Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

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

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The Third Order of Simulacra: Simulation and Hyperreality

August 6th, 2024 in the categories: Jean Baudrillard

The third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s genealogy is also known as simulation: the system of objects, the consumer society, the system of models and series, simulated differences generated by “the code,” the post-World War II era of media, shopping mall architectures, and the American way of life.
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The Controversy Around Baudrillard

August 6th, 2024 in the categories: Jean Baudrillard

The diagnosis of simulation, simulacra, virtuality, and hyperreality in contemporary culture is not the main concern of Baudrillard's work. The main concern of his work is to open a new knowledge field of reflection on and investigation into the possibilities of the challenge to the sim- ulacrum.
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Early Baudrillard

August 6th, 2024 in the categories: Jean Baudrillard

The postmodern recombinant culture of cyber-commodities is a system of simulated differences or differences-in-sameness. The sign-object takes on its meaning in a system of marginal or minimal differences from other sign-objects, according to a code of hierarchical significations (Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, formula-generated episodes of a TV series).
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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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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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Is Trump a Fascist or is He the Parody of Fascism?

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Donald Trump, Jean Baudrillard

The kind of media theory or media analysis which has been prevalent on the American political left for the past several decades operates essentially with an epistemology of true and false. In their war against Trump, the liberal political media – CNN and the New York Times, for example – take the same tack.
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“The Prisoner” as “The Hostage” and the Episode “A. B. and C.”, by Alan N. Shapiro

September 21st, 2019 in the categories: Jean Baudrillard, The Prisoner

I relate "The Prisoner" to one key concept of Baudrillard: his idea of the figure of the hostage as a metaphor for understanding both the situation of our post-political world and the situation of the individual consumer-citizen in the contemporary postmodern and cybernetic capitalist society.
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Baudrillard and the Situationists, by Alan N. Shapiro

June 27th, 2019 in the categories: Jean Baudrillard, Situationists

I will say something about the similarities and differences between the Situationist critical social theory of advanced or hyper-capitalism and consumerist media culture – the theory of “the society of the spectacle” and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of image, media and consumer culture – the theory of simulation, simulacra, virtuality, hyper-reality, Integral Reality, and “the models and codes precede the real.”
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Philosophie, Science und Ökologie: Whitehead und Merleau-Ponty über den Begriff der Natur, von Alan N. Shapiro

June 25th, 2019 in the categories: A. N. Whitehead, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Vor etwa zehn Jahren begann ich mich intensiv für Kunstwerke und Kunstinstallationen zu interessieren, die Wissenschaften und Technologien in ihrer Konzeption und Ausführung mit einbezogen: Medienkunst, Electronic Art, Computerkunst, Videokunst, Bio Art, transgenic art, robotics art, telepresence art, ecosystems art und virtuelle Kunst.
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Gerry Coulter, Sophie Calle and Baudrillard’s “Pursuit in Venice”, by Alan N. Shapiro

June 25th, 2019 in the categories: Gerry Coulter, Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion Beyond Art

I did not know Gerry Coulter well personally. Yet I have considered him to be my friend. Our intellectual, political, and academic perspectives have been very close to one another. We have been comrades-in-arms, fighting for the same cause. We have both been engaged with Jean Baudrillard’s system of thought.
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Alan N. Shapiro racconta “Star Trek” (RAI4 Italian TV interview)

April 10th, 2017 in the categories: Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Star Trek

Poliedrico studioso di tecnologia, fantascienza, media e filosofia contemporanea, americano di nascita ed europeo d’adozione, Alan N. Shapiro spiega l’importanza, i significati e il successo della saga di Gene Roddenberry, partendo dal suo innovativo e celeberrimo saggio Star Trek: Tecnologie della sparizione.
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Orwell, Baudrillard and Trump, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 19th, 2017 in the categories: Donald Trump, Jean Baudrillard

From a Baudrillardian perspective, one could say that the media themselves (not only the news media, but the media considered in their widest scope) – having promoted a culture of simulation and simulacra where words and images stand on their own and have no reference – are responsible for Trump.
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Baudrillard und Trump: Agonie des Realen, von Alan N. Shapiro

February 18th, 2017 in the categories: Donald Trump, Jean Baudrillard

Es handelt sich hier um den fraktalen oder viralen Zustand von Simulakra der vierten Ordnung. Nach Baudrillard Post-Simulations-Erkenntnistheorie oder der "Simulationsepidemie" strahlt der Wert - wenn dieser Begriff noch angebracht ist - wie krebsartige Metastasen in alle Richtungen aus.
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