Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • The Third Order of Simulacra: Simulation and Hyperreality

    The third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s genealogy is also known as simulation: the system of objects, the consumer society, the system of models and series, simulated differences generated by “the code,” the post-World War II era of media, shopping mall architectures, and the American way of life.

  • Early Baudrillard

    The postmodern recombinant culture of cyber-commodities is a system of simulated differences or differences-in-sameness. The sign-object takes on its meaning in a system of marginal or minimal differences from other sign-objects, according to a code of hierarchical significations (Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, the subset of formula-generated episodes of a TV series).

  • 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.