Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • 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.