Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

Blog and project archive about media theory, science fiction theory, and creative coding

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Methodology – Thirty Minute Statement at my Ph.D. Oral Defense

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Book Descriptions, Creative Coding, Future Design, Media in the Digital Society

I present a way for cultural studies and philosophy to play an important role in what the nascent Creative Coding movement can become. It is about Creative Coding, Phase Two. I lay out how poststructuralist theories of language can provide a basis for the project of transdisciplinary software coding.
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Biosphere 2: The Artificial Paradise of Nature

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Ecology, Energy, and the Environment

Biosphere 2, according to Baudrillard, is the desperate project of a desperate humanity faced with its own extinction, the obsessive mania to create an artificial paradise of so-called nature and so-called reality, given that both of those nostalgic referents have already disappeared.
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Technological Anarchism, by Alan N. Shapiro

June 28th, 2019 in the categories: Art and Economics, Ecology, Energy, and the Environment

My intention is to write a book developing the transdisciplinary concept of Technological Anarchism as an optimistic, normative, heterotopian (a term of Michel Foucault) idea of a near-future and open-ended social, logistical, and economic system of Post-Scarcity and Post-Capitalism.
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Mobility and Science Fiction, by Alan N. Shapiro

June 27th, 2019 in the categories: Car of the Future, Future Design, Science Fiction Film

It is the self-driving car – and the way that it has come to inform the advanced technological imagination in our media culture – that I want to focus my attention on here. The autonomous vehicle has become one of the principal exemplars symbolizing the whole wide spectrum of self-aware technologies of Industry 4.0.
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Gestalt-Ideas at the Interface between Theory and Practice, by Alan N. Shapiro

June 25th, 2019 in the categories: Future Design

What is design as a “thinking discipline”? What is the relationship between “academic” ideas and the wider capitalist-practical-business society?
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Fiktion ist der Schlüssel zu kreativen Lösungen, von Alan N. Shapiro

June 25th, 2019 in the categories: Fiction, Future Design

Der Triumph Donald Trumps als US-Präsidentschaftskandidat der Republikaner im Jahr 2016 veranschaulicht die wachsende und allgegenwärtige Konfusion zwischen dem ,Realen‘ und dem Virtuellen in der zeitgenössischen Geschichtssituation der Hypermoderne.
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New Book Published: “Transdisciplinary Design”, edited by Alan N. Shapiro

March 26th, 2017 in the categories: Future Design

My edited book "Transdisciplinary Design" (co-editors: Prof. Marion Digel and Irmi Wachendorff) has just been published by the Passagen Verlag of Vienna in their XMedia series. The Passagen Verlag is one of the leading publishers in the German-language countries of philosophy books, especially by "postmodern" and "deconstructionist" and "neo-Marxist" radical thinkers, such as Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, and Zizek.
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Das Paradox, die Zukunft vorherzusehen, von Alan N. Shapiro

March 23rd, 2016 in the categories: Future Design

Die meisten Voraussagen über das, was geschehen mag, sind im wesentlichen psychologische Projektionen eines imaginären Zukunftsszenarios, bestehend aus einigen geläufigen Phänomenen, die sich tatsächlich bereits ereignet haben oder sich gerade gegenwärtig ereignen; denen die betreffende Person, die die Voraussage tätigt, jedoch nicht offen gegenübertritt.
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The Paradox of Foreseeing the Future, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 17th, 2016 in the categories: Future Design

I am a science fiction theorist, but for me science fiction is never about the future, predictions of the future, or the question of the “accuracy” of those predictions. Science fiction is about the present, the virtual reality of the present that dominant ways of thinking prevent us from seeing.
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“Die Software der Zukunft,” new book by Alan Shapiro

September 3rd, 2014 in the categories: Computer Science 2.0, Future Design

Mit seiner "Software der Zukunft" pladiert der Informatiker und Medientheoretiker Alan Shapiro für eine partizipatorisch realisierte Neuausrichtung der Informatik. Dies wäre eine Informatik der "rechten Gehirnhälfte", die zwar auf der bestehenden, technisch ausgerichteten Wissenschaft vom Computer aufbaut, sie aber näher an die Disziplinen Kunst, Soziologie, Philosophie und Kulturtheorie heranrückt.
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How Does the Changed Media Environment Influence Young People’s Attention and Education?, by Lena Neumann

November 28th, 2013 in the categories: Architecture

The modern world is not coming up with a plethora of new media which we are faced with everyday. The notion of a change in modes of attention is a question that N. Katherine Hayles discussed in her essay “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes”, which was published in 2007.
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An Interdisciplinary Approach to Building Robots, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 10th, 2013 in the categories: Robotism

I will now outline a programme of 7 concrete near-term steps that a large robotics manufacturing company should take on the road towards introducing robots-slash-androids to the consumer public.
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Towards a Unified Existential Science of Humans and Androids, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 8th, 2013 in the categories: Androids & Artificial Life, Robotism

There are two ways of thinking about robots or androids, distinguished by the different associations evoked by the two terms robot and android. We want to synthesize the two perspectives.
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Art and Design in the Age of New Media and New Technologies, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 1st, 2013 in the categories: Future Design

Audio recording of my January 16th, 2013 lecture at the Bath Spa University, Bath School of Art and Design. "A very important and significant manifestation of your thought. The most coherent and systematic comments about technology, ALife and science [in a lecture by you so far]." -- Nolan Bazinet
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“Software of the Future” on Tour, by Alan N. Shapiro

January 31st, 2013 in the categories: Future Design

This is not about "programming for artists" -- it is about a new kind of programming by artists, and it is a programming that has almost nothing to do with what we currently understand by programming.
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