Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

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

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Inscribe Philosophy into the Heart of Computer Science

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Alexis Clancy, Humanities Informatics, Jacques Derrida, P.D. Ouspensky

There are many individuals in the technology and cyberculture communities who are not just “engineers” or techie programmers. They are already working to bring software together with art and sociology. However, in their projects, they are working two or three levels removed from the core of computer science.
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Star Trek: How the New Comes Into the World

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Star Trek

Most scientists and academics who write about Star Trek claim to be fans of the series. But their customary methodologies function to deny to Star Trek its true originality as the creator of a reality-shaping science fiction that formatively influences culture, ideas, technologies, and even hard sciences like physics.
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Alan Sokal on French theory and Science

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Rethinking Science

Sokal’s hoax was very funny. Its strength was that it was a literary strategy (taking a page from the playbook of that very same interdisciplinarity and “literary turn” – science and literature – that he was ostensibly attacking); the strength did not come from his hardcore physics.
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Only Impossible Exchange Is Possible, by Aurel Schmidt (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Jean Baudrillard, Zen Buddhism

Impossible exchange is an impossible subject. In Jean Baudrillard's book "Impossible Exchange", the matter is treated in such a way that one is better off with an associative and meditative interpretive approach than with a discursive reading.
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In Search of the Child’s Innocence, by Caroline Heinrich (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Baudrillard

I begin with a quotation. "The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes", writes Nietzsche in Zarathustra. The child is innocent because s/he starts all over again from scratch. S/he starts from the space of emptiness that the lion has carved out.
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The Star Trekking of Physics, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Star Trek, Teleportation

In spite of the proliferation of exhilarated technoculture and its multidisciplinary, wired self-image, there remain some straightlaced, uncool tendencies within the techno-elite which boil over at the thought of all this openness to the humanities and the soft.
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Captain Kirk Was Never the Original, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Captain Kirk, Captain Pike, Real/Virtual Reality, Star Trek

In its prevalent forms, the cottage consumer industry of Star Trek is a classic virtuality of identification where the viewers' senses of self, otherness, and reality are blurred by the contemplation of iconic spectacles.
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The New Computer Science

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Alexis Clancy, Humanities Informatics

Computing analyzed from a philosophical viewpoint is still at the level of Descartes, Bacon and Babbage: Mechanical automation. Shapiro wants to include Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard and many others into the science of computing.
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Considerations on Transgenic and Biotech Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Arts & Genomics, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

At the Experimental Art Foundation of Adelaide, Australia, there took place in 2004 the exhibition "Art of the Biotech Era" organized by Melentie Pandilovski. It involved the principal exponents of the artistic sphere connected to biology, genetics and bio-technologies, showing their projects and realizations.
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From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Osmose by Char Davies (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Real/Virtual Reality, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

To enter inside a tree and exit it through the leaves after having participated in its process of chlorophyllous photosynthesis: this is one of the many journeys that Char Davies makes the user of "Osmose" experience in an immersive, interactive, and multisensorial VR environment that was developed and produced in 1995.
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Adolf Portmann on the New Biology, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Adolf Portmann, Arts & Genomics, The Technological Herbarium

This action, offering light to the plant, enables the latter to externalize its 'interiority'. Suggesting this original meaning is the theory developed in the 1960s by the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann. Focusing attention on the study of the form of living beings, Portmann elaborates the innovative concept of 'self-presentation'.
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From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Telegarden by Ken Goldberg (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

Telegarden is a telerobotic installation that enables users of the World Wide Web to see and cultivate a real garden. Conceived in 1994, it was activated in June 1995 at the University of Southern California and presented at the leading international exhibitions of digital art and technology.
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Nature: A Fragment, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: German Literature, The Technological Herbarium

Rereading the reflections in which, at the end of the 17th century, Goethe voices his hymn to Nature, one acquires the sense of just how advanced is contemporary man in adding those 'secrets', in gaining access to that 'forge', in procuring those 'powers' which Goethe credits exclusively to the great artist Nature.
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Merleau-Ponty and Marx on Nature and Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Arts & Genomics, Karl Marx, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

Interrogating Western philosophy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty pinpoints the original meaning of the concept of Nature. "In Greek, the word 'nature' comes from the verb φύω, which alludes to the vegetative; the Latin word comes from nascor, 'to be born', 'to live'; it is drawn from the first, more fundamental meaning."
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The Technological Herbarium: Introduction, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

April 15th, 2010 in the categories: Arts & Genomics, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

Infinite are the facets in which the living manifests itself. Infinite are the possibilities in which it expresses its existence. Art seizes these possibilities of existence, interprets them, advances unusual combinations of them, breaks up their consolidated connections.