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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An Interdisciplinary Approach to Building Robots, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 10th, 2013 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, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 8th, 2013 in Category: Androids & Artificial Life, 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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Three Lectures in Italy, One Lecture in Estonia

February 4th, 2013 in Category: Art and Economics, Art and Science, Future Design, Star Trek

Here is my 15-minute interview on Italian TV, on RAI4, on the program Wonderland. A fantastic show about Star Trek. First broadcast on October 26, 2012. And my lecture in Italian/English at the Share Festival in Turin on Art and the Future City.
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Art and Design in the Age of New Media and New Technologies, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 1st, 2013 in Category: Future Design

Audio recording of my January 16th, 2013 lecture at the Bath Spa University, Bath School of Art and Design. "A very important and significant manifestation of your thought. The most coherent and systematic comments about technology, ALife and science [in a lecture by you so far]." -- Nolan Bazinet
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“Software of the Future” on Tour, by Alan N. Shapiro

January 31st, 2013 in Category: Future Design

This is not about "programming for artists" -- it is about a new kind of programming by artists, and it is a programming that has almost nothing to do with what we currently understand by programming.
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Audios on Tumblr by Alan N. Shapiro, Text by Elise Van Mourik

November 27th, 2012 in Category: Future Design

Alan Shapiro discusses our mainstream understanding of the real and the virtual, and proposes the merging of the two into a new real. Taking further Jean Baudrillard's notions of simulation, and how the model of reality can precede reality itself, Shapiro advocates a revolution in software design and car design.
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Twenty Basic Principles of a New Green Politics, by Alan N. Shapiro

October 13th, 2012 in Category: Ecology, Energy, and the Environment

In the third part of my lecture, I will now build on top of the ideas of Baudrillard and Gatti that I have presented, and I will start to conceptualize the essential elements of the proposed New Green Politics.
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Towards a New Green Politics, by Alan N. Shapiro

October 13th, 2012 in Category: Ecology, Energy, and the Environment

How can we develop an alternative to this worn-out discourse of 'catastrophe warning', how can we construct a new Green Discourse, a new Green Politics that might jump-start the ecology-enviromental movement into effective action?
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The Plane of the Future, by Alan N. Shapiro, and Congetture minime sullo spazi-tempo, by Pier Luigi Capucci

July 21st, 2012 in Category: Future Design

Dall'Ars Electronica FUTURELAB ci sono stati commissionati dei testi per una installazione artistica presso il nuovo terminale dell'Aeroporto di Vienna. Il tema dell'installazione era "Zeit/Raum" ("Tempo/Spazio"), ed è stato realizzato anche un e-book interattivo con tutti i contributi.
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Lecture-Performance in Amsterdam (Alan N. Shapiro and Regan O’Brien), with video clips

June 6th, 2012 in Category: Car of the Future, Performance Studies

On March 14, 2012, I did a lecture-performance in Amsterdam, together with the choreographer and performance studies scholar Regan O'Brien.
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The Car of the Future, by Alan N. Shapiro and Alan Cholodenko

February 15th, 2012 in Category: Car of the Future, Donna Haraway, Future Design, Gregory Bateson, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio, Real/Virtual Reality

In November 2008, Alan N. Shapiro was invited by Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany to speak about his ideas about "the car of the future." He spoke in front of an audience of people from the Human-Machine Interface Dept. and and the Infotainment Dept. This text was written as accompaniment to that presentation.
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Anticipating the Future through Knowledge of the Fiction in Social Reality, by Alan N. Shapiro

November 17th, 2011 in Category: Future Design

I was the keynote speaker at the conference on "Das Wissen der Zukunft" ("Knowledge of the Future") that took place at the University of Vienna on November 4-5, 2011. These are the lecture notes for my speech.
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Jean Baudrillard and Doomsday: On Louis Arnoux’s “Catastrophe Warning” Discourse, by Alan N. Shapiro

August 25th, 2011 in Category: Ecology, Energy, and the Environment, Jean Baudrillard

After a summer break lasting the month of August, I now start the new academic and business year with this major critique of the work of Louis Arnoux.
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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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I am physically in Las Vegas, Nevada, but I am really in Venice, Italy

March 31st, 2011 in Category: Architecture, Quantum Culture

The reality of what Las Vegas architecture has achieved exceeds the intentions of the casino hotel owners. Venice is no longer restricted to its physical location in the region of Veneto in northern Italy.
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