Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

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

“Software of the Future” on Tour, by Alan N. Shapiro

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I leave on Saturday for an 8-day tour in Berlin and Potsdam.

All these events are about “the software of the future,” a software that will be made by artists and designers, not by techies and engineers.

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.

And I believe that this project, this nearly total shift in things, is going to lead to something like the breakthrough to something like what has been called Artificial Intelligence, or what has been called Artificial Life — the breakthrough that the scientists who have been working on that for 70 years have failed to produce.

Programming started out, at the end of WW II, as being the manipulation of a bit.

Now programming will be about the making of an ARTIFICE. The step-by-step history of programming languages leads us finally away from the manipulation of bits, to arrive at the crafting of an artifice.

The “programming” into the autonomous software object of the liveliness and vitality of dance, movement, music, poetry, literature, languages, mathematics, and sexuality (desire and seduction).

Sunday 11 to 2: workshop on the software of the future (with Anja Wiesinger) at Transmediale at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

This workshop presents intellectual ideas and software designs from efforts to transition from “digital-binary” to “quantum” computing. It is not about “quantum computing in hardware” as reported in science magazines. It is about “quantum computing in software,” a paradigm shift in code writing, and a shift to the object of computer science being both software patterns and cultural patterns. There is a shift from the procedural to the object-oriented paradigm, to a new third paradigm, which is the radicalization of object-orientation or “more power to the objects.” Desire is also very important to the project, because the difference between existing computer science and the software of the future is to consider the software object either as a dead “thing” or as something alive. In addition to presentations by Alan N. Shapiro and Anja Wiesinger, in a third part of the workshop, participants design software applications based on the new paradigm of infusing desire into software objects. Alan is speaking about the level of cultural studies of software and a new kind of code writing. Anja is talking about the design process and institutional decision-making, and the desire involved in software production. Her talk addresses theories of desire that question binary logic as the basis of new technologies. Seduction and perversion are discourses of queer theory to challenge and “denaturalize” common grounds of sexuality and social structures.

Monday 10 to 12: lecture at Potsdam University, Department of Information Science, on

Wir konnten diverse Termine des für seine Zukunftseinschätzungen bekannten Kulturkritikers, Medien- und Computerwissenschaftlers Alan Shapiro nutzen, ihn in ein Seminar des Masterstudiengangs Informationswissenschaften einzuladen. Er ist bekannt für seine Neuinterpretationen von Science Fiction Literatur wie Star Trek aber auch von zentralen Gesellschaftskritikern unserer Zeit wie Baudrillard und Foucault.

Schon auf einer der letzten BOBCATSSS Tagungen begeisterte er das Publikum mit seinen unkonventionellen Ideen.

In unserem Seminar wird er sich mit “Hybrid Software Codes and Cultural Codes in the New Informatics” beschäftigen und seine Vorstellung von Computer Science 2.0 mit uns diskutieren. Seine These: es gibt eine Informatik rechts von der linken (rationalen) Gehirnhälfte…

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Der amerikanische Medienwissenschaftler und Künstler Alan N. Shapiro ist am 4. Februar 2013 zu Gast am Fachbereich Informationswissenschaften der FH Potsdam

Am 4. Februar 2013 wird Alan Shapiro am Fachbereich Informationswissenschaften der Fachhochschule Potsdam einen Vortrag zum Thema “Hybrid Software Codes and Cultural Codes in the New Informatics” halten. Die Veranstaltung beginnt um 11 Uhr und findet im Gebäudekomplex Friedrich-Ebert-Straße 4/Am Alten Markt im Raum 4005 statt.

Der an mehreren Hochschulen weltweit tätige Medienwissenschaftler und Künstler, Alan Shapiro, vereint Science Fiction Studies, Social Choreography, Kultur- und Medientheorie mit klassischer Computerwissenschaft und kreativer Kunst. Er ist gern gesehener Gast auf renommierten Veranstaltungen wie der Transmediale oder der Ars Electronica, spricht aber genauso auf wissenschaftlichen Konferenzen wie der ›IEEE oder demnächst auch auf dem Internationalen Symposium der Informationswissenschaft – ›ISI2013, das vom 19. bis 22. März 2013 an der Fachhochschule Potsdam stattfinden wird. Eine seiner provokanten Thesen lautet: Es gibt eine Informatik rechts von der linken (=rationalen) Gehirnhälfte.

This seminar has five focuses, all interrelated: (1) how do you teach programming to art students? (2) actually teaching programming to art students. (3) how does teaching programming to art students change what programming is? (4) what is the history and structure of programming? (5) what ideas from 20th century philosophy (and other humanities and scientific fields) are we going to infuse into programming in order to change it?

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