In his essay The Hyper-realism of Simulation (originally published in 1976), Jean Baudrillard asserts that the use and abundance of media, signs, and symbols has so bombarded our culture that “reality itself, as something separable from signs of it ...vanished in the information-saturated, media-dominated contemporary world” (1018). Photography, mass production, television, and advertising have shaped and altered authentic experience to the point that “reality” is recognized only when it is re-produced in simulation. Truth and reality are mediated and interpreted to an extent that culture can no longer distinguish reality from fantasy. Baudrillard terms this blurring of mediated experience and reality “hyper-reality.”
Further removed from their original meaning, signs and symbols become imitations of facsimiles and reality and fiction dissolve into indistinguishable imitations. Baudrillard considered this culture of hyper-reality an advanced stage of life-as-art: “it manages to efface even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary. Unreality no longer resides in the dream or fantasy, or in the beyond, but in the real’s hallucinatory resemblance to itself.” (1018)
The signs ultimately mean nothing and therefore form their own abstracted meaning, and in Baudrillard’s words, “an air of nondeliberate parody clings to everything” (1020). Simulation, abstraction, and hyper-reality ultimately define contemporary reality.
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