Chenoe Hart
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chenoehart.bsky.social
Chenoe Hart
@chenoehart.bsky.social
2.7K followers 1.3K following 1.1K posts
Architectural designer and researcher exploring the intersection of the internet and physical space.

https://chenoehart.com/
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chenoehart.bsky.social
This passage of Chapter 13, which appears after the author's discussion of evidence for increased TV viewing correlating with reduced social participation, feels particularly jarring to me. I never watched that much TV, but this is exactly how I feel when I use my phone.
Text from Bowling Alone: "IF TV STEALS TIME, it also seems to encourage lethargy and passivity. Time researchers Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used an ingenious method to track our use of time and its effects on our psychic wellbeing. (45) They persuaded subjects to carry beepers with them around the clock for a week, and when the beepers were randomly triggered, the subjects wrote down what they were doing and how they felt. Television viewing, Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi found, is a relaxing, low-concentration activity. Viewers feel passive and less alert after watching. On heavy-viewing evenings, people are also likely to engage in other low-energy, even slothful activities, whereas on light-viewing evenings, the same people spent more time outside the home in activities like sports and club meetings. Heavy viewing is associated with lots of free time, loneliness, and emotional difficulties. TV is apparently especially attractive for people who feel unhappy, particularly when there is nothing else to do."
November 15, 2025 at 1:21 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
I found this image, but I thought I remembered seeing another one that involved a more curvilinear street map. Unless I'm misremembering...
Google maps satellite view of a suburban neighborhood where it takes 6mi to travel between two points on the map separated by a cul-de-sac.
November 4, 2025 at 4:03 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Was excited yesterday to go to the launch event for my former architecture professor Madeline Schwartzman’s new book, Alive: Synthetic Cells, Feral Robots, Rebellious AI, and the Design of Radical Life. It shares some provocative projects and ideas!
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/alive-...
Book cover for Madeline Schwartzman’s book Alive, showing a sculpture of a transparent circuit-filled bird atop someone’s hand.
October 31, 2025 at 12:13 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Wherever they go, it looks like there’s going to be some corporate favoritism involved.

www.pbs.org/newshour/pol...
Trump also said at last week's event that the head of Carrier Global Corp., a leading manufacturer of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, had offered to donate the air conditioning system for the ballroom. Carrier confirmed to The Associated Press on Monday that it had done so. A cost estimate was not immediately available. "Carrier is honored to provide the new iconic ballroom at the White House with a world-class, energy-efficient HVAC system, bringing comfort to distinguished guests and dignitaries in this historic setting for years to come," the company said in an emailed statement.
October 26, 2025 at 3:48 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
VR tech appears to be inducing a new kind of labor exploitation, as offshore robot teleoperators restocking Japanese convenience stores report motion sickness from their abnormal patterns of headset use. Is VR really needed in these situations?

restofworld.org/2025/philipp...
The worker said they often feel dizzy and cross-eyed from cybersickness, a type of motion sickness associated with VR. Its occurrence is related to how much they use the headset: 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. "It can be really tough. Imagine teleporting, the sudden disconnect from your surroundings, elevation - everything can cause accidents," said Atienza, who has studied the nausea and disorientation resulting from cybersickness. The bots are usually autonomous, but occasionally — about 4% of the time — they mess up. Perhaps they drop a bottle, which rolls away. Getting the AI bot to recover it by mimicking the human grip perfectly - the friction, the feel of metal in the hand - is one of the more challenging problems in robotics. That's when a pilot steps in.
October 22, 2025 at 5:28 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
These curves came out of nowhere, and there’s no thickened poche.
GPT prompt to draw Mies’s brick country house. Some of the corners of the building have curves the real plan drawing lacks in real life.
September 7, 2025 at 6:01 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Glass house without the glass.
Prompt asking GPT to draw a floor plan of Philip Johnson’s glass house. One side of it has walls & interior rooms.
September 7, 2025 at 5:55 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Tried asking ChatGPT to draw some well-known floor plans. It does not seem to have very much awareness of architecture at all.
Prompt asking chatgpt to draw a plan of the Villa Savoye. It’s rounded on one end with no evidence of pilotis.
September 7, 2025 at 5:51 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
It gave me the right answer for blueberry, but it still doesn’t understand “cranberry” as of right now.
Prompt: How many r in cranberry ChatGPT answer: The word cranberry contains 2 instances of the letter "r".
August 8, 2025 at 2:12 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Wonder if helianthophobia (fear of sunflowers) may also be related. They’re fairly large, and when you look too closely at the center of one it feels like you’re staring into an eye or an infinite fractal.
Image of a field of sunflowers via Wikimedia.
July 20, 2025 at 2:47 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Apparently a few people on Reddit feel the same way.
Reddit post with image of Green Bank WV radio telescope with text “One of my most effective triggers. Never been around them, never will.” Reddit post of large satellite dish with text: “This really set my megalophobia off, one of the satellite dishes at Pikes Peak Observatory in The Crew 2, the speck inside the circle is my car.”
July 20, 2025 at 1:31 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
People invent all sorts of products to solve problems which corporations aren’t willing to solve for them, and it’s interesting when you stumble across an example of one.
Product description for a stick-on webcam privacy shutter cover advertising compatibility with many existing webcam models.
June 30, 2025 at 4:17 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Interesting answer to a random hunch I had. I'm not sure offhand exactly what it means for the philosophical basis of blobitecture.

(Screenshots from Wikipedia.)
Wikipedia entry on CATIA: "Besides being used in a wide range of industries from aerospace and defence to packaging design, CATIA has been used by architect Frank Gehry to design some of his signature curvilinear buildings[2] and his company Gehry Technologies was developing their Digital Project software based on CATIA.[3]" Wikipedia entry on CATIA: "CATIA started as an in-house development in 1977 by French aircraft manufacturer Avions Marcel Dassault to provide 3D surface modeling and numerical control functions for the CADAM software they used at that time[4] to develop the Mirage fighter jet."
June 9, 2025 at 3:40 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
I’m going to be doing a short lightning talk at the upcoming Sceenshot Conference, happening on the 11th of this month in NYC.

screenshot.arquipelago.org
Text: “Hosted by Cristóbal and Omar May 11th 2025 at 73 Allen St, NYC starting at 9am Present anything related to screenshots! Provenance, image-based computing, screenshot archives, folk practices of information storage and sharing, &c We'll have 2-3 selected keynotes (tbd!) and a series of lightning talks (~5 minutes).”
May 2, 2025 at 9:33 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
This is an important finding in general, but I’m also noticing how the article used a spatial example (Keyon Vafa’s research on how AIs trained on turn-by-turn directions produce a distorted map) to make its point. Discrepancies become clear on the map where they don’t when the AI’s medium is words.
Map from Keyon Vafa’s research showing how AIs trained on turn-by-turn travel directions generate a distorted overall map of Manhattan, with non-existent diagonal routes cutting through city blocks.
April 26, 2025 at 6:17 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Now with some classic rock-eating advice added in:
Google Al Overview The saying "don't eat a biscuit when a rock will do" is a variation of the idiom "don't take the biscuit," which means to do something surprising, annoying, or outrageous. It's a colloquial expression suggesting that someone is taking advantage of a situation or being overly demanding when a simpler, less extravagant solution is available. In this case, "biscuit" and "rock" represent the less and more satisfactory options, respectively.
April 23, 2025 at 1:47 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Not a good photo, but I got an odd mix of emotions the other day sitting on the JFK runway waiting to fly to a Red State over Easter when I saw one of the last not-yet-retired A340s behind me in line to fly to Europe instead. Felt like an end of an era but also like something I wished I was part of.
Lufthansa Airbus A340 on the runway at JFK airport, waiting in line to take off. The wing of a smaller plane is in the foreground.
April 20, 2025 at 8:21 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
The design process also involved investigating an alternative translucent design option for the rack shelves.
Alternative design of a larger set of server racks with translucent shelf inserts, and a data read-out (“12,000 Transactions Completed”) projected onto their surface.
April 13, 2025 at 5:57 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Update on my FutureRack project to explore the re-use of server racks as furniture: earlier this year I worked with a client on adapting the idea for potential installation in an office, further developing the design and working with a fabricator to get it ready for production.
3D rendering of two server racks with wooden shelf/drawer inserts and LCD screens. Rear view of server racks with wooden shelf inserts. Sectional detail drawing showing a connection adapter between wooden shelves and server rack rails. Detail drawing of pull-out drawer construction assembly.
April 13, 2025 at 5:57 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Discovered a paper talking about a topic I've wondered about on my own for a while: the phenomenon of how often games are set on islands. (My curiosity has been technical though, while the paper discusses islands as a literary trope in more detail.) islandstudiesjournal.org/article/8160...
Screenshot of journal website with the paper title "The Island as Container: Islands, Archipelagos, and Player Movement in Video Games." A photo of a game controlled is shown in the hazy purple/green background.
March 24, 2025 at 4:59 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Went to The Met’s Paul Rudolph exhibit on the last hour of the last day it was open, because I was honestly a bit nervous about confronting his work. His drawings often seem like an impossible ideal for current architects to live up to. Was relieved to find they had imperfections like anything else.
Close-up of Paul Rudolph sectional perspective drawing. The people inside the building are hazily abstracted, and the shadows are drawn as harsh lines. Close-up of Paul Rudolph drawing. Cars on a road are abstracted boxes without wheels, the drawing is smudged, and a material in the foreground is rendered with rough squiggles. Close-up of Paul Rudolph rendering, showing palm trees by the water. The line between the land and water cuts through the tree trunks and part of the water is missing. Close up of a Paul Rudolph drawing. There’s smudges between the line work and the people are rough abstractions.
March 16, 2025 at 11:04 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
I don't have a lot to say about it yet since I'm still reading, but this looks to be a good book. It invites you to question a lot of preconceived conceptual assumptions about how computers "think" and function in our society.
Cover of the book "Programmed Visions: Software and Memory," showing a hazy partly-obscured person looking through an implied window onto a projected stream of code.
February 21, 2025 at 7:33 PM
chenoehart.bsky.social
This is kind of niche, but: I tried Googling for anecdotal advice on the best way to pack/move a Tizio lamp, and the AI answer is so unbelievably wrong I had to share it. 🤦🏻‍♀️
Al Overview To transport a Tizio lamp safely, disassemble it by separating the arms and base, wrap each component individually with packing paper or bubble wrap, and then place them in a well-padded box with additional packing material to fill any gaps; ensure the lampshade is also carefully wrapped and protected separately. Key steps: Disassemble: Carefully detach the lampshade and separate the arms from the base of the Tizio lamp. Wrap components: • Wrap each arm individually with packing paper or bubble wrap, paying special attention to the joints and delicate areas. • Wrap the lampshade separately with packing paper or bubble wrap. • Wrap the base with packing paper or bubble wrap.
January 9, 2025 at 2:33 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Enjoyed the pleasant surprise at the end of this talk where the audience was invited to help demolish an edible gingerbread geodesic dome. It offered another avenue for participation in addition to asking questions, kind of like how you’d eat popcorn in a movie or dance during a concert.
A partially eaten gingerbread geodesic dome on a table before a chair used during the panel discussion.
January 8, 2025 at 1:13 AM
chenoehart.bsky.social
Bizarre to read about the Israeli military relying on AI & phone use patterns to abstract away awareness of the spaces they were bombing. They had to know these approaches were deeply flawed, so the tech might be as much an excuse for inaccuracy as a cause of it.

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/w...
Screenshot of text from the linked article: “The military struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets. It burned through much of a prewar database of vetted targets within days and adopted an unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence at a vast scale. • The military often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm, and sometimes launched strikes on targets several hours after last locating them, increasing the risk of error. The model mainly depended on estimates of cellphone usage in a wider neighborhood, rather than extensive surveillance of a specific building, as was common in previous Israeli campaigns.”
December 26, 2024 at 4:03 PM