Alan N. Shapiro, Technologist and Futurist

Blog and text archive about media theory, science fiction theory, future design, social choreography, Computer Science 2.0, new media art, robots and androids, Star Trek, The Prisoner, Jean Baudrillard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Marshall McLuhan

Read Article

The Elastic Clock

April 28th, 2010 in Category: Alexis Clancy, Humanities Informatics

We will create a time in software that is electively elastic. The Elastic Clock will mimic a Gaussian distribution. The electivity of time intervals is determined solely by the coder. The Elastic Clock will instantiate an instance that is capable of positive mutation.
Read Article

The Metronome Clock

April 28th, 2010 in Category: Alexis Clancy, Humanities Informatics

The Object-Oriented instance is instantiated from micro-measurable tick-tock time. This is the time that is implemented in the time/math libraries of existing OO programming languages like C++ and Java. The quantum computer will come into existence after an expansion in consciousness of our perception of time.
Read Article

The Instance and the Shadow

April 24th, 2010 in Category: Alexis Clancy, Humanities Informatics, Jean Baudrillard

At the end of his book “The Consumer Society: myths and structures,” Jean Baudrillard tells the story of the 1930s German expressionist film “The Student of Prague.” A poor but ambitious student is impatient for a more prosperous life. The student sells his mirror-image to the Devil in exchange for worldly success.
Read Article

Towards a New Computer Science: Instantiate a Much Richer Software Instance

April 21st, 2010 in Category: Alexis Clancy, Humanities Informatics

Object-Orientation is an essential prerequisite to the New Computer Science. Yet Object-Orientation has the limitation that it has continued mainly to be a technical practice, stuck in the binary opposition between technique and culture.
Read Article

The Answer to the Question of Artificial Life

April 18th, 2010 in Category: Alexis Clancy, Androids & Artificial Life, Humanities Informatics

Artificial Life has the goal of making make software that is more “alive.” However, ALife has overlooked that “vitality” already exists in the creative arts. Life means art, music, painting, dance, poetry, literature, languages, sexuality, society, spirituality. Life means emotions, feelings, sensations, intuitions, colors.
Read Article

Inscribe Philosophy into the Heart of Computer Science

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Alexis Clancy, Humanities Informatics, Jacques Derrida, P.D. Ouspensky

There are many individuals in the technology and cyberculture communities who are not just “engineers” or techie programmers. They are already working to bring software together with art and sociology. However, in their projects, they are working two or three levels removed from the core of computer science.
Read Article

What is the New Computer Science?

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Alexis Clancy, Humanities Informatics

It is essential to engage in a reflection on the relationship between computer science and the history of ideas. Existing computer science is based on 17th century ideas. The entire history of ideas of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries has been excluded from computer science.
Read Article

Star Trek: How the New Comes Into the World

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Star Trek

Most scientists and academics who write about Star Trek claim to be fans of the series. But their customary methodologies function to deny to Star Trek its true originality as the creator of a reality-shaping science fiction that formatively influences culture, ideas, technologies, and even hard sciences like physics.
Read Article

Interview about Wikipedia

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Wikipedia

I studied European Intellectual History with Dominick LaCapra at Cornell University, and I am interested in ambitious systems of knowledge classification in the West starting from the French Encyclopédistes in the 18th century and scientific positivism in the 19th century.
Read Article

Alan Sokal on French theory and Science

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Rethinking Science

Sokal’s hoax was very funny. Its strength was that it was a literary strategy (taking a page from the playbook of that very same interdisciplinarity and “literary turn” – science and literature – that he was ostensibly attacking); the strength did not come from his hardcore physics.
Read Article

Only Impossible Exchange Is Possible, by Aurel Schmidt

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Jean Baudrillard, Zen Buddhism

Impossible exchange is an impossible subject. In Jean Baudrillard's book "Impossible Exchange", the matter is treated in such a way that one is better off with an associative and meditative interpretive approach than with a discursive reading.
Read Article

In Search of the Child’s Innocence, by Caroline Heinrich

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Baudrillard

I begin with a quotation. "The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes", writes Nietzsche in Zarathustra. The child is innocent because s/he starts all over again from scratch. S/he starts from the space of emptiness that the lion has carved out.
Read Article

Re-Thinking Science: The Essay

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Rethinking Science

Influenced by Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” Adorno and Horkheimer’s "Dialectic of Enlightenment," and Kubrick and Clarke’s "2001: A Space Odyssey," I believe that we have come to the end of the long era of technology being conceived and developed as a tool for the ‘domination of nature’.
Read Article

Play Don’t Work in a Pragmatic-Utopian High-Tech Enterprise

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Karl Marx, Utopian High Tech Enterprise

As a libertarian thinker, I believe that capitalism has brought great benefits in economic wealth, individual freedom, science and technology, education, and democracy. As someone sensitive to social inequality and alienation, I have also taken seriously the views of capitalism's critics, whether liberal, anarchist, or Marxist.
Read Article

The Star Trekking of Physics

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Star Trek, Teleportation

In spite of the proliferation of exhilarated technoculture and its multidisciplinary, wired self-image, there remain some straightlaced, uncool tendencies within the techno-elite which boil over at the thought of all this openness to the humanities and the soft.
Older Entries