Description: Alan N. Shapiro investigates the social impact of Virtual/Augmented Reality, AI, social media platforms, robots, and the Brain-Computer Interface.
Brief description: Alan N. Shapiro teaches media theory at Hochschule für Künste Bremen and future design research at Hochschule Luzern. He has also been Visiting Professor of Transdisciplinary Design and Heterotopia at the Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, and worked for many years as a software developer. He is originally from New York City and lives in Frankfurt.
Review Quotes: »Shapiro believes that creative software coding and re-coding must not only be a new way of resistance but a positive vision for new embodiments, new poetic modulations, and new music-like resonances. If this is one way to read Shapiro's seminal book on Digital Culture Studies, another way is to read it as a post-art performance of Creative Coding. He is one of the contemporary trailblazers in the designing and implementation of digital software re-coding. He resists and transforms the social, political, and cultural "reality" by playing the risky game of hyper-modernism, hyperreality, and post-humanism. What makes him a new critical theorist is that he pulls together material that ranges from physics and digital technology to mainstream philosophy and science-fiction literature. Shapiro achieves an understanding of digital processing, software design, and code poetry with a radical theory of writing that goes beyond Barthes and Derrida. Creative Coding is an interdisciplinary informatics in which coding and re-coding are contextualized with philosophical, poetic, political, aesthetic, and design knowledge.«-- "Spiros Makris, Asst. Professor of Political Theory, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece"