Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • 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.

  • Wendy Chun on Software Code

    In Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun develops her concept of “programmability” to argue that almost all social and economic institutions and procedures of life under capitalism are now shaped by software that pilots the unfolding of the future by intimately knowing data patterns and making extrapolations from the past.

  • Claus Pias on First-Order Cybernetics

    The complete transactions of the Macys Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953, were recently (2015) edited by Claus Pias and published in English and German. Pias discusses the importance of first-order cybernetics in the post-Second World War history of ideas in his introductory essay “The Age of Cybernetics.”

  • Bernhard Dotzler on Second-Order Cybernetics

    In his major three-volume work Diskurs und Medium, Bernhard J. Dotzler considers discourse and medium as embodied knowledge or thinking, examining “archaeologically” the interconnections between technology and the history of ideas.

  • Hayles on Writing and Software Code

    In Does Writing Have a Future?, Vilém Flusser lays out an intellectual project of connecting the future of software code with the history of writing. The code of the future will become more like the writing of the past – or rather, in the future there will be an as-yet-concealed hybrid of code and writing.