Day: July 31, 2024

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.