Kester Brewin

I don’t want to be petty or anti-American, but one of the scourges of the past decade or so is the growth of Halloween as a fully marketable ‘festival’ to give supermarkets a little bump in the run up to Christmas. Halloween is big in the US, and it’s getting bigger…and more depressing here. It [...]

Rather than remain online, I thought I’d flyer-up some of the ideas I’ve been working on and hand them out at the Occupy demo in London today, camped at St Paul’s. You can download the PDF here: Mutiny Or just read the text… In May 1724, in a small bookshop just a stone’s throw from [...]

There are so many technology stories every week it can be hard to know what’s significant or not. But this piece on the BBC about a new sort of camera has kept me thinking all day, so I thought I’d blog something about it. Put simply, the ‘Lytro’ camera – available for pre-order, but not [...]

You go to a shop to buy a bat, and a ball. In total they cost £1.10. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the bat cost? Listened to a very interesting episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast on ‘the enigma of reason’ yesterday. The interviewee – Dan Sperber – was [...]

  Interesting video here showing Slavoj Zizek at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York. His speech can be read in full here, but what I love about the video is that, for some technological reason no doubt, he cannot himself speak. The crowd around him who can hear directly have to shout out [...]

The media coverage in the UK has been limited, but I think the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest is interesting, and I hope it turns out to be significant. There was comment on BBC radio the other morning suggesting variously that it was the Democratic equivalent of the Republican ‘Tea Party’ movement  - though I’m not [...]

I’m aware of the cult of mac dangers of sychophancy today… but also wanted to mark the passing of someone who did have a big impact on who are and how we live today, both positive and negative. This speech, given to Stanford graduates in 2005, is moving and prescient, but what I want to [...]

It’s been good getting to know Pete over the past few years. Our first books came out at pretty similar times, when we were both involved in similar projects in Ikon and Vaux, and since then I’ve come to count him as a good friend, and companion on a journey. The very nature of conversation [...]

It’s Black History Month again, a festival I have expressed some concerns about in the past – not because I don’t think Black history should be celebrated and represented, but because giving it a ‘special’ place in a particular month may actually serve to reduce its representation, as we can compartmentalise it, rather than integrate [...]