Alan N. Shapiro
media theory,
science fiction theory,
future design research
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All Our Yesterdays
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet Sarpeidon, the only natural satellite of a star, Beta Niobe, which is going to explode as a supernova. Although it has been previously established that a “civilized humanoid species” dwells on the planet, Enterprise sensor scans strangely indicate that there is no intelligent life remaining anywhere on that world.
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A Taste of Armageddon
The Enterprise is en route to the NGC 321 star cluster to try to establish diplomatic relations with Eminiar VII, the most technologically advanced planet in the area. More than fifty years earlier, the Federation starship U.S.S. Valiant was listed as missing in space after it transmitted a report from Eminiar and then vanished.
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L’importance de Baudrillard pour l’avenir
L’un des meilleurs commentateurs de Baudrillard est Gary Genosko, l’auteur du Baudrillard and Signs, un livre qui place Baudrillard dans le contexte de la sémiotique et de la pataphysique. Genosko écrit: «Baudrillard est l’inventeur d’un langage sophistiqué décrivant les capacités de simulation les plus avancées des systèmes d’information.»
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Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
The basic situation of Robinson Crusoe’s early life was that of a young man who did not want to get a job. Robinson was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family. His father was a successful businessman, a trader in “merchandise.”
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Cultural Citizenship in Contemporary America
In one terminology, cultural citizenship is a process which takes place in the context of a specific historical relationship between the individual and the social. In what may be the most highly socialized society that ever existed, Americans tend to almost completely deny that there exists a social or cultural realm.
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Charles A. Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis
We think of Lindbergh as the far-right most prominent speaker at rallies of the “America First” movement in the early 1940s, an isolationist precursor of the unilateralist Donald Trump and his horrible MAGA movement. I present here an alternative existentialist view of Lindbergh’s pioneering 1927 flight.
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“Outer space is a blank canvas” — Interview with Forty Two Magazine
Wir alle leben Science-Fiction, und die Zukunft ist utopisch – zumindest könnte sie das sein, würden wir sie uns bloß richtig vorstellen? Im Gespräch mit 42 Magazine argumentiert Alan N. Shapiro dafür, dass wir verstehen müssen, dass Science-Fiction keine Zukunftsmusik ist und wir uns letztlich von der Idee verabschieden müssen, alles wissen zu können.
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Body, Self, and Code in Hypermodernism
This is the text of the speech that I gave at the Schaubühne theater in Berlin on 23. February 2020, at an event in the “Streitraum” series led by Carolin Emcke.
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How to Regulate the Media when they are ubiquitous and have gone viral: from utopian science fiction to practical European policy
This is the text of the keynote speech that I gave at the European Union conference “Pluralism and Responsibility: Media in the Digital Society” in Berlin on July 7, 2020. I was invited to speak by Monika Grütters, the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
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Interview with Artist Network Theory
AXELLE: We met in a media theory course you gave in Lucerne at the HSLU where I was a student in the masters design program. I was struggling to legitimate my position as an artist entering the field of design in a program which at the time had no face, no position, and no theory.
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Some Visions of Post-Capitalism
The book that I have read about Marx that most inspired me was Marx’s Theory of Alienation by the Hungarian Marxist philosopher István Mészáros, published in 1970. Mészáros argues that the first full-fledged elaboration of Marx’s philosophical system is to be found in the theory of alienated labour of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
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From mass advertising to personalized advertising: the Billboard Cage Project of Christos Voutichtis
The billboard is like a theatrical stage. It is an exhibition space, a seductive or informative representation of a product or service or venue, or a simulation drawing attention to itself and becoming its own hyper-reality. It is a large advertising structure on the side of the highway or in the middle of the city.
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Is Trump a Fascist or is He the Parody of Fascism?
This is the text of my speech at the virtual conference “Trump, Television and the Media: From Drama to Fake News to Tweetstorms” organized by London Metropolitan University which took place on 30-31 October 2020.
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From Sociology to Media Studies to Software Studies, part one
I disagree with Kittler’s statement that there is no software. In my view, just because the kernel or center of computing is rational and computational and digital-binary does not mean that all the other layers, languages, and interfaces of the system, and which surround the kernel, must obey or follow that logic.
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From Sociology to Media Studies to Software Studies, part two
Kittler opposes the so-called discourse analysis of the study of media practiced in much of the humanities, which he sees as deriving its methods from hermeneutics and literary criticism. He instead advocates a technical materialism of data storage devices, data transmission, processors, automatic writing systems, and so forth.
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