Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

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

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Winning at the Venice Lido Casino

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Casino Gambling, Memoir

I had saved the $172.50 that I won in the casino in Atlantic City in a special envelope. I was going to use it for gambling the next time that I entered a casino. I took my “big winnings” with me for my next round of European wanderings. In Venice, the idea of going to the casino came up again.
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The Best University Ever: The “Free Association”

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Memoir

I was fascinated by the idea of an alternative university or “free” university. In the 1970s, there were alternative free universities in New York City. The most notable one was “the Marxist School.” Yet I never set foot in that place, not even once. I was much more attracted to the “Free Association,” a cultural and educational Center on 20th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan.
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First Year in France and Italy

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Memoir

What was unusual, and in a way crazy, about my plan, was that I was going to France to simply “live” there. I had no job. I had no affiliation with any university program. At least I had the project of learning French. My trans-Atlantic flight stopped in Reykjavík, Iceland. I got out of the plane, walked around the airport, and even ventured outside for a few minutes to breathe the far north air.
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Nursery School, Kindergarten, First Grade

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Memoir

The Sands Point School was housed in a sumptuous mansion on a sprawling real estate property that was adjacent to the sometime rough waters of the Long Island Sound estuary at Hempstead Harbor. The regal manor house on Elm Court was originally built with “old money” wealth around 1921, at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. The architect Egerton Swartwout had designed the stately home of twenty-two rooms.
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Cadillac to JFK Airport

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Baseball, Memoir

It was two months after my twentieth birthday and my father was driving me in his Cadillac Coupe DeVille from my parents’ upper middle class split-level house in suburban Roslyn, Long Island to JFK Airport in Queens. I was going to begin my first attempt to create a life for myself on the other side of the pond. I had an open return ticket that cost four hundred dollars – that was a lot of bread – and was good for one year.
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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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