Category: Thinkers

  • Alan N. Shapiro racconta “Star Trek” (RAI4 Italian TV interview)

    This is the transcript of an interview about Star Trek which I did on Italian TV (RAI4) in 2013. There exist also transcripts of interviews which I did on Italian TV about Lost and The Prisoner.

  • Donna J. Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”

    Donna Haraway’s text “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” was written in 1985, but it reads as if itwere written yesterday. A cyborg is a hybrid of living organism and machine. The cyborg is a person whose body has been supplemented by artificial components. The term is anacronym derived from “cybernetic organism.”

  • Fiction, Power, and Codes in Hyper-Modernism

    The most significant facet for my perspective is that, in hyper-modernism, the power and control exercised via narratives and fictions in the media-technological society now get implemented on much more detailed micro-levels via algorithmic-informatic codes and digital, virtual, and cybernetic technologies.

  • Claus Pias on First-Order Cybernetics

    The complete transactions of the Macys Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953, were recently (2015) edited by Claus Pias and published in English and German. Pias discusses the importance of first-order cybernetics in the post-Second World War history of ideas in his introductory essay “The Age of Cybernetics.”

  • Bernhard Dotzler on Second-Order Cybernetics

    In his major three-volume work Diskurs und Medium, Bernhard J. Dotzler considers discourse and medium as embodied knowledge or thinking, examining “archaeologically” the interconnections between technology and the history of ideas.

  • Hayles on Writing and Software Code

    In Does Writing Have a Future?, Vilém Flusser lays out an intellectual project of connecting the future of software code with the history of writing. The code of the future will become more like the writing of the past – or rather, in the future there will be an as-yet-concealed hybrid of code and writing.