Paul Roquet

@inqualia.bsky.social

1303 Followers 496 Following

other spatial mediations | proquet.mit.edu

Poster for Weatherhead talk by me, "Japanese Approaches to the Computational Image," April 6, 2026, 12-1pm.
Cover to Lee Bul: Life and Work, eds. Doryun Chong and June Yeong Kwak, 2025
Poster for Harvard East Asia Society conference: "Delineations" February 13-14, 2026 https://heasconference.hsites.harvard.edu/
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/
Campaign train poster
Poster for SANITORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (Quay Brothers, 2024)
"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
"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/
Spoon/fork box with long explanation (in Japanese) why using chopsticks is not authentic and will kill the vibe please don’t do it
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.
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
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”
“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.”
TV showing white cat watching a door in a blue-striped room, with news ticker running at the bottom
Four figures enveloped in fog
This afternoon at Kanda myōjin, a long line of people wait to make their first shrine visit of the year
“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.”
Tall wooden slats with painting of white snake welcoming the new year
“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…
“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.”
Multi-channel speaker installation in dark room (from 「evala　現われる場　消滅する像」)
In-cafe ‘smoking room,’ about the size of a phone booth
Winding street-side bike lane with tall metal and fiberglass walls on both sides
Nov 28 post to x from Akihiko Taniguchi showing two views of a grey figure in a VR headset lounging and leaning back on his hands
Left: 2015 TIME cover with Palmer Luckey in VR headset; Right: Business Insider story from today about how Luckey's brother-in-law, Matt Gaetz, might become US Attorney General
"And I often say that the Metaverse is... it's a world that rotates around you….” (clip from The Future is a Dead Mall)
“10:20 p.m. An Apple watch led to the arrest of its owner when the device alerted police to a "serious" car crash on Lowell Road near the boat ramp. Officers grew suspicious when they contacted the watch owner, who said he had "no issues and that he pulled over to relieve himself in the woods." Officers noted the man "seemed hesitant to answer any follow-up questions" and sent two cruisers to Lowell Road. There, officers found a car crashed into the guardrail and the driver uninjured. The 50-year-old Concord man behind the wheel failed a field sobriety test, leading to his arrest on charges of operating under the influence and marked-lane violations. Police ordered a tow of the car.”
Black poster with neon squiggles for Dissolve Music 2024
“The animation looks fuzzy and /I really would prefer it/ if you took the headset off when you're talking to me for anything more than a few sentences.” From Julian Chokkattu, “Apple’s Vision Pro Headset Shows the Future of Computing Is Bulky and Weird,” Wired magazine
Google maps review excerpt for a coffee stand, with AI summary “20 people mention bench”
Phone booth with the words TELEPHONE CALM above the door
Still from recent vision pro ad with montage of characters pulling on goggles/masks
bright future: jellyfish drifts down the sendaibori
Line of tall wooden boards in leaning on front of a building, with 迎春 2024 and a colorful dragon illustration painted on them
The Voice at 3:00 A.M. Who put canned laughter Into my crucifixion scene?
Email text: I am contacting you to build a trusting relationship with the eminent. It was not an easy task for me. I am planning to release Volume 1, Issue 5, for which I need one article. We expect you'll play a significant role in assisting us in making this upcoming issue the best it can be. Could you kindly help by supporting me with your unpublished contribution? Kindly acknowledge this email within 24 hours.
Diagram for mouse VR setup showing screens fixed in place on mouse via a pair of long poles. From original paper at https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(23)00893-0
“A future-oriented anthropology of the metaverse can be utopian while responding to how the metaverse can also magnify negative aspects of the internet, adding new negative aspects all its own. The metaverse can be a corporate-owned source of disinformation, complicit with state power, that troubles boundaries of the authoritative and real in more pervasive ways than before. While the metaverse is grounded in the physical world, it can be used in service of ideologies involving the desire “to escape from existing physical and cultural constraints, and to start over in a more flexible space freed from the intense inequality and economic struggle of the existing social order” (Roquet, 2023, p. 4). In the metaverse it is entirely possible for heteronormativity, ableism, white supremacy, and patriarchy to continue to exploit and exclude. It can support infrastructures of labor precarity, surveillance, and inequality with regard to access, control, and representation.”
Bright yellow moon emerging from between tall buildings with bright railway platforms below
Black text on white page: Printed in Japan, and [in Japanese] complaints about missing or out of order pages should go to amazon customer service
[PDF] Robots'“Woohoo” and “Argh” can Enhance Users' Emotional and Social Perceptions: An Exploratory Study on Non-Lexical Vocalizations and Non-Linguistic Sounds X Liu, J Dong, M Jeon - ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
Me on the panel
Article section (in Japanese) describing how site visitors think the 3D replica artworks are just as good as the originals; artists also appreciate the details
black and white image of the landing page of Hara Museum 3D walkthrough, with inset 3D image looking down a curved gallery hallway
“True virtual reality shifts time like media, place like communications, and, crucially, does so with perfect availability and infinite capacity. In this view, virtual reality is AI, and AI is virtual reality. Hardware does matter — that has been the focus of this Article — but it matters as a means to an end, to enable an interactive experience without the constraints of human capacity or the friction of actual reality.” From https://stratechery.com/2023/ai-hardware-and-virtual-reality/
Email advertisement from local government for a “Cell Tower Listening Session”
From Amanda Petrusich's Oneohtrix Point Never profile in the New Yorker: “A really exciting part of technology is that you can metaphorically experience one thing from many different angles,” Lopatin said. “And that’s sculpture, too. Being able to look at things a million different ways.”
Excerpt from Melissa Kagen, WANDERING GAMES: “The discourse of work as love serves to calcify existing inequalities, with the added bonus of soul-negating self-indoctrination that quelches a worker’s suspicion that perhaps they are being mistreated by an employer (or, in the case of independent game development, a fandom of consumers).”