co-author: Alan Cholodenko
In November 2008, Alan N. Shapiro was invited by Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany to speak about his ideas about “the car of the future.” He spoke in front of an audience of people from the Human-Machine Interface Dept. and and the Infotainment Dept.
This text was written as an accompaniment to that presentation.
Today we will speak about the “Car of the Future“ considered as a trickster cyborg or Animatic Automaton situated at the center of a network of relationships – an automobile design project. Note that there is a crucial distinction between the cyborg as articulated in Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance and the cyborg as depicted in many instances of popular culture, including today’s typical automobile advertisements…