Baudrillard Response: Charlotte, Charles-Antoine, Jos

In this politically flavoured text, Baudrillard talks about three distinctive "things": the Real, the Imaginary and the Simulation. The real is true, the imaginary is false and the simulation is neither true nor false but can be interpreted as the reality for some. He explores the hazards of hyper reality and metaphysics and how they relate to our historical context. He consider simulations to be dangerous as they are systems very close to the real and can affect it and interact with it, but are sustained by artificial means, they are not real. As complex as it may sound, his concept of simulation either comes back to lies and deterring or to over-rationalization (over-quantization) and this is what he warns us about.

One of the most interesting points Baudrillard makes is about Disneyland. He says, “Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland”... “It is there to make us believe” that the rest of America is real. This is a scary point when thinking of many other aspects of American culture, and the information we are fed. One might ask (or “some people” ask) if all information (or extreme/controversial/far-fetched information) forced upon us in the media, as described in Outfoxed is fed to us merely as another attempt to convince us that everything around us must be real. Without the crazy things we see on the news, we may not believe the crazy things all around us. Except simultaneously, Disneyland is reality, only it is caged up and masked as a childhood fantasy in which we all unknowingly live. We found it interesting to have pointed out to us that after all sorts of previously natural activities and habits have diminished in American cultural practice, we have decided to “reinvent” such activities and habits, remarketing them and making them new. For example, we have now come up with yoga, organic foods, and natural food products; as discussed in class last week, these new labels may be becoming the reason for the participation and purchasing of such goods, instead of the actual reason behind their creation. Baudrillard also touches on the idea that American culture is fascinated with past and dying cultures, and archaic articles, taking pride in the fact that they(we) have been able to restore them, and put them into a glass case to slow their decomposition. Is this a chauvinistic act of pride, as if to say that because of our superiority, we are able to better preserve and restore a dying culture? He asks. Once a culture is dead, it is only then we are even interested, and once it has died, it seems to possess power over us. "In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it." Baudrillard explains American requires a vision of death because "We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end."


In this digital age of repetition, reproduction, appropriation, and of replication, how can we apply Baudrillard’s theory? Can we say: simulacra is reality, therefore the medium is the message? Is this affecting computation art in a good way?