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.

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.

Glass Cubes In Germany

A Giant, Glowing Cube in the Middle of Berlin - Lisa Katayama @ io9

This is probably one of the cooler things I've seen in supermodernist architecture. Apparently it's the new headquarters of railroad company Deutsche Bahn but you can't tell by just looking at the building. It's a perfect abstract piece of architecture.