Author: Alan N. Shapiro

Nature: A Fragment, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Rereading the reflections in which, at the end of the seventeenth century, Goethe voices his hymn to Nature, one acquires the sense of just how advanced is contemporary man in adding those ‘secrets’, in gaining access to that ‘forge’, in procuring those ‘powers’ which Goethe credits exclusively to the great artist Nature.

April 15, 2010
Merleau-Ponty and Marx on Nature and Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Man places between himself and nature those signs useful to denote and represent it, sanctioning the beginning of the autonomous differentiation of the phenomenal world. In the Upper Paleolithic, the figurations of wild animals drawn on the walls of caves, between magic and the practice of the satisfaction of vital needs and control over nature.

April 15, 2010
The Technological Herbarium: Introduction, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

The Technological Herbarium: Introduction by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated from the Italian by Alan N. Shapiro) Infinite are the facets in which the living manifests itself. Infinite are the possibilities in which it expresses its existence. Art seizes these possibilities of existence, interprets them, advances unusual combinations of them, breaks up their consolidated connections.

April 15, 2010
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.

April 14, 2010
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.

April 14, 2010
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.

April 14, 2010