class: title background-image: url(theo-crazzolara-klHuYR3Ds6E-unsplash.jpg) --- class: fit-h1 # Writing Assignment #2 - "The Visuality of the Nasher Museum" * Importance of making an argument! "In this exhibition, we can discern that the Nasher | is invested in maintaining ideologies of . . . | controls the field of visuality by . . . | opens up new possibilities for agency for . . . " * keywords: enables/constrains; controls/directs; renders invisible; prominently displays; shapes; circumvents; accessible/inaccessible; power; ideology; space; architecture; institution; status; cultural capital; movement; surveillance; structure; provenance; author-function; high vs low culture; hierarchy; appropriation ??? Nasher Cafe and Gift Shop --- class: title, smokescreen, shelf, no-footer background-image: url(theo-crazzolara-klHuYR3Ds6E-unsplash.jpg) # Simulacra and Simulations ## October 31, 2022 --- class: center <br /><br /><br /> > The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. > > The simulacrum is true. > > &mdash; Ecclesiastes --- class: img-left, fit-h1, compact  # Today's Theorist: [Jean Baudrillard](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard) * 1929-2007 * Extremely prolific social &amp; culltural critic: 50+ books * Associated with French poststructuralist and postmodernist thought * Early work within a semiotic frame, focused on social and symbolic capital of identifying with one's possessions; valorized "symbolic exchange": symbolic or cultural activities which do not contribute to capitalist production * Later work posited a postmodern "break" with modernity and thus with Marxist political economy: **hyperreality** and **spectacle** replace economic determinism as the space of everyday life. ??? Following Marx, he argues that this modern epoch was the era of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, in which workers were exploited by capital and provided a revolutionary force of upheaval. Baudrillard, however, declared the end of political economy and thus the end of the Marxist problematic and of modernity itself: > The end of labor. The end of production. The end of political economy. The end of the signifier/signified dialectic which facilitates the accumulation of knowledge and of meaning, the linear syntagma of cumulative discourse. And at the same time, the end simultaneously of the exchange value/use value dialectic which is the only thing that makes accumulation and social production possible. The end of linear dimension of discourse. The end of the linear dimension of the commodity. The end of the classical era of the sign. The end of the era of production (Baudrillard 1993a: 8). The discourse of “the end” signifies his announcing a postmodern break or rupture in history. People are now, Baudrillard claims, in a new era of simulation in which social reproduction (information processing, communication, and knowledge industries, and so on) replaces production as the organizing form of society. In this era, labor is no longer a force of production but is itself a “one sign amongst many” (1993a: 10). Labor is not primarily productive in this situation, but is a sign of one’s social position, way of life, and mode of servitude. Wages too bear no rational relation to one’s work and what one produces but to one’s place within the system (1993a: 19ff.). But, crucially, political economy is no longer the foundation, the social determinant, or even a structural “reality” in which other phenomena can be interpreted and explained (31ff.). Instead people live in the “hyperreality” of simulations in which images, spectacles, and the play of signs replace the concepts of production and class conflict as key constituents of contemporary societies. --- class: center, roomy <br /><br /> > Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory &mdash; _precession of simulacra_ &mdash; it is the map that engenders the territory . . . > > &mdash; Baudrillard, p. 166 ??? Baudrillard begins with reference to Borges: p166 "If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts" And now it is the territory, reality itself, which is in tatters. --- class: center <br /><br />  Calvin &amp; Hobbes, July 11, 1995 --- # &quot;Orders of Simulation&quot; Successive phases of the image: ??? p. 170 relation between sign and its referent, reality, the thing in the world first order — good representations second order — bad, "evil" representations - ideology 3rd order — simulation, playing at being 4th order — hyperreal -- 1. It is the reflection of a basic reality. (mimesis) -- 1. It masks and perverts a basic reality. (ideology) -- 1. It masks the absence of a basic reality. (simulate being/having) -- 1. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulation. (hyperreal / precession of simulacra) --- class: fullbleed, no-footer  ??? p. 171-172: "Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that sufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concen­tration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade." Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. --- # Dissimulation versus Simulation > To _dissimulate_ is to feign not to have what one has. > > To _simulate_ is to feign to have what one hasn’t. > -- > [Yet] to simulate is not simply to feign. Feigning…leaves the reality principle intact, whereas simulation threatens the difference between “true” and “false,” between “real” and “imaginary.” ??? pp 167 - 168 "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". STINFs . . . --- class: fullbleed, no-footer, title, smokescreen  -- # The impossibility of staging an illusion ??? p177-178 For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a real hold up only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas a simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality. Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation. --- class: title # Simulacrum / Simulacra --- class: roomy # Simulacrum It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own _pure simulation_.^* <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> ^*<small>__Simulation__ - the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.</small> ??? A simulacrum (plural: simulacra or simulacrums, from Latin simulacrum, which means "likeness, semblance") is a representation or imitation of a person or thing. The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, **especially of a god.** By the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original According to Baudrillard, what the simulacrum copies either had no original or no longer has an original, since a simulacrum signifies something it is not, and therefore leaves the original unable to be located. --- class: center # War Games (1983) <video width="80%" height="80%" controls> <source src="WarGames_trailer.mp4" type="video/mp4"> Your browser does not support the video tag. </video> ??? Relate to Mirzoeff's idea of visualization . . . attempt to exert control over a situation But these simulations are increasingly automated . . . the idea that the "war game" can become war itself (and later, with the Gulf War and remote missile targeting, or more recently, drones -- for US soldiers, war and video games indistinguishable. America's Army game as recruitment tool) p. 167: substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. --- class: img-right-full  ## "the authentic fake" &mdash; Umberto Eco --- class: center <br /><br />  Grand Avenue, July 30, 2011 --- class: center # The Authentic Fake <br />  Over the Hedge, May 14, 2007 ??? pumpkin spice lattes Again: substituting signs for the real --- class: fullbleed, no-footer, center  --- class: title # Hyperreality ??? models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal --- class: fullbleed, no-footer, center <br />  Precession of Simulacra --- class: fullbleed, no-footer, center <br />  Precession of Simulacra --- class: fullbleed, no-footer, center <br />  Precession of Simulacra: Viva Las Vegas! --- class: fullbleed, no-footer, center  --- class: compact # [The Diigitals](https://www.thediigitals.com/compendium)  ??? The world's first all digital modeling agency Hyperreal fashion models -- literally models without an original. Available for "hire" and now also being sold as NFTs; Note their Instagram pages --- class: fullbleed, no-footer <video width="100%" height="100%" loop autoplay muted> <source src="meta_human.mp4" type="video/mp4"> Your browser does not support the video tag. </video> --- class: center # Epic Games' [Metahuman Creator](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/metahuman) <iframe width="90%" height="80%" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Aa2r9nbt6SA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> ??? https://metahuman.unrealengine.com/ Photogrammetry combined with simulation --- # For Wednesday Read: * _Practices of Looking_, Chapter 6 (pp. 219-234)