“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. The specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system.” — Guy Debord

Alan N. Shapiro
media theory,
science fiction theory,
future design research

  • Julian, California: The Museum of Reality

    Driving up and down the southern California coast between Los Angeles and the Mexican border, every town looked the same. Most everywhere in America it is like this. “Reality” has been reduced to a cloned instantiation from a formula: replicated instances of the same shopping malls, supermarkets, mega-stores, and chain restaurants everywhere you go.

  • On the trail of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek in the American Desert

    OBJECTS IN THIS MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. We understand Baudrillard to be a unique thinker – perhaps one of the half-dozen greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. America is a milestone work of social commentary about the USA by a French author, in the same tradition as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

  • General Patton Memorial Museum

    General Patton Memorial Museum 62-510 Chiriaco Road, Chiriaco Summit, California 92201 “A Military History Museum With Exhibits from World War I through the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars And our Tank Yard with Armored Vehicles from World War II through Vietnam.”

  • Authentic Existence in Heidegger’s “Being and Time”

    In his excellent essay on Heidegger’s Being and Time, my nephew James Shapiro argues (among other things) that Heidegger gives little content to or explanation of what he means by authentic being. Jamie said that he was influenced in formulating this view by one of his philosophy professors at Boston University, Daniel Dahlstrom.

  • On Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, by James Shapiro

    Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time is a work primarily concerned with the explication and understanding of the specific brand of existence and consciousness that is unique to man—or perhaps stated more succinctly, what it means to be a human being. This unique human existence Heidegger calls Dasein.

  • Pietro Mussini: A habitat of an interlocked nature, by Franco Torriani

    Pietro Mussini: A habitat of an interlocked nature, by Franco Torriani (published in book form by Edizioni Diabasis, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2010) (English translation by Julian Delens) How far can an artistic practice really produce, and place in a given space and time, place-unrelated objects (in respect to a given place), it’s an underlaying matter…

  • From the Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Giardino Cablato (Cabled Garden) by Pietro Mussini (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    The digital images of flowers, fields, and gardens created by Pietro Mussini at the computer do not constitute the work in itself, but rather a moment of passage, useful for re-elaborating nature according to different solutions, studying forms and expressive combinations of nature’s sounds and colors, constructing graphically that which will be concretized in sculpture.

  • Cactus League Baseball: San Francisco Giants vs. Oakland Athletics

    It was early March on planet Earth. In any of the other places where I have hung out during my apparently long yet in fact rather brief life so far as coder and Richard Daystrom wannabe – Frankfurt, Berlin, New York, Boston, Ithaca, Bologna, Zurich – it would be freezing cold in winter.

  • Eduardo Kac: Living Works, by Claudio Cravero

    The first exhibition in Italy dedicated to the controversial figure of Eduardo Kac (Rio de Janeiro, 1962; he lives in Chicago). His research explores the frontiers between man, animal and robot, culminating in Transgenic Art, through which living beings become a single entity with the technological.

  • Sartre and Derrida: The Promises of the Subject, by Christina Howells

    Sartre and Derrida: The Promises of the Subject Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde by Christina Howells Christina Howells is Professor of French at Wadham College, Oxford University. She has published books on Sartre, on Derrida, and on French women philosophers. She teaches literary theory, French literature, and recent French thought.

  • Impressionist Paintings by Florence Morrison, Installment 2

    The traveler had long arduous journeys behind him. Ahead was an easy walk to paradise. Something akin to a time tunnel had been constructed, rendering all our adventures completely safe. Fences are not for separating. They are for connecting. Solitary and solidary.

  • Lost: The Crash Out of Globalization and Into the World

    En route from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles, California, USA, Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 crashes on an unknown Island in the South Pacific. This flight that was supposed to circumscribe half of the globe already symbolizes globalization, and the crash of Flight 815 symbolizes the crash of globalization. But the crash into what?

  • New York City in Las Vegas

    New York New York Las Vegas Casino & Hotel all photos © 2011 Alan Shapiro

  • Complementarity: An Archipelago, by Robin Parmar

    Robin Parmar is an intermedia artist whose practice incorporates electroacoustic composition, sound installations, improvisation, radiophonics, sonic ecology, poetry, performance art, theory and photography. Works have recently appeared in Ireland, England, Portugal, Germany, Spain and Sweden.

  • Three Impressionist Paintings by Florence Morrison

    As if Santiago of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea had gone out again for priceless discoveries, but this time with a group of friends. The singularity of this painting is striking, yet it also reminds me of work products from Van Gogh’s period in Arles.

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