Graven on the Air

Are we increasingly living in/as a simulacrum? "The Image Culture," an article by Christine Rosen in the rich online journal The New Atlantis, examines the underlying intelligence of the Second Commandment -- the real, the imagined, the neurology and ethics of a life swimming in unexamined split-second pixellated synecdoche. Invented experiences anchored in one or two senses only (increasingly the visual), yet so exceedingly lifelike and immediate in those channels that imagination and left-brain language capacities are pre-empted and more or less atrophied.

Daniel Boorstin: “The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses,” but they have created a world “where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original.” The result [is] a culture of “synthetic heroes, prefabricated tourist attractions, [and] homogenized interchangeable forms of art and literature.” Images [become] wildly popular, but they [are], in fact, little different from illusions. “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that [we] can live in them,” he wrote.

Via liquidlifehacker, a frequent commenter at the sui generis One Cosmos

*Title: Jenny
Name: Ark Game
Country: United Kingdom
Software: LightWave 3D, Photoshop

This character was created as an in house project to developed photo realistic skin shading and rendering techniques. for a closer look check out the high res image. [Ed. This character makes no demands, is never too tired, will not complain nor grow old. High-res, lo-res: user's option.]

Comments

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

She's something! What's her phone number?

[Jeff Hull]

I wish I had seen the image without knowing it is artificial; it rather spoiled the fun, because I immediately thought - it is a graphic, not a photo. The question is, how do we know intuitively when images are fake? Looking at the hi-res image, it's clear that the amazing touches of skin detail are not applied to the neck, and the left neckline is not sharp against the background as a photo would be. The elongated facial proportions are a bit odd, as well, the eyes a bit large, lips full ... all calculated to be attractive. The skin flaws are a nice touch - the key to the believability.

It is a very interesting question you pose, though. To what extent will otherwise "healthy" people choose to live in an artificial world? Can they truly "live" in such a world, and are they really so healthy? Sounds more like a description of insanity, and not just the garden variety kind, in which a chemically deficient brain produces its own delusions. This is insanity programmed by an external source. Why do I have the vision of the lab rats with brain electrode implant to the sexual gratification center, pawing the treadle repeatedly until he dies of starvation?

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

Our friend John C. Wright, the atheist turned Christian, has some deucedly clever descriptions, in his space opus THE GOLDEN AGE, of a future world in which consciousness is continually reprogrammable in all five senses, and in which creatures on various levels of existence -- fleshly, fictional, organic, cybernetic -- interact much as different ethnicities do today, and the "natural" world itself can be rearranged at whim the way we rearrange furniture. The book as a whole is pretty turgid, but it has some brilliant set pieces.

[dilys]

In my more, shall we say, "hermetic" study days, I heard a fine teacher lecture on the importance of the "Saturnian" element in life on earth, the difficulty of change, the unavoidability of consequences, the general cussedness of things. Necessary for traction and physical life itself.

I look forward to taking a look at Wright's books. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, he writes now.