Sims

 

 

 

 

“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real.”

Jean Baudrillard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1985. Is this real?

 

 

 

 

 

Free the Robots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are losing our centers, when Microsoft word fixes a word for you and you don’t even know how to spell it anymore… it’s like the writing is no longer yours. The external world fixes it for you, and suddenly the outside starts to replace the functions of your inside. We begin to depend on the outside for solutions, we assume that solutions can be bought or given an app for, so much that we can hardly tell the outside from ourselves. Our desktops begin to reveal our personality and our deepest secrets are recorded into files and messages which end up forming a labyrinth of your mind almost more real than your mind itself. Your memories become your photos, your interests become categorized by the tumblrs you follow and the history of your google searches could tell the narrative of your academic, social and private life. Our subjectivity has been replaced by objects.

 

 

 

 

Rather than coming from within, our knowledge is filtered through a network of sources to the point that the information isn’t so pure; there may be so much of it that none of it means much at all. Information has saturated the world so that it begins to replace the world, so that we can no longer distinguish what is mediated from what is not, where to draw the line between myself and the rest of the world. The public leaks into the private. The world of simulation diminishes the world of affect, of touch. The individual has melded with the collective.

 

 

 

 

 

What is at risk is the complete, unmediated subject, one that doesn’t formlessly mold into whatever cultural container.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Hachiko Square near Shibuya Station has four enormous monitors and hundreds of advertisement boards filled with commercial and mass media images that continuously pour into the surrounding urban space. This urban situation creates a
reversed reality of individual perception. Here what is unreal has become hyper-real, even more so than the reality of the surrounding physical space. Within the context of an environment generated by a mass media oriented urban-scape, the behavioral cognition of the urban becomes drastically differentiated from the traditional modes of physical community…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Urban space in Tokyo has emerged into a kind of 'masquerade' utilizing various forms of communication to convey a constructed reality much in the same way role-playing computer games such as Multi User Dungeons (MUD) allow
participants to establish and change synthetic or false
personalities.”

Noriyuki Tajima

 

 

 

 

David Cooley

 

 

 

 

 

(this image has been circulating the internet but im curious as to how many people know that its actually a real sculpture by Ferruccio Laviani, not just a glitchy photo)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.”

William Butler Yeats

 

 

 

 

 

related sources: Simulacra and Simulation, http://kenmat.tumblr.com/, Shlohmo’s anti-design, http://simsgonewrong.tumblr.com/