Simulated Authenticity
Simulated Authenticity is a state of being where an object is recreated to synthetically imitate; consequently this state of faux achieves its own authenticity. An example is the evolution of a humanistic model to an animation, then from an animation to a posthumanistic character. The entity metamorphoses; consequently authenticity is lost. Through simulation a falsehood is understood as authentic; however its process filters it as a connection through metaphor. It is also the conversion or transformation of the digitally created image to the tangible, animate and artificial entity. The design work is based on the theories of Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Northrup Frye and Christine Boyer. The experience is to create an alternate of the fantasy world, a faux of a faux; giving simulation authenticity through a relation to an extreme of itself. This design work emphasizes what has become the socially-anti-entertainment, simplicity and the art of design.
Minimal Disney World Art: Simulated Authenticity
The work in the gallery consisted of different examples of Simulated Authenticity. The blind letterpress elegantly uses the simple essence of what is included with Simulated Authenticity. The piece of black, linen cover stock that is letter pressed quietly with descriptive words. Words such as "Simulated environment, filtered history, antigeographical environment urban, placelessness, costumed and aura of mc disney" are placed on the perimeter of the rectangular page. By eliminating color and image, this piece whispers a different image language compared to Disney's overzealous visual overload. These cards could be a flyer for the audience; because of this, the piece becomes both a piece of a series and an authentic to the individual, consequently, becoming simulated authentic. The other blind letterpress "poster" diagonal to the black linen is in white and creates an entrance sign to the room.
The ten-foot tiled out vellum printouts create attention to the beauty of language (poetry in space) and the concept that founded simulated authenticity. The installation states two quotes from Christine Boyer.
"On the surface of these tableaux, everything seems steeped in tradition... Yet these nostalgic constructions only refer to history obliquely by appropriating styles of clothing, architectural environments, and furnishings to create a mood through which the past is filtered and perceived."
"This art of the double, an image of the city set up within the space of the city, inaugurates the age of reproduction....This is spectator art, meant to be quickly scanned, not analyzed in detail, where the pleasure of the view suspends critical judgment; it is commercial art as well, expected to entertain for a profit. And now, as in the nineteenth century, a feeling of social insecurity seems to breed a love of simulation."
The grandeur of the scale emphasizes the desired ambiance that is fundamental to the viewing of the images. The overlapping of the edges suggests the singular and the tiling creates the multiple; similar to the multiplicity of simulated images and the singularity of the authentic.
Another tiled out vellum four-page printout is the climax to the ten-foot installation. The translucence of the vellum speaks softer than white paper. It is the climax since it is the conclusion to the giant. The Plexiglas tightly frames it; however the pages are separated only to be visually connected by the viewer. Minimalism is useful to oppose the glamour of Disney. A black box and the black edges to the pages create form and counter form-the space and the void. One could connect this to the search for the void of nostalgia; something that was never possessed nor could be since nostalgia is the reality that we never could create authenticity. Therefore, the epitome of this installation is the simulation of authenticity.
The book explains with text what “Simulated Authenticity” is. Since Simulated Authenticity is a loaded term or oxymoron, its explanation describes it as a state of nostalgic replica, timeless frames and facades claiming popularity on a truncated cultural view of nostalgia. It is truncated because a population agrees on the pastiche style composed of genuine times and places. We no longer live in the past, nor the present, nor the future, but in between all of them. So the question is "When are we?" Here, we have now created a timely style of Simulating Authenticity through linear time not a holistic time, time continuing in cycles. Above the display of the book is another blind letterpress of the title on while board; this gives the mass produced book a monumentality. Since the aura is so strong in the craft of the blind letterpress, it juxtaposes the digitally created book display.
"The Simulated" is where world known historical sites are transformed into facades. The authentic sites are treated as though they were cut right out of their homeland and truncated to be placed on the Disney concrete street-sidewalks. Disney World, like America itself, has a place where all the nations become sections or pieces of a pie, in the same vein as McLuhan's Global Village. Nostalgia is an illusion, a construction of the imagination to prove the physicality of time. Time and nostalgia evoke repetition; however it is the age and quality of the repeated entities that gives them a seal of genuineness or authenticity. "The Authentic" leads to the theory: "aura from nostalgia presents Disney exactly in the heart of the United States, Florida is simply a holding ground." The difference here from the simulated is the cultural appreciation and adoration for a cartooned mouse that later symbolized a world vacation resort enterprise.
Summary
One's perception of displacement within actual geography--an anti-geographical space becomes a metaphor. Are you a displaced person in Disney? According to Mumford, the "Displaced Person" becomes dislocated because of depersonalized "technics." The designers convert the image from animation to tangible entities. The translated is not interpretation, since the aesthetics are replicated, not remade. This usage of the word, translation, means taking visual language and forming it to have verisimilitude (without using the original's syntax, atmosphere, materials or aura). Something is lost in the middle of the conversion--the middle is design. The designer takes the original to represent it as image or visual as an illusion.
Place or object (subjects to design) undergoes the result of telesthesia (the designer's perceiving and responding to distant stimuli). The process is what the designer intended and time has the power to transform an opposite into its opposition. Baudrillard explains an analogy with "private telematics" and an astronaut in his capsule. He says each person wants to be in an isolated sovereignty (complete independence) with the machine. The viewer and machine become one, a living satellite. His term "telematics" signifies the distance between a viewer with a machine and the viewed. "The realization of a living satellite, in vivo in a quotidian space, corresponds to the satellitization of the real, or what I call the 'hyperrealism of simulation': the elevation of the domestic universe to spatial power..." (Baudrillard, 128). "Hyperrealism of simulation" relates to the simulation that is beyond reality. The living satellite is the person in isolation inhabiting everyday space. So if one could detach oneself mentally from "reality," she or he is remote from the already distant stimuli (the viewed). Cases such as a television or telephone: machine and viewer (talker) are one simultaneously viewing (talking with) the distant trascommunicator.
The world that Baudrillard speaks of is one where someone disconnects from the human world yet communicates with it. Frye describes the world where we want to live. Comparatively speaking, Baudrillard describes a living space as more objective and disconnected, while Frye describes a space more subjective. Both ends pose for small portions of the other since it is rare to be purely subjective or objective. So in other words, the scene of simulation, a product of technology creating a living space, molds our desired habitation. The habitation is no longer authentic but simulated authentic space. (In Baudrillard's absolute simulation the subjective is overtake by the objective; they become one. As you say their character is isolated.) These spaces promote isolated interface (communication with physical distance) rather than subjective interaction of scene.
In conclusion, simulation of leisure and tourist places builds an empire upon the human desire to live a fantasy and step away from one's imagined cognitive reality. It involves designing an illusion to imitate a mentality that is imitation an illusion. Again, the "life imitating art imitating life" syndrome puts Disney on the map and in a geographical location. Aura weakens with each stage of obsolescence and mechanical reproduction. Promotion then becomes the issue for the increasing obsolete; designers update symbols to the point of not recognizing their initial identity. There is great importance in the representation of a "sense of place" and the location of the site. This is where communication is the "shell," in order to deceive the audience who reads it as authentic; as opposed to the Simulated Authentic where the viewers read its expressive content. Social communication (not expression) carries a "stock of signs" that is culturally comprehensible.
Through time, authenticity evolves with the once made simulation. "Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form" (McLuhan, 70). McLuhan opposes Mumford's 'the machine is oppressive' theory; McLuhan points out the authenticity in simulation. The sincere characteristics develop through time. In this sense time is holistic and living the "life imitating art imitating life." Therefore, this demonstrates reality imitating the simulated imitating reality. D.N. Lowe says in the same vein: "Herein lies the importance of phenomenology for the social sciences, because it provides us with second-degree constructs which can hermeneutically describe the meaning of the first-degree reality in the world" (Lowe, 165). It is important to experience in the first-degree reality, to participate in the real and events, rather than to passively accept it. Second degree reality acceptance only passes time. Perception develops from experience, that is to say the continuous interaction with projections of the imagination. D.W. Winnicott has written, "the question is; how to be isolated without having to be insulated?"