Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

Blog and project archive about media theory, science fiction theory, and creative coding

Read Article

Gianna Maria Gatti’s The Technological Herbarium, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 14th, 2010 in the categories: Arts & Genomics, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

The hybrid of art and technoscience is the carrier of a new worldview, a new era for cyberspace, new cognitive thought and cybernetic epistemology, and the emergence of authentic post-metaphysical thinking as pointed to by 20th century philosophers like Heidegger, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty and Bateson.
Read Article

Society of the Instance: Artificial Intelligence, Object- Orientation, and Semiotics, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 14th, 2010 in the categories: Humanities Informatics

The entire virtual life of societies in which postcapitalist conditions of seduction prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of software instances.
Read Article

Europe at War in Serbia and Kosovo, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 14th, 2010 in the categories: Information Society, War & Peace

On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization initiated a bombing campaign from 15,000 feet vectored towards designated targets inside the territory of Yugoslavia.
Read Article

Consumer Culture and Naming the Animals, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 14th, 2010 in the categories: Consumer Culture, New American Studies, Roland Barthes

In his famous essay "Myth Today," published in 1957, Roland Barthes added a second dimension to the semiotic analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure, to the insight of the Swiss linguist that language is a social institution. Barthes added a social theory of culture to the social theory of language.
Read Article

Garry Winogrand’s “Park Avenue, New York”

April 14th, 2010 in the categories: Architecture

In a 1959 photograph by Garry Winogrand entitled "Park Avenue, New York", our camera line of vision starts from an image-producing apparatus in the car behind or mounted on the back of a Chevy convertible with folding top down in the muggy summer, traveling on this most prestigious of Manhattan thoroughfares.
Read Article

The Klingon Language

April 14th, 2010 in the categories: Language, Star Trek

At the same time that many of the world's languages are either disappearing or imploding into deeper uncertainty and complexity, there is one new language which is currently experiencing rapid exponential growth in its number of speakers, and is the object of widespread fascination: the Klingon Language.
Read Article

The Fate of Languages

April 14th, 2010 in the categories: Language

There are about 6000 living human languages spoken in the world today. The vast majority of Earth languages are in danger of imminent disappearance.