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

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Radical Software in India

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Humanities Informatics

Alan Shapiro talks about the possibility of radical software in India, based on expanded philosophical-scientific principles related to Indian intellectual traditions.
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Re-Thinking Science: The Interview

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Rethinking Science

Alan N. Shapiro interviewed by Ulrike Reinhard and Joy Tang.
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Transmediale: The Long Conversation

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Media Studies

On February 5, 2010, Shapiro spoke at the FUTURITY NOW! Transmediale Festival in Berlin, as part of the LONG CONVERSATION event, engaging in dialogues onstage in the auditorium of the HOUSE OF WORLD CULTURES with the artists Jem Finer and Ken Rinaldo.
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Wir brauchen künstliche Intelligenz

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Car of the Future, Humanities Informatics

On February 5, 2010, Shapiro was interviewed for a second time on Deutschlandradio Kultur, talking about the New Computer Science and the Car of the Future.
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Transmediale: The Car of the Future

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Car of the Future

On February 3, 2010, Alan N. Shapiro gave a lecture at the FUTURITY NOW! Transmediale Festival in Berlin, talking about the Car of the Future, and presenting visualizations of the ideas first elaborated in the essay "The Car of the Future," made by the designer Nick Pugh.
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The New Computer Science

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

Computing analyzed from a philosophical viewpoint is still at the level of Descartes, Bacon and Babbage: Mechanical automation. Shapiro wants to include Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard and many others into the science of computing.
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Considerations on Transgenic and Biotech Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Arts & Genomics, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

At the Experimental Art Foundation of Adelaide, Australia, there took place in 2004 the exhibition "Art of the Biotech Era" organized by Melentie Pandilovski. It involved the principal exponents of the artistic sphere connected to biology, genetics and bio-technologies, showing their projects and realizations.
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From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Osmose by Char Davies (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Real/Virtual Reality, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

To enter inside a tree and exit it through the leaves after having participated in its process of chlorophyllous photosynthesis: this is one of the many journeys that Char Davies makes the user of "Osmose" experience in an immersive, interactive, and multisensorial VR environment that was developed and produced in 1995.
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Adolf Portmann on the New Biology, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Adolf Portmann, Arts & Genomics, The Technological Herbarium

This action, offering light to the plant, enables the latter to externalize its 'interiority'. Suggesting this original meaning is the theory developed in the 1960s by the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann. Focusing attention on the study of the form of living beings, Portmann elaborates the innovative concept of 'self-presentation'.
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From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Telegarden by Ken Goldberg (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in Category: The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

Telegarden is a telerobotic installation that enables users of the World Wide Web to see and cultivate a real garden. Conceived in 1994, it was activated in June 1995 at the University of Southern California and presented at the leading international exhibitions of digital art and technology.
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Nature: A Fragment, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

April 15th, 2010 in Category: German Literature, The Technological Herbarium

Rereading the reflections in which, at the end of the 17th century, Goethe voices his hymn to Nature, one acquires the sense of just how advanced is contemporary man in adding those 'secrets', in gaining access to that 'forge', in procuring those 'powers' which Goethe credits exclusively to the great artist Nature.
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Merleau-Ponty and Marx on Nature and Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Arts & Genomics, Karl Marx, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

Interrogating Western philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty pinpoints the original meaning of the concept of Nature. "In Greek, the word 'nature' comes from the verb φύω, which alludes to the vegetative; the Latin word comes from nascor, 'to be born', 'to live'; it is drawn from the first, more fundamental meaning."
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The Technological Herbarium: Introduction, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Arts & Genomics, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

Infinite are the facets in which the living manifests itself. Infinite are the possibilities in which it expresses its existence. Art seizes these possibilities of existence, interprets them, advances unusual combinations of them, breaks up their consolidated connections.
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Gianna Maria Gatti’s The Technological Herbarium, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Arts & Genomics, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

The hybrid of art and technoscience is the carrier of a new worldview, a new era for cyberspace, new cognitive thought and cybernetic epistemology, and the emergence of authentic post-metaphysical thinking as pointed to by 20th century philosophers like Heidegger, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty and Bateson.
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Gregory Bateson and Cybernetics, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Gregory Bateson, Social Choreography

Patterns are everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere. Patterns are in between, ephemeral yet real. They exist in parallel to what we commonly call reality. We can only perceive them if we are precisely tuned in to their wavelength.
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