“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

  • Gianna Maria Gatti’s The Technological Herbarium, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Gianna Maria Gatti’s book The Technological Herbarium (subtitled: “Vegetable Nature and New Technologies in Art Between the Second and Third Millennia”) is a study of ‘interdisciplinary’ works of art that exemplify the increasing importance of science and technology in artistic creation.

  • Society of the Instance: Artificial Intelligence, Object- Orientation, and Semiotics, by Alan N. Shapiro

    The entire virtual life of societies in which postcapitalist conditions of seduction prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of software instances. Everything that was venerated or rejected in the mirror stage by the ideologically constituted ego as system of commodities, panoply of consumer objects, or spectacle of images has dissolved into a virtual reality.

  • Europe at War in Serbia and Kosovo, by Alan N. Shapiro

    On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization initiated a bombing campaign from 15,000 feet vectored towards designated targets inside the territory of Yugoslavia. NATO’s spokesmen stated that the systematic aerial assaults were a response to brutalities being carried out on the ground by Serb military and para-military forces against the ethnic Albanian majority.

  • Consumer Culture and Naming the Animals, by Alan N. Shapiro

    In his famous essay “Myth Today,” published in 1957, Roland Barthes added a second dimension to the semiotic analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure, to the insight of the Swiss linguist that language is a social institution. Barthes added a social theory of culture to the social theory of language.

  • Garry Winogrand’s “Park Avenue, New York”

    In a 1959 black-and-white photograph by Garry Winogrand entitled Park Avenue, New York, our camera line of vision starts from an image-producing apparatus in the car behind or mounted on the back of a Chevy convertible with folding top down in the muggy summer.

  • The Klingon Language

    At the same time that many of the world’s languages are either out- right disappearing or imploding into deeper uncertainty and complexity, there is one new language which is currently experiencing rapid exponential growth in its number of speakers, and is the object of widespread fascination.

  • The Fate of Languages

    There are about six thousand living human languages spoken in the world today. Estimates by language catalogers of the number of existing languages vary by about 10%, since it depends upon how one defines what distinguishes a language from a dialect. The vast majority of Earth languages are in danger of imminent disappearance.

  • Richard Rorty on Radicalism, Liberalism, and Poetic Language

    I was very impressed reading something that Richard Rorty wrote about revolutionaries in his essay “The Contingency of Community” ( in the book “Contingency, irony, and solidarity”). Rorty argues very cogently for a kind of “impossible” deconstructive synthesis of radicalism and liberalism.

  • The Revolution will not be Televised, it will be led by Radical Software

    Laura Mitchell interviews Alan N. Shapiro Do you play video games? A little, not so much. There’s a blackjack machine that I play a lot, in an offtrack betting parlor where a bunch of semi-addicted male gamblers hang out. I never lose more than 5 Euros at a time, and sometimes I win.

  • I consider Star Trek to be a great text of Western Civilization

    “I consider Star Trek to be a great text of Western Civilization” Scientist Shapiro on his vision of progress and the future Alan N. Shapiro in discussion with Joachim Scholl, Deutschlandradio Kultur The philosopher and computer expert Alan N. Shapiro explains his ideal for a future as an “employer.”

  • “Twelve Monkeys” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

    In a time of momentous and accelerated changes (for example, in a few brief decades we are dismantling a book culture which took centuries to construct), it is a great comfort to know that time travel will soon be available to bring us back to critical junctures in case we made a mistake.

  • “Groundhog Day” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

    In most movies and television series about time travel, a temporal displacement system still under construction (usually at the cutting edge of research in theoretical physics) has gone haywire. In the TV series Time Tunnel (1966-67), the Pentagon is about to cut off financial support for a top-secret time travel project operating underground.

  • Star Trek, Marx and Time Travel

    Alan Shapiro – Star guest of the next Transmediale – on new computers, 1968 and anarchism Interview in the Berlin daily newspaper “Neues Deutschland,” January 5, 2010 Translated from the German by Dwight “Doc” Gooden As a software specialist, Alan Shapiro would like to set the digital world on a new footing.

  • “Desperate Living” (film): John Waters’ Science Fiction Dystopia, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Maybe it was the mono sound of my budget-priced video recorder, which the salesperson at Saturn Hansa had dubbed the ‘Trabant’ (der Trabi, das Symbol eines verschwundenen Landes, the symbol of a disappeared country, hat heute längst Kultstatus erreicht, has long since attained cult status) of VCRs.

  • “Jurassic Park” (film): Newman Eaten by a Dilophosaurus, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Steven Spielberg’s stated goal for the film Jurassic Park (1993) is to achieve what he calls “total realism.” He wants to make cinema coincide with the real. This is a symptomatic fantasy that Jean Baudrillard diagnoses in The Evil Demon of Images as “cinema attempting to abolish itself in the absolute of reality.”

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