Simulation and Hyperreality

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Simulation and Hyperreality
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Lecture Outline

• Baudrillards concepts of simulation and
  hyperreality
• Examples of simulation and hyperreality
• The impact of simulation and hyperreality on
  everyday life and experience

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What is a simulation?

• a model, an image, a virtual thing, some kind of
  fiction or artifice
• Some examples of simulation
• computer animation of dinosaurs in the film
  Jurassic Park
• theme parks, e.g. Disneyworld
• military training simulations
• virtual presenters/actors, e.g. ananova.com

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Baudrillard's definition

• simulations are "models of a real without
  origin or reality
• a hyperreality

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Jean Baudrillard

• Baudrillard developed the notion of simulation in
  a 1980s essay called The Precession of
  Simulacra.
• Baudrillard identified four stages of simulation

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The four stages of simulation

• Stage One
• Initially, the sign (e.g. image or
  representation) is a reflection of a basic
  reality.
• (e.g. a conventional photograph or
  representational painting)

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The four stages of simulation

• Stage Two
• In the second stage, the sign masks a basic
  reality.
• (The image becomes a distortion of reality)

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The four stages of simulation

• Stage Three
• In third stage, the sign masks the absence of a
  basic reality.
• (The image calls in to question what the reality
  is and if it even exists).

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The four stages of simulation

• Stage Four
• In the fourth stage, the sign bears no relation
  to any reality whatsoever it is its own pure
  simulacrum.
• (e.g. Cottingham's simulated image of the twin
  boys)

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Examples digital photography
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Cottinghams image

• The photograph is a pure simulation made up of
• Scanned anatomical drawings
• photographic samples of skin, hair, eyes from a
  variety of individuals of different ages, sexes
  and ethnicities including the artist
  himselfImage credit Keith Cottingham -
  Fictitious PortraitsSourcewww.kcott.com

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Photography

• In photography, there is a one-way logical
  relationship between
• the thing and its photographic image
• the original and the 'copy'
• the actual and the virtual
• Example a photograph of the opera house

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Digital Photography

• Digital simulations undermine the one-way logic
  of the original and its image
• In a digital photograph there is no necessary
  origin or actuality which the image reflects, or
  to which the image refers

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Simulated images

• Simulated images break the assumed link between
  reality and representation
• Simulation produces images of things which appear
  real ex nihiloout of nothing. (from Kevin
  Robins article in ARIN1000 reader)

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Simulated images

• Principal consequence the truth value,
  evidentiary status and objectivity that is
  traditionally ascribed to photographs no longer
  applies.
• The image is pure digital information, endlessly
  manipulable and remote from any pre-existing
  reality.

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What does all this mean?

• Various simulations of reality images, fictions,
  artifice etc are eclipsing or displacing reality
  itself.signs of the real are substituted for
  the real (Baudrillard)
• The boundary between fiction, images and artifice
  on the one hand, and reality or truth on the
  other hand, has become blurred.

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Kate Winslett - GQ cover
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The map and the territory

• In The Precession of Simulacra, Baudrillard
  reworks a famous Borges story where cartographers
  of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it
  covers the territory entirely - as the map decays
  the territory reasserts itself.

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The map and the territory

• "today it is the territory whose shreds slowly
  rot against the extent of the map. It is the
  real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist
  here and there in the deserts that are no longer
  those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the
  real itself."
• Baudrillard meets The Matrix
• "Welcome to the desert of the real"

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The Precession of Simulacra

• Now, according to Baudrillard, the map comes
  before the territory - media images, simulations
  and the hyperreal precede our experience of the
  real.
• We experience simulations before we experience
  the real thing. These experiences and perceptions
  shape our perception of reality.

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Precession of Simulacra

• images of great artworks take precedence over the
  actual artwork, which often pales by comparison
• Armchair tourism - Getaway, Lonely Planet - we
  typically see media images of the world before we
  see the real thing

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Precession of Simulacra

• digitally altered images of women in magazines
  determine how real women wish to look
• plastic surgery simulations - try before you buy
• Lara Croft, a computer generated animated
  character in the game Tomb Raider - played by
  Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider movie.

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Baudrillard and the 1991 Gulf War

• Baudrillard's essay The Gulf War Did Not Take
  Place caused a public outcry
• What does Baudrillard mean by this?

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The Gulf War

• Baudrillard "signs of the real are substituted
  for the real itself"
• In the end, the signs of the real (i.e.
  simulations) come to take precedence over the
  real itself.

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The Gulf War

• Signs or representations of warfarescreen-based
  simulations of various kindsdisplaced what was
  depicted, the real war.
• The Gulf War was conducted as if it were a giant,
  global simulation on a series of screens radar
  screens, computer screens, TV screens.

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The Gulf War

• Images of war become the war. (Virilio)
• It was just like the movies or a computer game
• The Gulf War that we saw on television was a
  mediated reality, not the 'real thing'.

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Reality Television

• The stuff of reality becomes the 'story' fodder
  for the fictional televisual world.
• "You no longer watch TV, TV watches you.
  Baudrillard

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Reality Television

• Real people in 'real' situations are used instead
  of actors
• Sylvania Waters
• Big Brother
• Fear Factor
• Survivor
• Talk shows (Jerry Springer, Oprah, etc)

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How real is reality TV?

• Reality TV might use real people but they put
  them in contrived rather than real situations.
• Events are set up and manipulated.
• Real people are selectively represented, often
  manipulated and staged as caricatures.
• When they are being filmed by a television or
  video camera, real people 'act'.

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The Truman Show (1998)

• Peter Wiers 1998 film The Truman Show is the
  ultimate reality TV show - the film raises some
  interesting issues about the nature of reality
  and our experience of it
• Truman, the subject of the show, has been filmed
  from birth 24/7 without his knowledge - he thinks
  his simulated world is real

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Baudrillard

• The simulacrum is never that which conceals the
  truthit is the truth which conceals that there
  is none. The simulacrum is true.
• We cannot know or experience reality beyond our
  own experience. In a sense there is no reality
  beyond our own experience.

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Some concluding thoughts

• Our experience of reality is increasingly
  mediated (viewed through the lens of a variety of
  media forms)
• These mediated simulations of reality are
  starting to displace reality and to shape our
  perception of reality
• reality has passed over into a play of
  reality (Baudrillard)

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Some concluding thoughts

• Digital technologies are increasing the scope and
  seductive power of simulation technologies
• In the future, digital technologies such as
  virtual reality will increasingly blur the
  boundary between the real and the imaginary
  (virtual)

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Some concluding thoughts

• simulation threatens the difference between the
  true and the false, the real and the
  imaginary (Baudrillard)

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References

• In ARIN1000 Reader
• Woolley, B. (1993) Hyperreality, in Virtual
  Worlds A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality,
  London Penguin.
• Willis, Anne-Marie Digitisation and the Living
  Death of Photography, in Philip Hayward (ed)
  (1990) Culture, Technology and Creativity,
  London John Libbey.
• Robins, K. The Space of the Screen, in Into the
  Image Culture and Politics in the Field of
  Vision, London Routledge, 1996.
• Baudrillard, J. The Precession of Simulacra, in
  Simulacra and Simulations, trans Sheila Faria
  Glaser, (1997) Ann Arbor University of Michigan
  Press. Excerpts.

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References

• Additional Readings in Fisher Reserve
• Baudrillard, J. The Ecstasy of Communication,
  in Hal Foster (ed) (1985) Postmodern Culture,
  London Pluto Press.
• Benedikt, M. (ed.) (1994) Introduction, in
  Cyberspace First Steps, Cambridge MIT Press.
• Bukatman, B. (1996) Terminal Identity, Durham
  Duke University Press. Section on Baudrillardian
  simulation.
• Dery, M. (1996) Escape Velocity Cyberculture at
  the End of the Century, London Hodder and
  Stoughton. Section on Baudrillardian simulation.
• Heim, M. (1993) The Essence of VR, in The
  Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Oxford Oxford
  University Press.
• Robins, K. Cyberspace and the World We Live In,
  in Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (eds.),
  (1995) Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk,
  London Sage.
• Tofts, D. et al (eds.) (2002) Prefiguring
  Cyberculture an intellectual history, Sydney
  Power Publications Cambridge, Mass. MIT.