Alan N. Shapiro
media theory,
science fiction theory,
future design research
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McKenzie Wark on the Situationists
The media theorist and activist McKenzie Wark has published two books on the Situationists – The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages Out of the 20th Century (2013).
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Baudrillard’s Importance for the Future
Baudrillard is highly controversial as a thinker. Over the course of time, his work has had as many detractors as it has had defenders and enthusiasts. Some of Baudrillard’s critics absurdly even accused him of celebrating the postmodern media-cultural condition of simulacra and semiotic signs.
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Gerry Coulter, Sophie Calle and Baudrillard’s “Pursuit in Venice”
I did not know Gerry Coulter well personally. Yet I have considered him to be my friend. Our intellectual, political, and academic perspectives have been very close to one another. We have been comrades-in-arms, fighting for the same cause. We have both been deeply engaged with Jean Baudrillard’s system of thought.
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Baudrillard and Existentialism: Taking the Side of Objects
Jean Baudrillard is well known for his theory of simulation (simulacra, virtuality, hyper-reality, models and codes precede ‘the real’) – expressed most iconically in his book Simulacra and Simulation (1981) – a breakthrough fundamental apprehension about the situation of ‘postmodern’ culture.
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Jean Baudrillard and Consumer Objects
Baudrillard sets out in his first book to “classify a world of objects.” He wants to go beyond a strictly “technological” analysis of how ordinary objects are intended – by the companies that manufacture them – to operate and to be used. He will instead study the “directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects.”
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Jean Baudrillard and America
America is no mere impressionistic travelogue, but rather a witty and serious interpretation of American democracy and capitalism today, based on a synthesis of political ideas drawn from many different currents of contemporary thought, notably including left-wing neo-Marxism and right-wing entrepreneurial libertarianism.
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Total War Meets Pure War
This was one of the very first pieces of writing that I did in my life. I wrote it during the first two weeks of the Gulf War in 1991. I was living in New York City at the time. I tried to balance the perspectives of Chomsky and Baudrillard/Virilio.
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Year of Hell (Star Trek: Voyager)
Janeway and Voyager lock in a course correction to avoid a rogue comet, and accidentally enter a region of space rich in Class-M planets that is in dispute between the Zahl and the Krenim. Data from the newly upgraded Astrometrics Lab indicate that the Zahl are preeminent in this Delta Quadrant sector designated as Spatial Grid 005.
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The Physics of Wormholes
According to Lawrence M. Krauss in The Physics of Star Trek, “a surprising amount of modern theo- retical physics research,” clustered in the area of astrophysical wormhole studies, is directed towards establishing the scientific and mathematical prerequisites for timetravel. “Wormhole time machines are easy to design,” explains Krauss.
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The Physics of Warp Drive
Although light from the moon reaches us in about two seconds, and light from Mars in a few minutes, light from Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri takes about four years to reach us. A spaceship traveling at current rocketry technology speed would take about ten thousand years to reach any possible Class-M planet.
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The Offspring
After attending a cybernetics conference, Data spends all his off-duty hours in a locked laboratory, at work on a secretive project. Data learned of a breakthrough in submicron matrix transfer technology. La Forge, Troi, and Wesley are startled to hear that he has built an android clone of himself, endowed with a like positronic brain.
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The Measure of a Man
Arriving at the brand new Starbase 173 near the Romulan Neutral Zone for crew rotation and offloading of experiment modules, the Enterprise-D is visited by Admiral Nakamura and Commander Bruce Maddox,. Maddox is an Associate Professor of Robotics Science at the Daystrom Technological Institute (named after Dr. Richard Daystrom of the episode The Ultimate Computer).
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The Enemy Within
Captain Kirk, Lt. Sulu, Geological Technician Fisher, and three otherEnterprise crew members are approaching the end of a routine, one-day geological survey and specimen gathering mission on the planet Alpha 177. Helm Officer Sulu is tending to a doglike creature indigenous to the planet.
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The Devil in the Dark
Spock begins to demonstrate his unusual capabilities of empathy towards alien others in his mind meld encounter with the silicon-based Horta life-form on the mining planet Janus VI. The workers of the mineral production station are menaced by a hideous creature they are not sure they have ever seen.
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The City on the Edge of Forever
The City on the Edge of Forever is Star Trek’s most poignant time travel story. The technology of the Guardian of Forever’s Time Portal is not made explicit. Specification of the Vortex’s technoscience would have detracted from the emotion/meaning of Kirk’s fateful choice between his love for Edith Keeler and preservation of the galactic timeline.
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