Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

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

Read Article

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.
Read Article

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.
Read Article

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.
Read Article

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.
Read Article

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.
Read Article

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.
Read Article

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.
Read Article

“Outer space is a blank canvas” — Interview with Forty Two Magazine

March 23rd, 2021 in the categories: Space Travel, Star Trek

Since Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, Western culture has been fascinated with the adventure narrative that starts with great technological ambitions and ends with the mere struggle for survival. And outer space is associated with the future – about which science fiction superficially appears to speculate.
Read Article

Body, Self, and Code in Hypermodernism

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Black Mirror, Hypermodernism, Self and Identity

The text of the speech that I gave at the Schaubühne theater in Berlin on 23. February 2020, at an event in the “Streitraum” series led by Carolin Emcke. There were 450 people in the audience, a highlight of my life.
Read Article

How to Regulate the Media when they are ubiquitous and have gone viral: from utopian science fiction to practical European policy

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: European Union, Media in the Digital Society

This is the text of the keynote speech that I gave at the European Union conference "Pluralism and Responsibility: Media in the Digital Society" in Berlin on July 7, 2020. I was invited to speak by Monika Grütters, the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Read Article

Interview with Artist Network Theory

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Creative Coding

What is the revolution of Creative Coding you also name Poetic Software or Radical Software? What did programming do to your thinking? At what point and in which way did you encounter creativity in this field?
Read Article

Some Visions of Post-Capitalism

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Post-Capitalism

In the post-capitalist economy fictionally envisioned by Varoufakis, work, control over production, digital networks, democratic politics, land use, money, and the internal culture and operations of corporations have been fully democratized. There are no bosses and no hierarchies at any level of the enterprise.
Read Article

From mass advertising to personalized advertising: the Billboard Cage Project of Christos Voutichtis

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Public Space Art

The billboard is like a theatrical stage. It is an exhibition space, a seductive or informative representation of a product or service or venue, or a simulation drawing attention to itself and becoming its own hyper-reality. It is a large advertising structure on the side of the highway or smack in the middle of the city.
Read Article

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.
Read Article

Light-Writing from Las Vegas

March 8th, 2021 in the categories: Architecture, Consumer Culture, Las Vegas

From Dublin, I traveled on to New York City, then to California to meet up with my long-distance girlfriend. The America trip had begun. Moments after entering Nevada by car, we encountered Whiskey Pete’s casino. Here an important Baudrillard “simulation and simulacra” conference had taken place in 1996.
Older Entries
Newer Entries