Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

Blog and project archive about media theory, science fiction theory, and creative coding

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“Outer space is a blank canvas” — Interview with Forty Two Magazine

March 23rd, 2021 in the categories: Space Travel, Star Trek

Since Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, Western culture has been fascinated with the adventure narrative that starts with great technological ambitions and ends with the mere struggle for survival. And outer space is associated with the future – about which science fiction superficially appears to speculate.
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Body, Self, and Code in Hypermodernism

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Black Mirror, Hypermodernism, Self and Identity

The text of the speech that I gave at the Schaubühne theater in Berlin on 23. February 2020, at an event in the “Streitraum” series led by Carolin Emcke. There were 450 people in the audience, a highlight of my life.
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How to Regulate the Media when they are ubiquitous and have gone viral: from utopian science fiction to practical European policy

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: European Union, Media in the Digital Society

This is the text of the keynote speech that I gave at the European Union conference "Pluralism and Responsibility: Media in the Digital Society" in Berlin on July 7, 2020. I was invited to speak by Monika Grütters, the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
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Interview with Artist Network Theory

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Creative Coding

What is the revolution of Creative Coding you also name Poetic Software or Radical Software? What did programming do to your thinking? At what point and in which way did you encounter creativity in this field?
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Some Visions of Post-Capitalism

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Post-Capitalism

In the post-capitalist economy fictionally envisioned by Varoufakis, work, control over production, digital networks, democratic politics, land use, money, and the internal culture and operations of corporations have been fully democratized. There are no bosses and no hierarchies at any level of the enterprise.
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From mass advertising to personalized advertising: the Billboard Cage Project of Christos Voutichtis

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Public Space Art

The billboard is like a theatrical stage. It is an exhibition space, a seductive or informative representation of a product or service or venue, or a simulation drawing attention to itself and becoming its own hyper-reality. It is a large advertising structure on the side of the highway or smack in the middle of the city.
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Is Trump a Fascist or is He the Parody of Fascism?

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Donald Trump, Jean Baudrillard

The kind of media theory or media analysis which has been prevalent on the American political left for the past several decades operates essentially with an epistemology of true and false. In their war against Trump, the liberal political media – CNN and the New York Times, for example – take the same tack.
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Light-Writing from Las Vegas

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Architecture, Consumer Culture, Las Vegas

From Dublin, I traveled on to New York City, then to California to meet up with my long-distance girlfriend. The America trip had begun. Moments after entering Nevada by car, we encountered Whiskey Pete’s casino. Here an important Baudrillard “simulation and simulacra” conference had taken place in 1996.
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Lessons from the Philosophy of Science

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Philosophy of Science

How can we redirect ideas from the philosophy of science (which has focused in the past on physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, etc...) to interrogating computer science or what Herbert A. Simon called The Sciences of the Artificial (as opposed to sciences which study natural phenomena)?
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From Sociology to Media Studies to Software Studies, part one

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Media Studies, Software Studies

The science part of the invention of computer science: algorithms and data can all be encoded into lengthy binary strings (i.e., stored as computable numbers). The cultural part: how one does this (i.e., the relationship between the code and the data) is a cultural decision.
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From Sociology to Media Studies to Software Studies, part two

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Media Studies, Sociology

The study of the societal consequences and existential meanings of digital technologies has today, in effect, merged with media studies: this is called the field of “digital media.”
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Baudrillard’s Importance for the Future

October 13th, 2019 in the categories: Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard is highly controversial. His work has had as many detractors as it has had defenders and enthusiasts. His detractors say: It cannot be that everything is simulation! Look at this table – it is real! If Baudrillard crosses the street without looking, he is going to get hit by a truck! The same as you and me!
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“The Prisoner” as “The Hostage” and the Episode “A. B. and C.”, by Alan N. Shapiro

September 21st, 2019 in the categories: Jean Baudrillard, The Prisoner

I relate "The Prisoner" to one key concept of Baudrillard: his idea of the figure of the hostage as a metaphor for understanding both the situation of our post-political world and the situation of the individual consumer-citizen in the contemporary postmodern and cybernetic capitalist society.
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The Simulacra of Public Space: the work of Christos Voutichtis, by Alan N. Shapiro

June 28th, 2019 in the categories: Creative Coding, The Illusion Beyond Art

I am going to talk about the artworks of Christos Voutichtis. Seine Arbeit ist ein führendes Beispiel für Interspace Art: nämlich das Bewusstsein für hybriden physischen und virtuellen Raum fördern.
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Technological Anarchism, by Alan N. Shapiro

June 28th, 2019 in the categories: Art and Economics, Ecology, Energy, and the Environment

My intention is to write a book developing the transdisciplinary concept of Technological Anarchism as an optimistic, normative, heterotopian (a term of Michel Foucault) idea of a near-future and open-ended social, logistical, and economic system of Post-Scarcity and Post-Capitalism.
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