Category: Media Studies

  • Time, Memory, Experience (part 1 of 4), by Anja Wiesinger

    In my Master’s Thesis in Art History, done at the Technical University of Berlin in 2011, I attempted to revise the theories and concepts that arose in the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s, when the Internet emerged from a blank canvas and served as a projection for dreams about utopian cyberspace.

  • Media theory: beyond the dualities of form and content, critical and enthusiastic, real and fake, by Alan N. Shapiro

    On January 26, 2012, I gave a lecture in the Speakers’ Series of the Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture and Politics at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. My topic was: “Media theory: beyond the dualities of form and content, critical and enthusiastic, real and fake.”

  • Star Trek: 20 Basic Principles

    Star Trek Basic Principle #1: Radical Uncertainty Captain’s Log, Supplemental: “We are seeing things that cannot possibly exist, yet they are undeniably real.” In its indeterminacy and paradox, the object discovers us. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle holds that the degrees of my knowing the position and speed of quantum particles are inversely proportional to each other.

  • Baudrillard’s Second Life, by René Capovin

    Fashion in the modern sense presupposes the becoming-autonomous of interaction, and is linked, in particular, to the communications of the mass media. In a society differentiated by functions, in fact, there is no one class or group that can impose its own “taste.” Everyone must conform their own taste to the information of all others.”

  • “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.