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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On the trail of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek in the American Desert

June 30th, 2011 in Category: Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek

In Baudrillard’s "America", the secret heart of reversibility is captured in the imaginary of the desert. The desert is The Other America, the quintessential strange attractor, the counterpoint to the system.
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General Patton Memorial Museum

June 30th, 2011 in Category: Museum of the Future, War & Peace

I felt that the General Patton Memorial Museum, and especially the "Ed Hastey Military Vehicle Park" next to it, has some elements embodying the basic principle of the "Museum of the Future" as I conceive it.
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West Coast Vietnam Wall

June 30th, 2011 in Category: War & Peace

West Coast Vietnam Wall, Chiriaco Summit, California
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Authentic Existence in Heidegger’s “Being and Time”

June 23rd, 2011 in Category: Martin Heidegger

In his essay on "Being and Time", my nephew James Shapiro argues (among other things) that Heidegger gives little content to or explanation of what he means by authentic being. My own reading of "Being and Time" is that Heidegger does indeed explain a lot what he means by authentic being or existence.
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On Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, by James Shapiro

June 23rd, 2011 in Category: Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger’s "Being and Time" is a work primarily concerned with the explication and understanding of the specific brand of existence and consciousness that is unique to man—or perhaps stated more succinctly, what it means to be a human being. This unique human existence Heidegger calls Dasein.
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An Interdisciplinary Approach to Building Robots

June 23rd, 2011 in Category: Robotism

I will now outline a programme of 7 concrete near-term steps that a large robotics manufacturing company should take on the road towards introducing robots-slash-androids to the consumer public.
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Towards a Unified Existential Science of Humans and Androids

June 21st, 2011 in Category: Marshall McLuhan, Robotism

There are two ways of thinking about robots or androids, distinguished by the different associations evoked by the two terms robot and android. We want to synthesize the two perspectives.
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Where am I? In The Village

June 18th, 2011 in Category: New American Studies, The Prisoner

In Phoenix, we ate dinner at an instance of The Village Inn restaurant chain. The interior décor, the atmosphere, and the "language semiotics" (the signs, the typography) of The Village Inn reminded me of one of my favorite TV shows of all time: "The Prisoner", starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan.
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Pietro Mussini: A habitat of an interlocked nature, by Franco Torriani

June 18th, 2011 in Category: The Illusion Beyond Art

How far can an artistic practice really produce, and place in a given space and time, place-unrelated objects (in respect to a given place), it’s an underlaying matter that enlivens most of Pietro Mussini’s creative path.
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From the Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Giardino Cablato (Cabled Garden) by Pietro Mussini

June 18th, 2011 in Category: The Technological Herbarium

The digital images of flowers, fields, and gardens created by Pietro Mussini do not constitute the work in itself, but rather a moment of passage, useful for re-elaborating nature, studying forms and expressive combinations of nature's sounds and colors, constructing graphically what will be concretized in sculpture.
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More Baseball Cactus League Photos

June 17th, 2011 in Category: Baseball

It don't matter if you're black or white. Thanks to the courage of Jackie Robinson.
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The Paradigm of Object Spaces: Better Software is Coming, by Bernhard Angerer and Alan N. Shapiro

June 11th, 2011 in Category: Computer Science 2.0

Object Spaces is the start of the road towards making a qualitative revolution in computer science: a major upgrade in how software is made, and in the power of what it can do. Object Spaces takes on infrastructural challenges with an application-centered unified programming paradigm.
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Cactus League Baseball: San Francisco Giants vs. Oakland Athletics

June 10th, 2011 in Category: Baseball

It was early March on planet Earth. In any of the other places where I have hung out during my apparently long yet in fact rather brief life so far as coder and Richard Daystrom wannabe – Frankfurt, Berlin, New York, Boston, Ithaca, Bologna, Zurich – it would be freezing cold in the middle of winter.
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Eduardo Kac: Living Works, by Claudio Cravero

June 3rd, 2011 in Category: Arts & Genomics, The Illusion Beyond Art

The first exhibition in Italy dedicated to the controversial figure of Eduardo Kac (Rio de Janeiro, 1962; he lives in Chicago). His research explores the frontiers between man, animal and robot, culminating in Transgenic Art, through which living beings become a single entity with the technological.