“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

  • A Critique of the Idea of Neutral Language, by Marc Silver

    In Arguing the Case, Marc Silver shifts the ground in original ways. He is not content to “deconstruct” the discourse founding the disciplines he studies – political, legal, scientific, literary, and psychoanalytic. He reveals the rhetorical, logical and philosophical rules as well as the paradoxes and aporias, which sustain the disciplines he illuminates.

  • Towards a New Computer Science: Instantiate a Much Richer Software Instance

    In this group of 5 coding projects, the core operations of the Limerick Metric will be developed. Where does the New Computer Science stand in relation to the prevailing software development paradigm of Object-Orientation (UML, C++, Java, etc.) ? The New Computer Science both respects and radicalizes Object-Orientation.

  • The Answer to the Question of Artificial Life

    Artificial Life is an emerging movement within computer science which has as its goal to make software that is more “alive” rather than mechanistic. This goal is similar to our goal. However, Artificial Life has overlooked something very important and obvious. It has overlooked that “vitality” already exists in knowledge fields and in creative arts.

  • Inscribe Philosophy into the Heart of Computer Science

    There are many individuals in the technology and cyberculture communities who are not just “engineers” or techie programmers. They are already working to bring software together with art and sociology. These people are our friends and allies. However, in their projects, they are working two or three levels removed from the core of computer science.

  • Star Trek: How the New Comes Into the World

    Most scientists, academics, and journalists who write about Star Trek claim to be fans and lovers of the various Starfleet Captains and their crews. But their customary methodologies function to deny to Star Trek its true originality as the creator of a reality-shaping science fiction that formatively influences culture, ideas, technologies, and even hard sciences.

  • Alan Sokal on French theory and Science

    Ah yes, rely on so-called “French theory” so-called authority Alan Sokal to provide you with an excuse to not read Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, and Virilio. That’s very bright. Ignore the intellectual contribution of an entire nation. The one that co-invented democracy.

  • Only Impossible Exchange Is Possible, by Aurel Schmidt (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    Impossible exchange is an impossible subject. In Jean Baudrillard’s book Impossible Exchange (2001), the matter is treated in such a way that one is better off with an associative and meditative interpretive approach than with a discursive reading. Much of the book transported me into a state of wonder, other parts I found irritating.

  • In Search of the Child’s Innocence, by Caroline Heinrich (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    I begin with a quotation. “The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes”, writes Nietzsche in Zarathustra. The child is innocent because s/he starts all over again from scratch. S/he starts from the space of emptiness that the lion has carved out.

  • The Star Trekking of Physics, by Alan N. Shapiro

    In spite of the proliferation of exhilarated technoculture and its multidisciplinary, wired self-image, there remain some straightlaced, uncool tendencies within the techno-elite which boil over at the thought of all this openness to the humanities and the soft.

  • Captain Kirk Was Never the Original, by Alan N. Shapiro

    In its prevalent forms, the cottage consumer industry of Star Trek is a classic virtuality of identification where the viewers’ senses of self, otherness, and reality are blurred by the contemplation of iconic spectacles. The fanatic relationship to media objects and fetishized paraphernalia is a partial, transitional realization of the reign of simulacra.

  • Considerations on Transgenic and Biotech Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    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.

  • From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Osmose by Char Davies (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    To enter inside a tree and exit it through the leaves after having participated in its process of chlorophyllous photosynthesis: this is one of the many journeys that Char Davies makes the user of Osmose experience in an immersive, interactive, and multisensorial virtual reality environment that was developed and produced in 1995.

  • Adolf Portmann on the New Biology, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    This action, offering light to the plant, enables the latter to externalize its ‘interiority’. A fascinating interpretation that, deriving from an unusual vision of the artwork, instills in it a deeper and certainly original value. Suggesting this original meaning is the theory developed around the time of the 1960s by the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann.

  • From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Telegarden by Ken Goldberg (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    Telegarden is a telerobotic installation that enables users of the World Wide Web to see and cultivate a real garden. Conceived in 1994, it was activated in June 1995 at the University of Southern California and presented, over the course of the summer, at the leading international exhibitions of digital art and technology.

  • Nature: A Fragment, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

    Rereading the reflections in which, at the end of the seventeenth century, Goethe voices his hymn to Nature, one acquires the sense of just how advanced is contemporary man in adding those ‘secrets’, in gaining access to that ‘forge’, in procuring those ‘powers’ which Goethe credits exclusively to the great artist Nature.

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