Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

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

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Methodology – Thirty Minute Statement at my Ph.D. Oral Defense

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Book Descriptions, Creative Coding, Future Design, Media in the Digital Society

I present a way for cultural studies and philosophy to play an important role in what the nascent Creative Coding movement can become. It is about Creative Coding, Phase Two. I lay out how poststructuralist theories of language can provide a basis for the project of transdisciplinary software coding.
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Blade Runner 2049: Android Liberation Between Old and New Informatic Power

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Androids & Artificial Life, Science Fiction Film

Blade Runner 2049 is a brilliant sequel to the original Blade Runner. Thirty years after the events of the narrative of the first film, the police discover evidence of the secret that Rachael, who was a replicant or android, became pregnant and gave birth in a “natural” fertility process to a child. Rachael died while achieving childbirth after a clumsy Caesarean section.
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The “Science Fiction World” of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Real/Virtual Reality, Science Fiction Literature

The novel Ubik is generally regarded as being Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece. In this major literary work of 1969, the struggle to occupy an “outside” relative to the “inside” of a cybernetic-economic-technological-virtual system is poignantly illustrated. It is a scenario where the “science fiction world” becomes everything, leaving the “safe confines” of a clearly defined literary space that is called a novel.
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Brain-Computer Interface

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Brain Computer Interface

One can distinguish between mainstream versus alternative/transformative designs and implementations of the user applications to be based on BCI – the command-and-control cyborg versus the feminist-theory cyborg. Rethinking and reinvention of Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory are possible in the BCI context.
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Fiction, Power, and Codes in Hyper-Modernism

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Cornelius Castoriadis, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, Hypermodernism, Michel Foucault

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.
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Biosphere 2: The Artificial Paradise of Nature

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Ecology, Energy, and the Environment

Biosphere 2, according to Baudrillard, is the desperate project of a desperate humanity faced with its own extinction, the obsessive mania to create an artificial paradise of so-called nature and so-called reality, given that both of those nostalgic referents have already disappeared.
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The Truman Show: “The Last Thing That I Would Ever Do is Lie to You”

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Reality TV, Science Fiction Film, Surveillance

Truman Burbank – played by Jim Carrey – is under surveillance by television cameras twenty-four hours a day within the framework of a carefully choreographed Reality TV show that is watched by billions of voyeuristic viewers all over the world. Truman lives inside a vast Hollywood studio erected as an enclosed dome that is so large that it can be seen from outer space.
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Wendy Chun on Software Code

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Software Studies

In her book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Wendy Hui Kyong Chun develops her concept of “programmability” to argue that almost all social and economic institutions and procedures of life under capitalism are now shaped by software that pilots the unfolding of the future by intimately knowing data patterns and making extrapolations from the past.
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Claus Pias on First-Order Cybernetics

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Claus Pias, First-Order Cybernetics, German Media Theory

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 called “The Age of Cybernetics,” which appears at the beginning of the volume.
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Bernhard Dotzler on Second-Order Cybernetics

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Bernhard Dotzler, Friedrich Kittler, German Media Theory, Second-Order Cybernetics

Bernhard J. Dotzler is a prominent German media theorist who has written extensively about the philosophical, scientific, and literary historical backgrounds to the beginnings of the computer and first-order cybernetics. In Diskurs und Medium, Dotzler considers discourse and medium as embodied knowledge or thinking, examining “archaeologically” the interconnections between technology and the history of ideas.
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Hayles on Writing and Software Code

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: N. Katherine Hayles, Software Studies, Vilem Flusser

In Does Writing Have a Future?, the media theorist 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.
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The Zeroth Law of Robotics and the Robot Unconscious

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Robots, Science Fiction Film, Science Fiction Literature

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 short story “The Evitable Conflict.” The zeroth law then became a permanent fixture in Asimov’s science fictional literary imagination. According to the zeroth law, a robot must not harm humanity considered in its entirety.
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I, Robot and the Moral Dilemmas of the Three Laws of Robotics

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Robots, Science Fiction Film, Science Fiction Literature

One of the contemporary developments with which Hayles is concerned is the technoscientific 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

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Software Poetry, Software Studies

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.