Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

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

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The Answer to the Question of Artificial Life

April 18th, 2010 in the categories: 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.
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Alan Sokal on French theory and Science

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: 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.
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The Star Trekking of Physics, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: 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.
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Captain Kirk Was Never the Original, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Captain Kirk, Captain Pike, Real/Virtual Reality, Star Trek

In its prevalent forms, the cottage consumer industry of Star Trek is a classic virtuality of identification where the viewers' senses of self, otherness, and reality are blurred by the contemplation of iconic spectacles.
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Considerations on Transgenic and Biotech Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: 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 the categories: 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 the categories: 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 the categories: 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 the categories: 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 the categories: 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 the categories: 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 the categories: 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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“Twelve Monkeys” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

April 13th, 2010 in the categories: Media Studies, Science Fiction Studies, Time Travel

Terry Gilliam’s brilliant film "Twelve Monkeys" raises critical questions about the linear nature of time and the causality of science. Möbius time travel will provide a fruitful tool for getting out of the hyperreality and myth of the end of history which surround us in modern culture.
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“Groundhog Day” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

April 13th, 2010 in the categories: Media Studies, Time Travel

"Groundhog Day" is fascinating because it is time travel without a single history book adventure, science fiction without a single technological device, and the triumphant reign of the computer program without a single computer.
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Star Trek, Marx and Time Travel

April 13th, 2010 in the categories: Karl Marx, Star Trek, Time Travel

Alan Shapiro - Star guest of the next Transmediale - on new computers, 1968 and anarchism. Interview in the Berlin daily newspaper "Neues Deutschland," January 5, 2010
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