Category: Science & Technology

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • “Twelve Monkeys” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

    In a time of momentous and accelerated changes (for example, in a few brief decades we are dismantling a book culture which took centuries to construct), it is a great comfort to know that time travel will soon be available to bring us back to critical junctures in case we made a mistake.

  • “Groundhog Day” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

    In most movies and television series about time travel, a temporal displacement system still under construction (usually at the cutting edge of research in theoretical physics) has gone haywire. In the TV series Time Tunnel (1966-67), the Pentagon is about to cut off financial support for a top-secret time travel project operating underground.

  • Star Trek, Marx and Time Travel

    Alan Shapiro – Star guest of the next Transmediale – on new computers, 1968 and anarchism Interview in the Berlin daily newspaper “Neues Deutschland,” January 5, 2010 Translated from the German by Dwight “Doc” Gooden As a software specialist, Alan Shapiro would like to set the digital world on a new footing.

  • “Jurassic Park” (film): Newman Eaten by a Dilophosaurus, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Steven Spielberg’s stated goal for the film Jurassic Park (1993) is to achieve what he calls “total realism.” He wants to make cinema coincide with the real. This is a symptomatic fantasy that Jean Baudrillard diagnoses in The Evil Demon of Images as “cinema attempting to abolish itself in the absolute of reality.”