When Does Virtual Become More Than Virtual?

Creepily lifelike CGI woman - Cory Doctorow @ BoingBoing

What you see to your right is a computer generated image, that's right, a CGI. Apparently some Brazilian firm was tasked to create a lifelike CGI person without falling into the uncanny valley problem. This is true hyperrealism as the image is nothing more than a simulation. Much like Rei Toei of William Gibson's Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties the image is a step toward an era of simulated actors and musicians and other celebrities. That celebrities are mainly manufactured and simulated anyway, this isn't much of a leap but that the tech is already here is amazing.

Hyperrealism after the Singularity

Humanity's Identity Crisis - Kevin Kelly @ Technium

Via Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing is this article that asks some of the basic questions of metaphysics and their relation to the world we are living and will live in. The salient point I pulled from the article was the issue of the supermodern/hyperreal in how we identify ourselves and the relation of that identity to the world. Whether that world is a physical one made up of atoms and cells or one made of images and mental spaces is the essence of such questions now. The divisions people place between the public and the private sphere are disintegrating while new divisions between who we are in the physical world and who we are online are growing rapidly. And yet those same divisions are becoming blurred as well as cosplay, Second Life, multi-communication devices and a myriad of other advances bring the virtual directly into the physical.
Identity plays a key role in the debate of the hyperreal versus the real. What is Reality, Person, Time, Place and Space when fakes, avatars and split timelines are here and ready for use? If the supermodern is more about the spaces we move through, the decontextualization of the physical world and hyperreality about the simulated lives we mentally create for ourselves, the bringing forth of a reality more real than Reality, then how does that change the sum in our lives (sum by the way is Latin for I am)? Memories become nothing but a matter of storage space, yet we have still to create the first truly artificial brain. We still haven't fully figured out the plasticity of a single neuron yet. But science cannot provide the entire answer to the questions of identity when identity can change with memories, place and time. How whole networks of neurons interact tell us only part of the story, the basic outlines of a narrative of humanity.
History is not a matter of science per se. History is the true story of human existence. It is a story with a narrative so even though we might get the outline we haven't understood the plot quite yet. The cogito ergo sum of Descartes was overturned by Wittgenstein when he explained how language was entirely a public act and thus the sum or the I we think ourselves of doesn't create identity. It is public and relies on the interactions of humans. We are not an I until there is Other. And when the barriers between what makes the I and the Other begins to dissolve as it has in the last two decades it become an urgency of philosophy to return to metaphysics and wrestle with those woolly questions.
Humanity is on the precipice of something entirely new, a cultural singularity of sorts, or mass psychological freak out. Where does the I go and what was it really in the first place? If we can fake reality, or make it more real than Real then can we fake identity or make an identity more real than Identity? Moreover, have we simply faked identity all along? Is that possible as well? When the God of the Universe said I am and became afraid because he recognized the Otherness of everything else, was that the birth of identity? Are we subsuming consciousness into subconsciousness/unconsciousness into a super-consciousness? How much understanding of reality do we really have and how much more can we bear? To me, these are the questions of the next decades. Whether we fall apart in that psychological freak out or finally move beyond the childhood of the mind depends on the answers we arrive at.

Painting Video Games in the Surreal Hyperreality

Oil Paintings Inspired by Internet Memes - Cory Doctorow @ BoingBoing

This doesn't fall into the category of supermodern but I think it does fit in with the hyperreal crowd. This is a painting inspired by the prairie dog viral video giving the viral video a longevity that has already surpassed the original. The artist, Jeremiah Palecek, has taken the original and transformed it into a pop zen painting of stunning simplicity. It's fitting for the hyperreal I think due to its twisting of something already simulated into a real, physical object. There's plenty more at his web site Nerdkore.com.

Cyber Goggles Tells You Where the Guns Are

Cyber Goggles Record and Tag Your World for Future Reference - Wilson Rothman @ Gizmodo, via Miss Information

Fellow blogger and friend pointed me to this article on Gizmodo about a virtual reality interface, or cyber goggles as they are calling it, that allows the user to tag the real world in the same way information is tagged in the virtual world. It's an idea I first encountered in William Gibson's latest book Spook Country. It's an idea I adore, mostly due to its implications to the philosophy of language and the mind. When you can stop relying on your brain to recall the specific name of something what happens to your memory and language functions? What happens when language is encoded in a device that exist outside of our brains? And what does this say about the primacy of the brain in consciousness? A tagged reality is the next step towards the hyperreality simulation supplanting the real physical world. Okay, I'm started to geek out now so I'll stop here.

Your Desk in Motion

So I've always taken an interest in what people consistently keep on their desk mixed with the everyday stuff that lands there. I'm not speaking of your desk at work, but the one at home where your real work begins. A desk isn't a requirement though. Coffee tables, floors, beds, countertops, or just anywhere in general where you compose, create or just lounge. I hold this strange belief that what you find on this space at any particular moment reflects a great deal of who you are and what kind of personality you keep.
This is my desk. This is where I spend a great deal of time writing, smoking and playing with media. But it also reflects some of the regular elements of my daily life, whether over the long term or the short term. A glass of water next to a prescription bottle is a regular thing while the dispenser of surgical gauze is reflective of my amazing week in personal injury. Coffee, smokes, cds and dvds are commonplace and travel with me most anywhere I go. What makes this picture of my desk so important is it's representation of the space I produce for myself, whether simulated or real. Each object has their own meaning, a myriad of meanings in fact. But in relation to each other what do they say? What does the totality of these objects reflect about myself and how I produce my reality, my space?
So, what does your creative space look like? If you send me pictures and brief descriptions then I'll post them, sans names and such if desired. I want to see how other creative spaces are produced and what they mean to the producer. So click away.

Hyperrealism, The Production of Space and Dialectic Materialism

Since I've been reading Henri Lefebrve's The Production of Space along with some minor research in the fields of hyperrealism and supermodernism, I've had to relearn the dialectical and the differences between Hegel's notion of the dialectic and Marx's dialectical imperialism. I know, I know, I should still know this but I tended to avoid anything that smacked of Marxism when I was in school. Now the off-shoots and intellectual movements sparked in response to Marxism I've been all over. Lefebrve, in writing on the production of space, is taking it from a Marxist perspective, sort of. Thus the dialectical is important. For Marx, the dialectic was the attempt to transcend the contradictions of the material world in order to attain a new height of history and human experience. Lefebrve believes this kind of attitude towards space (space meaning social space, mental space and material space) overlooks the necessity of both the distinctiveness of different kinds of space while admitting their intertwined relation.
For me, this attempt to span the contradictions of the human experience shows a misunderstanding of what the human experience really is. Camus spoke of this in The Rebel as the concepts of freedom and justice are constantly at odds with each other, neither existing without the other but without any foreseeable way of reconciling that conflict. It's a matter of not 'transcending' the contradictions of the world but allowing those contradictions to exist as is. The gap exists but it isn't a failure of philosophy. It's an acknowledgment of the limitations of the human mind. The dialectic originally meant, in the pre-Hegelian sense, a way of reasoning to arrive at a truth. Hegel and Marx turned it into some world-historical method to achieve a more perfect form of history and humanity when none was needed. Even though the dialectic has allowed us to realize the limitations of human logic it is not a system that one should take too seriously. Instead, I think the dialectic is a starting point for understanding those limitations and realizing how production in the Marxist sense is only one way to look at things. Postmodern, it may be, but it also fits within the realm of the hyperreal as attempting to expose the contradictions of the simulated reality of hyperrealism is an important task for futurists as well as philosophers.

The Supermodern as the Hyperreal as the Imagined Community

Hyperreality @ Wikipedia
Hypermodernity @ Wikipedia

I'm beginning to wonder whether the development of the hyperreal in art has any connection to the rise of supermodern architecture. Both are depictions of some beyond the reality of old. The supermodern in architecture invokes a simulated reality as it transposes context and places of rest with contextless and movement-oriented designs. Part of this has to do with the rise of the internationally recognized architect who receives bids and commissions from around the globe. Another part has to do with the business classes who travel from city to city to experience the same hotel rooms, the same airport terminals and the same rented cars on the same highways as the place they would call home. All of this, from the detachment of architecture from context to the building of simulated worlds for the business class to travel through are, in many ways, part and parcel with the ideas behind hyperrealism. The original reality become less important as the simulated one replaces it for those who actually do travel from country to country on a frequent basis. Home becomes the movement through things and a house becomes just another space to move through.
While the hyperreal in art offers a detailing of reality beyond the capability of the human mind to do by itself, it also offers a simulated reality that presents itself as somehow 'more real' than reality. How this interplay between the original and the simulation will play out in the future is something that cyberpunk writers have asked for years.
William Gibson, in describing an American's view of London as a sort of mirror world in his book Pattern Recognition, touches on that aspect of the hyperreal and the supermodern. Cayce goes from London to Tokyo to Moscow and finds the same stores, the same clothing, the same designs and the same sense of fashion. It's a simulated unity of the world through shops and attire, but then again, as Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities, any identification with a group of people you have never actually met is a simulation of unity.
Viewed in this light, nationalism is the first kind of hyperrealism, as it asks us to deny the reality we see and accept that we are unified through common language, ancestry and history despite not needing to know the rest of those you are 'unified' with. Nationalism also asks us to accept the mobility of jobs and the ability to transplant one worker from one city to another, as Ernst Gellner would argue. The spiritual unity sought by the Germans and the Italians after their political unification in the 1870s could only be a simulated unification, an imagined one. Thus nationalism crafts a simulated united between people that doesn't exist in the everyday world.

Photos of the Universe as Hyperrealist Art

Airbrushed Space Pics Are Abstract Art - Charlie Jane Anders @ i09

Personally I think this kind of art falls under the category of hyperrealism as it offers details of the world, or universe in this case, that would otherwise remain unknown to the eyes. That the radiation given off by the Cat's Eye Nebula is invisible to the naked eye is key to my believe that photos taken by the Hubble telescope belong to the realm of hyperrealist art, even if they are only photos taken with particular kinds of lenses. It's exactly that kind of human manipulation of the visual that makes this kind of art hyperrealistic versus abstract. These images are real, just presented in a way that we would have never seen before. That and I just love me some space porn like this.

Travels in Hyperrealism

Jacques Bodin
Jacques Bodin @ Wikipedia
Hyperrealism @ Wikipedia
Jean Baudrillard @ Wikipedia

The photo you see here is not a photo. The subject is not real in the sense of a photographed subject. Instead, both the photo and the girl are subjects of a painting by hyperrealist artist Jacques Bodin. An offshoot of the Photorealist movement from the 60s and 70s, hyperrealism differs in both narrative structure and the use of technology to paint or sculpt subject at a level of detail that goes beyond what a 35mm camera could accomplish. The hyper in hyperrealism is taken literally as most works of hyperrealism are produced to a level of detail far beyond that of real life. The dimensions of the finished product go far beyond reality as well. Most paintings and sculptures are done at an almost absurd scale. Thus by paradoxically enlarging then magnifying the detail of their subjects, hyperrealists artists amplify reality to a point of non-reality.
The original photorealists were influenced by semiotician and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard. Basing his ideas on language and semiotics around the idea that an object's meaning is determined by its prestige in relation to other mundane objects. While not as simple as Wittgenstein's formulation it does share traits such as the need for context and relation to other elements in the world. Where Baudrillard breaks with such older theories and joins with his contemporaries Foucault, Lyotard and Lacan in his postmodernist thinking about how reality is perceived and treated in the larger-scale social structure. It is on this point that Baudrillard intersects with the photorealists and hyperrealists. As the relation between object and subject becomes magnified to the point of absolute minutia as the subject (people, you and I), in attempt to gain a total understanding of all reality, becomes lost. Once lost, the subject ends up creating a simulation of reality in their mind. Reality, in this sense, becomes non-reality and to the subject the simulation is more real.
I don't buy most of it, since I never bought into Berkeley's idealism or the theory that perception is so fallible that we never have a truly unmediated experience of reality. Then again, I think Baudrillard did have an understanding of how technology like virtual reality and social networks create a simulated reality that, for some people, becomes more real than the real world itself. The acronym IRL (in real life) is a pretty convincing point of evidence for Baudrillard. Even so, to say that an unmediated experience of the real is, for all intents and purposes, impossible goes beyond what I'm willing to accept as a sentient creature whose grey matter is based on a lizard brain. If you can prove to me that lions chasing down gazelle are also seeing a simulation of reality versus an unmediated reality then perhaps I'll buy into Baudrillard.
But despite my criticism of Baudrillard, his influence on the artistic movement of hyperrealism does expose some of the flaws in the human experience. There are grey areas of experience where we have difficulty telling between the real and and non-real. Our perceptions and beliefs are prone to trickery but this has long been known. It's our ability to winnow out the real and non-real that make the human mind an amazing organism.