The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.

Most automobiles spend about 80 percent of their time sitting around doing nothing. They're gasoline powered; they go to very high speeds, which in fact, under urban conditions, you don't need. These high speeds generate enormous safety requirements and so on and so forth. Now you can incrementally tweak the automobile. You can make the power train more efficient and you can enhance safety and all of these sorts of things that are very worthwhile.

Everybody thinks an automobile needs an engine. Well, an automobile doesn't necessarily need an engine. What we do is shift electric motors into the wheels of our automobiles and so we have a completely different kind of thing where we have four independent intelligent wheels rather than a traditional internal combustion engine and power train and so on.

We [MIT Smart Cities research group] try to identify the fundamental underlying design assumptions that everybody takes as a sort of given and unchallengeable when you think about solving these problems. And we try to challenge those assumptions.

What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.

We are surrounded by pictures; we have an abundance of theories about them, but it doesn't seem to do us any good. Knowing what pictures are doing, understanding them, doesn't seem necessarily to give us power over them.

That's not a utopian vision. It is a set of ideas that we think are important to discuss. Those ideas largely have to do with sustainability of cities. The ability of cities to, over time, remain in balance with the resource streams that are available to them, and they have to do with social justice and equity of the fundamental conditions of satisfactory citizenship.