An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave.
William J. MitchellThe essential characteristic of digital information is that it can be manipulated easily and very rapidly by computer... Computational tools for transforming, combining, altering, and analyzing images are as essential to the digital artist as brushes and pigments to a painter.
William J. MitchellWe [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.
William J. MitchellAutomobile is one of the most successful inventions of all time, but in my view, it is thoroughly obsolete already. And so by fundamentally rethinking the automobile, thinking of it as a robot on four wheels, essentially, something that can communicate with other intelligent devices, it can operate in a coordinated way, you can really start to fundamentally rethink urban personal mobility.
William J. Mitchell