Category: Star Trek

  • “Outer space is a blank canvas” — Interview with Forty Two Magazine

    „Der Weltraum ist wie eine weiße Leinwand” “Outer space is a blank canvas” — Interview with Forty Two Magazine This is an excerpt from the complete interview. It can be found at Forty Two Magazine Alan N. Shapiro ist gebürtiger Amerikaner, der in seiner Wahlheimat Deutschland als transdisziplinärer Theoretiker und Dozent Medientheorie und Science-Fiction an der…

  • Science-Fiction-Replikatoren: Additive Fertigung und die Ökonomie der Zukunft, von Alan N. Shapiro

    Science-Fiction-Replikatoren: Additive Fertigung und die Ökonomie der Zukunft Von Alan Shapiro This was the text of my keynote speech at the conference of the Swiss Manufacturing Association in October 2018. Einführung Sozialismus ist schiefgegangen. Kapitalismus muss sich verändern. Der europäische Kapitalismus hat Angst davor, von Asien überholt zu werden. Wie also sieht die Vision für…

  • Alan N. Shapiro racconta “Star Trek” (RAI4 Italian TV interview)

    This is the transcript of an interview about Star Trek which I did on Italian TV (RAI4) a few years ago. If I can find the time, I will translate it soon into English. There exist also transcripts of interviews which I did on Italian TV about Lost and The Prisoner. Poliedrico studioso di tecnologia,…

  • Star Trek: Technologien des Verschwindens, von Alan N. Shapiro

    Star Trek is die verbreiteste “Ikone” der technologischen Kultur. Zu den größten Fans gehören Physiker, Ingenieure, Informatiker, Grafikkünstler und Medienschaffende. Doch die ursprüngliche Kreativät von Star Trek wird von der Star Trek-Industrie neutralisiert. Sie programmiert ein automatisches System von endlosen simulierten Unterschieden und verhindert so, dass die Zuschauer sich je mit einem wahren Anderen konfrontieren…

  • Baudrillard und Trek-nologie, von Alan N. Shapiro

    Beginnen wir mit dem Ende der sechziger Jahre in New York, dem Ort meiner Kindheit. Als guter Jude sollte ich eine jüdische Erziehung bekommen. Stattdessen liebte ich Star Trek. Alles, was ich weiß, habe ich von Star Trek gelernt. Unter anderem auch, die Naturwissenschaften zu lieben. Das machte mich zu einem guten Amerikaner.

  • Star Trek: How the New Comes into the World

    Most scientists, academics, and journalists who write about Star Trek claim to be fans and lovers of the various Starfleet Captains and their crews. But their customary methodologies function to deny to Star Trek its true originality as the creator of a reality-shaping “science fiction” that formatively influences culture, ideas, technologies, and even “hard sciences.”

  • Star Trek: 20 Basic Principles

    Star Trek Basic Principle #1: Radical Uncertainty Captain’s Log, Supplemental: “We are seeing things that cannot possibly exist, yet they are undeniably real.” In its indeterminacy and paradox, the object discovers us. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle holds that the degrees of my knowing the position and speed of quantum particles are inversely proportional to each other.

  • Baudrillard and Trek-nology (Or Everything I Know I Learned From Watching Star Trek and Reading Jean Baudrillard), by Alan N. Shapiro

    We should be greatly mistaken were we to view science fiction as an escape from everyday reality: on the contrary, it is an extrapolation from the irrational tendencies of that reality through the free exercise of narrative invention.

  • Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Does Star Trek’s worldview coincide with the unbridled high-tech enthusiasm of recent years? Or is there a tension between the show’s originality and the Borg-like assimilation of its creativity by the Star Trek industry? Focusing on the stories themselves, the author reveals the basic principles behind Star Trek that contest the ideology of mainstream technoscience.

  • Alan N. Shapiro interviewed by Gerry Ryan

    I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Gerry Ryan on April 30, 2010, Ireland’s premier radio and television broadcaster and interviewer. Gerry was a great communicator. Gerry was a huge Star Trek fan. On June 1, 2005, I was interviewed for 45 minutes by Gerry on the Gerry Ryan Show.

  • Data and Baudrillard, by Franco La Polla

    This is a translation of one chapter of Franco La Polla’s book Star Trek: Foto di Gruppo con Astronave. La Polla is a distinguished Professor of the History of North American Culture at the University of Bologna. He has written and published three amazing books on Star Trek.

  • Star Trek: How the New Comes Into the World

    Most scientists, academics, and journalists who write about Star Trek claim to be fans and lovers of the various Starfleet Captains and their crews. But their customary methodologies function to deny to Star Trek its true originality as the creator of a reality-shaping science fiction that formatively influences culture, ideas, technologies, and even hard sciences.

  • The Star Trekking of Physics, by Alan N. Shapiro

    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.

  • Captain Kirk Was Never the Original, by Alan N. Shapiro

    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. The fanatic relationship to media objects and fetishized paraphernalia is a partial, transitional realization of the reign of simulacra.

  • The Klingon Language

    At the same time that many of the world’s languages are either out- right disappearing or imploding into deeper uncertainty and complexity, there is one new language which is currently experiencing rapid exponential growth in its number of speakers, and is the object of widespread fascination.