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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Stefanie Schmidt, Film und Erinnerung

May 24th, 2010 in Category: Book Descriptions, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Jacques Lacan, Media Studies, Sigmund Freud

Im Hinblick auf einen vergleichenden Bezug zu der zeitphilosophiscen Filmtheorie von Gilles Deleuze werden die bildhaften und sprachlicen Aspekte des Gedächtnisses und des Films, wie sie enmal in Anschluss an die Linie Freud/Lacan und zum anderen bei Bergson/Deleuze entwickelt werden, diskutieret.
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Jean Baudrillard, Le Ludique et le policier

May 24th, 2010 in Category: Book Descriptions, Jean Baudrillard

This collection of 23 essays by Jean Baudrillard in French from the years 1967-1978 is not available at any amazon website. It was published by Sens & Tonka, editeurs in 2001.
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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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The Technological Herbarium: Introduction, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in Category: 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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Europe at War in Serbia and Kosovo, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Information Society, War & Peace

On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization initiated a bombing campaign from 15,000 feet vectored towards designated targets inside the territory of Yugoslavia.
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Consumer Culture and Naming the Animals, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Consumer Culture, New American Studies, Roland Barthes

In his famous essay "Myth Today," published in 1957, Roland Barthes added a second dimension to the semiotic analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure, to the insight of the Swiss linguist that language is a social institution. Barthes added a social theory of culture to the social theory of language.
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Star Trek: First Contact

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Faster-Than-Light Speed, Star Trek

The Vulcans knew previously of the existence of our life-sustaining planet, but considered human civilization too primitive and insignificant to be bothered with. But the invention of warp speed technology is the sign of a species sufficiently advanced to be worthy of interstellar attention.
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The Physics of Warp Drive

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Faster-Than-Light Speed, Star Trek

In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre Moya published an important paper entitled "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity," which explains the principles of what has come to be known as the Alcubierre Warp Drive.
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“Caretaker”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Voyager

The Intrepid-class starship U.S.S. Voyager is suddenly thrown seventy thousand light-years off course to a far corner of the galaxy in the Delta Quadrant. It is the region of space from which the fearsome Borg Collective emanates. The ship undergoes extensive damage.
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“Survival Instinct”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Seven of Nine, Voyager

Note Arthur Kroker's inversion of Deleuze & Guattari's concept as "Organs without Bodies": technology is infused with a genetic logic and assumes "living species existence." Žižek wrote about "organs without bodies" after Kroker and without acknowledgment, similar to his taking of many ideas from Baudrillard.
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Third Wave Cybernetics and Artificial Life

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Androids & Artificial Life, N. Katherine Hayles, Star Trek

A number of theorists have located the essential elements of the third wave of cybernetics in the bio-informatic movement of Artificial Life; the "female" flows, intensities, and turbulence of cyber-capitalism and the post-disciplinary "society of control"; or the fractal and viral stage of "fourth order" simulacra.
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“Scorpion”

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Seven of Nine, Voyager

Played by former Miss America pageant finalist Jeri Ryan, outfitted in a skintight, lustrous catsuit and high heels that accentuate her breasts and buttocks, Seven of Nine radiates "available feminine sexuality," yet is paradoxically unaware of her "epidermal" exposure and blatant desirability.
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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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“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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