Alan N. Shapiro
media theory,
science fiction theory,
future design research
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The Zeroth Law of Robotics and the Robot Unconscious
The suspenseful story of the film I, Robot depends on the energy and complexity of the zeroth law of robotics – added as an even higher ethical priority than the first three laws by Asimov in 1950 in “The Evitable Conflict.” The zeroth law then became a permanent fixture in Asimov’s science fictional literary imagination.
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I, Robot and the Moral Dilemmas of the Three Laws of Robotics
One of the contemporary developments with which Hayles is concerned is the techno-scientific project that has attracted widespread attention of building robots which, thanks to their Artificial Intelligence, will behave and operate in imitation of humans, yet, in all probability, will not have human-like consciousness.
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Paloque-Bergès and Sondheim on the Poetics of Code
In her book Poétique des codes sur le réseau informatique: une investigation critique, Camille Paloque-Bergès examines the history of the writing practices of software code poetry. Her ultimate emphasis is on the concept of Codeworks which was originated by the theorist, artist, and poet Alan Sondheim. Codeworks is the literary writing of informatic code.
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Jaron Lanier’s Phenotropic Programming
In his autobiographical work Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, VR pioneer and founder of the company Visual Programming Languages Jaron Lanier explains his view of software code which has a lot of overlap with the view laid out in the present study.
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Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial
Is computer science a science? What is at stake in the question of “the sciences of the artificial”? Herbert A. Simon was a distinguished professor for five decades at Carnegie Mellon University, one of America’s most elite and important technology institutes of higher education. Simon won the Nobel Prize in economics and the Turing Award.
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Armin Nassehi: Complexity Not Capitalism
Armin Nassehi is a sociology professor at a prominent German university in Munich. He is one of Germany’s most well-known and successful public intellectuals. His 2019 book Muster: Theorie der Digitalen Gesellschaft received much praise in numerous book reviewsin Germany’s major newspapers and weekly news magazines.
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D. Fox Harrell’s Phantasmal Media
In his book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression (2013), D. Fox Harrell strives to establish a new relationship between the human or posthuman imagination and computing. Writing code, or working actively with computational media, are, for Harrell, activities of artistic, cultural, social, critical, and personally empowering expression.
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McKenzie Wark on the Situationists
The media theorist and activist McKenzie Wark has published two books on the Situationists – The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages Out of the 20th Century (2013).
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Baudrillard’s Importance for the Future
Baudrillard is highly controversial as a thinker. Over the course of time, his work has had as many detractors as it has had defenders and enthusiasts. Some of Baudrillard’s critics absurdly even accused him of celebrating the postmodern media-cultural condition of simulacra and semiotic signs.
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The Third Order of Simulacra: Simulation and Hyperreality
The third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s genealogy is also known as simulation: the system of objects, the consumer society, the system of models and series, simulated differences generated by “the code,” the post-World War II era of media, shopping mall architectures, and the American way of life.
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Early Baudrillard
The postmodern recombinant culture of cyber-commodities is a system of simulated differences or differences-in-sameness. The sign-object takes on its meaning in a system of marginal or minimal differences from other sign-objects, according to a code of hierarchical significations (Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, the subset of formula-generated episodes of a TV series).
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Gerry Coulter, Sophie Calle and Baudrillard’s “Pursuit in Venice”
I did not know Gerry Coulter well personally. Yet I have considered him to be my friend. Our intellectual, political, and academic perspectives have been very close to one another. We have been comrades-in-arms, fighting for the same cause. We have both been deeply engaged with Jean Baudrillard’s system of thought.
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Baudrillard and Existentialism: Taking the Side of Objects
Jean Baudrillard is well known for his theory of simulation (simulacra, virtuality, hyper-reality, models and codes precede ‘the real’) – expressed most iconically in his book Simulacra and Simulation (1981) – a breakthrough fundamental apprehension about the situation of ‘postmodern’ culture.
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Jean Baudrillard and Consumer Objects
Baudrillard sets out in his first book to “classify a world of objects.” He wants to go beyond a strictly “technological” analysis of how ordinary objects are intended – by the companies that manufacture them – to operate and to be used. He will instead study the “directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects.”
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Jean Baudrillard and America
America is no mere impressionistic travelogue, but rather a witty and serious interpretation of American democracy and capitalism today, based on a synthesis of political ideas drawn from many different currents of contemporary thought, notably including left-wing neo-Marxism and right-wing entrepreneurial libertarianism.
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