media theory, science fiction theory,
future design research
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Prominente: Groß und Klein
Die Amerikaner träumen groß. Die größten Hamburger. Die größten Hot Dogs. Zum Mond und Mars. Der Football Super Bowl und die Baseball World Series. Die größten Prominenten. Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Madonna. Sie waren groß. Sie waren die Stars. Das waren die Prominente im Zeitalter der Massenmedien.
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The Third Order of Simulacra: Simulation and Hyperreality
The third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s genealogy is also known as simulation: the system of objects, the consumer society, the system of models and series, simulated differences generated by “the code,” the post-World War II era of media, shopping mall architectures, and the American way of life.
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The Controversy Around Baudrillard
Baudrillard is highly controversial as a thinker. His work has had as many detractors as it has had enthusiasts. Some of his critics absurdly even accused him of celebrating the postmodern media-cultural condition of simulacra and semiotic signs becoming increasingly autonomous and detached from the “referents” of which they were supposed to be the representations.
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Early Baudrillard
The postmodern recombinant culture of cyber-commodities is a system of simulated differences or differences-in-sameness. The sign-object takes on its meaning in a system of marginal or minimal differences from other sign-objects, according to a code of hierarchical significations (Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, the subset of formula-generated episodes of a TV series).
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Methodology – Thirty Minute Statement at my Ph.D. Oral Defense
I will begin with some autobiographical remarks. I have a double educational background in the humanities and natural sciences. I studied the former at Cornell University and the latter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Later in life, I worked for twenty years as a software developer. I had earlier studied literature and philosophy.
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Blade Runner 2049: Android Liberation Between Old and New Informatic Power
Blade Runner 2049 is a brilliant sequel to the original Blade Runner. Thirty years after the events of the first film, the police discover evidence of the secret that Rachael, who was a replicant or android, became pregnant and gave birth in a “natural” fertility process to a child. Rachael died while achieving childbirth.
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The “Science Fiction World” of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik
Ubik is generally regarded as Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece. In this major literary work, the struggle to occupy an “outside” relative to the “inside” of an economic-technological-virtual system is poignantly illustrated. It is a scenario where the “science fiction world” becomes everything, leaving the “safe confines” of the clearly defined literary space of the novel.
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Brain-Computer Interface
The digital-neurological or Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a key SF and “real” technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. BCIs can be interpreted as a “becoming cyborg” of humanity. One can distinguish between mainstream versus alternative/transformative designs and implementations of the user applications to be based on BCI – the command-and-control cyborg versus the feminist-theory cyborg.
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Fiction, Power, and Codes in Hyper-Modernism
The most significant facet for my perspective is that, in hyper-modernism, the power and control exercised via narratives and fictions in the media-technological society now get implemented on much more detailed micro-levels via algorithmic-informatic codes and digital, virtual, and cybernetic technologies.
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Biosphere 2: The Artificial Paradise of Nature
Biosphere 2 is the enclosed artificial simulation of a natural environment in the Arizona desert. According to Baudrillard, it is the desperate project of a desperate humanity faced with its own extinction, the mania to create an artificial paradise of so-called nature and so-called reality, given that both of those nostalgic referents have already disappeared.
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The Truman Show: “The Last Thing That I Would Ever Do is Lie to You”
Truman Burbank is under surveillance by television cameras 24 hours a day within the framework of a carefully choreographed Reality TV show watched by billions of voyeuristic viewers globally. Truman lives inside a vast Hollywood studio erected as an enclosed dome that is so large that it can be seen from outer space.
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Wendy Chun on Software Code
In Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun develops her concept of “programmability” to argue that almost all social and economic institutions and procedures of life under capitalism are now shaped by software that pilots the unfolding of the future by intimately knowing data patterns and making extrapolations from the past.
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Claus Pias on First-Order Cybernetics
The complete transactions of the Macys Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953, were recently (2015) edited by Claus Pias and published in English and German. Pias discusses the importance of first-order cybernetics in the post-Second World War history of ideas in his introductory essay “The Age of Cybernetics.”
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Bernhard Dotzler on Second-Order Cybernetics
In his major three-volume work Diskurs und Medium, Bernhard J. Dotzler considers discourse and medium as embodied knowledge or thinking, examining “archaeologically” the interconnections between technology and the history of ideas.
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