; orange line). Whiskers represent the standard deviation.
29334
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Nature @nature.com · 26/06/2025
The output of computer-vision research is overwhelmingly aimed towards monitoring humans go.nature.com/45HQI4f
go.nature.com
Don’t sleepwalk from computer-vision research into surveillance
The output of computer-vision research is overwhelmingly aimed towards monitoring humans. The potential ethical implications need more scrutiny.
05318
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Creative writing assistant prof. position in our department now taking applications - fiction of any or many sorts! cmsw.mit.edu/applications...
cmsw.mit.edu
Applications for Assistant Professor in Creative Writing now open
The deadline for all materials is Aug 29, 2025 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time.
000
Reposted by Paul Roquet
Joyce Park @troutgirl.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
The regime has posted signs at Manzanar, the WWII concentration camp for Japanese Americans, asking visitors to report "negative" historical interpretations. Hard to imagine a positive interpretation but it's probably just an excuse to shut down the park. www.sfgate.com/california-p...
sfgate.com
Signs to police 'negative' history went up at Manzanar. Historians are nervous.
"It sends a pretty clear message that your story is not welcome here."
751875812
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
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
030
Reposted by Paul Roquet
NCC (北米日本研究資料調整協議会) @nccjapaninfo.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
NCC's Resource Sharing Committee & CEAL's Committee on Japanese Materials hosted an open meeting featuring representatives from the National Diet Library on 3/13 at AAS to discuss access to NDL materials. A summary of the discussions can now be found on our site: guides.nccjapan.org/homepage/new...
084
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
"As the project progressed, however, institutional pressure mounted not to engage with the topic of non-Japanese labor before 1945 [...] What began as an immersive heritage experience has become something else entirely: a study in obstruction, an index of refusal, and a methodological provocation."
pastmeetspixel.substack.com
Why the Island Is Silent
Reframing the Prototype as a Node in a Distributed System of Refusal
020
Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
They're calling this ambient mini refrigerator-looking thing a 'wall washer,' promising to cleanse your space with $270 worth of LEDs (why be immersed when you can be power-washed, as it were)
theverge.com
Amazon leaked Philips’ new Hue Play Smart Wall Washer ambient wall light
Set the mood.
010