Category: Science & Technology

  • Dance and Digital/Virtual Technologies, by Jaana Parviainen

    Dwelling in the virtual sonic environment: Phenomenological analysis of dancers’ learning processes in working with the Embodied Generative Music interface. “We must admit that the sound, of itself, prompts rather a grasping movement, and visual perception the act of pointing.” (Merleau-Ponty)

  • From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Teleporting an Unknown State, by Eduardo Kac (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

    Telepresenza, bio arte, arte transgenica: questi saranno i temi al centro del racconto di Eduardo Kac, l’artista che a partire dagli anni ‘80 è stato il pioniere delle nuove declinazioni artistiche del biologico ed è riconosciuto internazionalmente come fondatore della Transgenic Art.

  • The Answer to the Question of Artificial Life

    Artificial Life is an emerging movement within computer science which has as its goal to make software that is more “alive” rather than mechanistic. This goal is similar to our goal. However, Artificial Life has overlooked something very important and obvious. It has overlooked that “vitality” already exists in knowledge fields and in creative arts.

  • Alan Sokal on French theory and Science

    Ah yes, rely on so-called “French theory” so-called authority Alan Sokal to provide you with an excuse to not read Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, and Virilio. That’s very bright. Ignore the intellectual contribution of an entire nation. The one that co-invented democracy.

  • The Star Trekking of Physics, by Alan N. Shapiro

    In spite of the proliferation of exhilarated technoculture and its multidisciplinary, wired self-image, there remain some straightlaced, uncool tendencies within the techno-elite which boil over at the thought of all this openness to the humanities and the soft.

  • Captain Kirk Was Never the Original, by Alan N. Shapiro

    In its prevalent forms, the cottage consumer industry of Star Trek is a classic virtuality of identification where the viewers’ senses of self, otherness, and reality are blurred by the contemplation of iconic spectacles. The fanatic relationship to media objects and fetishized paraphernalia is a partial, transitional realization of the reign of simulacra.