Hyperreality

[A brief introduction]. I’m Tim, a Las Vegas resident, PhD Candidate in sociology, amateur photographer. I have a passion for urban environments and I love using photography as a means to uncover the hidden subtexts – the poetry – of city life. A few years ago I set out to wield my camera as a sociological tool, together with my stockpile of abstract theoretical tools, to see what I could produce. My blog is intended to connect the real, the “real”, and the “really real” with the abstract, the ideological, and the theoretical.

[On hyperreality]. This is a term I came across in Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation. If you’re a Matrix fan, the Wachowski brothers tried to hire Baudrillard as a consultant for their epic trilogy, though he declined their offer. Hyperreality describes a condition where we are unable to differentiate between the fictional and the real. In technical language, it’s a condition where referents (i.e. the words we use to describe our world) do not actually refer to real objects. Example, what do you know to be true about 9/11? If you’re like me, much of what I know was gleaned from media reports. Another way of saying that is “much of what I know was gleaned from narratives”. And it turned out there were many, many narratives. The official narrative (hijackers & boxcutters & passports & flight lessons), conspiracy narratives (“9/11 was an inside job”), the national security narrative (PATRIOT act), and so on. Which one of those is really real? Or can they only be “real”? We can’t know because our only referents are to narratives, and the actual events of 9/11 are totally removed from the process. This is much like the metaphor of the matrix where believed reality is in actuality a computer simulation.

[On the spiritual]. As a final note, I am a firm believer in the metaphysical, the unseen, and the spiritual. I truly ascribe to a dualistic view of knowledge that is both Discovered through science and Revealed through introspection, intuition, and occasionally through supernatural revelation. To paraphrase Jules’ epiphany in Pulp Fiction, ‘…whether we observed an according to Hoyle miracle is irrelevant. What is important is that I felt the touch of God’. It’s not an either/or proposition, it’s both/and. I believe the world to be both physical and spiritual and they both function together. So don’t get mad if I discuss religious principles along with “objective” observations about empirical “reality”. Trust me, I’m as critical of the unseen as I am of what is seen.

But enough about me. It’s time for some pictures.