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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Re-Thinking Science, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 11th, 2013 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’.
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From the Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Giardino Cablato (Cabled Garden) by Pietro Mussini (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

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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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.
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Of Art, Biotech and the Body in the World, by Claudio Cravero

March 24th, 2011 in Category: Arts & Genomics, Rethinking Science

Research over the last fifty years, including work in biotechnologies and in genetics, now enables us to intervene in the development and growth of life forms. It is a reference point around which artists develop their research, enabling creators to make biotechnologies their artistic medium.
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Who are the new radical thinkers in Europe?

October 4th, 2010 in Category: The Technological Herbarium

It’s more important to see that Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Lacan - and even Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault - cannot help us to move forward in the mess that we are in. A Supernova Explosion of new phenomena and new realities has taken place, and only truly new original thinking can help us.
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From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Interactive Plant Growing and Trans Plant by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

October 4th, 2010 in Category: Arts & Genomics, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

Botany forms the basis of Christa Sommerer's training: she dedicated herself to it after her secondary studies, at the Faculty of Biology and Botany of Vienna. Her intention was to investigate nature applying and elaborating methods suitable to the classification of plants. to achieve the formulation of systematic rules.
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From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Nerve Garden by Bruce Damer (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

October 4th, 2010 in Category: Real/Virtual Reality, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

Nerve Garden is a three-dimensional virtual world accessible on the Internet, a "Public Terrarium in Cyberspace," according to the definition of its authors, where the users of the Net can sow and witness the growth of virtual plants.
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Interview with AVINUS Press about The Technological Herbarium

September 8th, 2010 in Category: Humanities Informatics, The Technological Herbarium

"The Technological Herbarium" is an interdisciplinary work, and it places into question in a very strong way the existing division of knowledge into separate spheres like art, technology, natural science, and computer science. I don’t think that these separate categories of disciplinary knowledge are helpful at all anymore.
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The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti

July 29th, 2010 in Category: Androids & Artificial Life, Arts & Genomics, Book Descriptions, Rethinking Science, Science & Technology, The Technological Herbarium

"The Technological Herbarium" is a study of works of art that exemplify the importance of science and technology in artistic creation. It embodies the invention of a strong philosophical concept that enables the glimpsing – in the coming together of nature and new technologies in the domain of art – of a new real.
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Bayerischer Rundfunk programme on Alan N. Shapiro

June 20th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, Androids & Artificial Life, Baseball, Car of the Future, Casino Gambling, Dance Theory, Hans-Peter Dürr, Humanities Informatics, Rethinking Science, Star Trek

On June 13, 2010, Bayerischer Rundfunk broadcast a 38-minute programme (mostly in German) about the ideas and projects of Alan N. Shapiro. The show was produced by Florian Fricke. It includes a segment on the social choreography ideas and practice of Alan's close friend Steve Valk.
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From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Teleporting an Unknown State, by Eduardo Kac (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

June 6th, 2010 in Category: Arts & Genomics, Rethinking Science, The Technological Herbarium

"Teleporting an Unknown State" is defined by Eduardo Kac as a biotelematic interactive installation in which the natural biological process at the basis of the artwork is activated by a telecommunications system managed by the computer.
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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.
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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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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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