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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Data and Baudrillard, by Franco La Polla

June 25th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, Androids & Artificial Life, Jean Baudrillard, Star Trek, The Next Generation

This is a translation of one chapter of Franco La Polla’s book "Star Trek: Foto di Gruppo con Astronave." Almost all of the books on Star Trek were written in a relatively thoughtless manner, put together in haste to make money. In contrast to them, La Polla’s books on Star Trek are rare precious gems of high intelligence.
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“Q Who?”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Captain Picard, The Next Generation

The super-entity Q from the Q Continuum reappears on an Enterprise-D traveling at the outer frontier of space. The irrepressible near-deity, whom Captain Picard calls "next of kin to chaos," insists that his critique of humanity, first iterated in the pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint", be given another hearing.
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“The Offspring”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, The Next Generation

But the real cause of Lal's breakdown and death was that she tried to live her destiny as an android in a fundamentally different way than the "simulation and seduction" of the human condition that is the cornerstone of Data's persistence.
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Is Data Human?

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, Androids & Artificial Life, Star Trek, The Next Generation

Richard Hanley, an Australian philosopher working in the Anglo-American "analytic tradition," constructs more than half of his book "The Metaphysics of Star Trek" (also entitled "Is Data Human?" in a second edition) on a misviewing of the episode "The Measure of a Man".
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“The Measure of a Man”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, The Next Generation

Data goes from being on trial to being a provocative, transforming mirror who places our knowledge and certainty of ourselves into question. Data is radical alienation incarnate, as in the words of the Shakespeare sonnet: "When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state."
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“Brothers”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, The Next Generation

It is the challenge of the advances of third-wave cybernetics that Data must confront if he truly wishes to move ahead to the full-fledged Artificial Life that he so intensely "desires." The brother who haunts me is the non-identity of myself to myself. I slowly learn that his doubling is the very condition for my existence.
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Android Epistemology

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, Androids & Artificial Life, Star Trek, The Next Generation

How can the cyborg's quest for embodiment or resistance-as-subject (theorized by Donna J. Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles) be complemented by an android hyper-conformist or shadowing resistance-as-object to jointly solve the riddle of authentic difference?
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“Datalore”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Android Data, The Next Generation

Data is in his quarters, looking into a tripod mirror and working on his imitation of the human sneeze.
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“Darmok”

April 13th, 2010 in Category: Language, The Next Generation

In the paradigm of multiple "selves" that has dominated critical cultural thinking about cyberspace, there is soft intermingling with simulated others. In the duel relationship, there is reciprocal seduction and transformation achieved through a real encounter with an agonistic other.
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“Ship in a Bottle”

April 13th, 2010 in Category: Real/Virtual Reality, The Next Generation

Diagnostics engineer Lt. Reginald Barclay is investigating a matrix diode spatial orientation systems bug in Sherlock Holmes Holo-program 3A when he accidentally initializes the executable data file object where Professor James Moriarty, Detective Holmes' archenemy and a self-aware piece of software code, is saved.
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Enter the Holodeck

April 13th, 2010 in Category: Real/Virtual Reality, The Next Generation

Holodeck virtual reality has become an ultimate projective target for digital technology startup companies which are developing virtual reality systems for applications in the "real world." The Holodeck has become a hyperbolic industrial standard of perfection, as well as a forceful cultural symbol.