Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

Blog and project archive about media theory, science fiction theory, and creative 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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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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Re-Thinking Science, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 11th, 2013 in the categories: Rethinking Science

Influenced by Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” Adorno and Horkheimer’s "Dialectic of Enlightenment," and Kubrick and Clarke’s "2001: A Space Odyssey," I believe that we have come to the end of the long era of technology being conceived and developed as a tool for the ‘domination of nature’.
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Towards a Unified Existential Science of Humans and Androids, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 8th, 2013 in the categories: Androids & Artificial Life, Robotism

There are two ways of thinking about robots or androids, distinguished by the different associations evoked by the two terms robot and android. We want to synthesize the two perspectives.
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The Car of the Future, by Alan N. Shapiro and Alan Cholodenko

February 15th, 2012 in the categories: Car of the Future, Donna Haraway, Future Design, Gregory Bateson, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio, Real/Virtual Reality

In November 2008, Alan N. Shapiro was invited by Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany to speak about his ideas about "the car of the future." He spoke in front of an audience of people from the Human-Machine Interface Dept. and and the Infotainment Dept. This text was written as accompaniment to that presentation.
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From the Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Giardino Cablato (Cabled Garden) by Pietro Mussini (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

June 18th, 2011 in the categories: The Technological Herbarium

The digital images of flowers, fields, and gardens created by Pietro Mussini do not constitute the work in itself, but rather a moment of passage, useful for re-elaborating nature, studying forms and expressive combinations of nature's sounds and colors, constructing graphically what will be concretized in sculpture.
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Eduardo Kac: Living Works, by Claudio Cravero

June 3rd, 2011 in the categories: Arts & Genomics, The Illusion Beyond Art

The first exhibition in Italy dedicated to the controversial figure of Eduardo Kac (Rio de Janeiro, 1962; he lives in Chicago). His research explores the frontiers between man, animal and robot, culminating in Transgenic Art, through which living beings become a single entity with the technological.
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Questioning Steven Hawking’s Scientific Discourse, by Marc Silver and Simon Schaffer

February 5th, 2011 in the categories: Science & Technology

This text is an interview-conversation between Professor Marc Silver of the University of Modena and Professor Simon Schaffer of Cambridge University that took place in Cambridge, UK in November 1995.
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From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Interactive Plant Growing and Trans Plant by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

October 4th, 2010 in the categories: Arts & Genomics, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

Botany forms the basis of Christa Sommerer's training: she dedicated herself to it after her secondary studies, at the Faculty of Biology and Botany of Vienna. Her intention was to investigate nature applying and elaborating methods suitable to the classification of plants. to achieve the formulation of systematic rules.
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From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Nerve Garden by Bruce Damer (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

October 4th, 2010 in the categories: Real/Virtual Reality, The Illusion Beyond Art, The Technological Herbarium

Nerve Garden is a three-dimensional virtual world accessible on the Internet, a "Public Terrarium in Cyberspace," according to the definition of its authors, where the users of the Net can sow and witness the growth of virtual plants.
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Interview with AVINUS Press about The Technological Herbarium

September 8th, 2010 in the categories: Humanities Informatics, The Technological Herbarium

"The Technological Herbarium" is an interdisciplinary work, and it places into question in a very strong way the existing division of knowledge into separate spheres like art, technology, natural science, and computer science. I don’t think that these separate categories of disciplinary knowledge are helpful at all anymore.
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Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, by Alan N. Shapiro

July 29th, 2010 in the categories: Book Descriptions, Media Studies, Science & Technology, Science Fiction Studies, Star Trek

In his lengthy review-essay of "Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance" in "Science Fiction Studies", coeditor Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. remarks: "Shapiro’s study of Star Trek is one of the most original works of sf-theory since Scott Bukatman’s 'Terminal Identity' (1993)."
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