Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • Paloque-Bergès and Sondheim on the Poetics of Code

    In her book Poétique des codes sur le réseau informatique: une investigation critique, Camille Paloque-Bergès examines the history of the writing practices of software code poetry. Her ultimate emphasis is on the concept of Codeworks which was originated by the theorist, artist, and poet Alan Sondheim. Codeworks is the literary writing of informatic code.

  • Jaron Lanier’s Phenotropic Programming

    In his autobiographical work Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, VR pioneer and founder of the company Visual Programming Languages Jaron Lanier explains his view of software code which has a lot of overlap with the view laid out in the present study.

  • Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

    Is computer science a science? What is at stake in the question of “the sciences of the artificial”? Herbert A. Simon was a distinguished professor for five decades at Carnegie Mellon University, one of America’s most elite and important technology institutes of higher education. Simon won the Nobel Prize in economics and the Turing Award.

  • Armin Nassehi: Complexity Not Capitalism

    Armin Nassehi is a sociology professor at a prominent German university in Munich. He is one of Germany’s most well-known and successful public intellectuals. His 2019 book Muster: Theorie der Digitalen Gesellschaft received much praise in numerous book reviewsin Germany’s major newspapers and weekly news magazines.

  • D. Fox Harrell’s Phantasmal Media

    In his book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression (2013), D. Fox Harrell strives to establish a new relationship between the human or posthuman imagination and computing. Writing code, or working actively with computational media, are, for Harrell, activities of artistic, cultural, social, critical, and personally empowering expression.

  • 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).