’The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,’ said the voice-over, ’in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.’ On the Sony, a two dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logaritmic spirals; cold military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. ’Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receeding…’ – William Gibson, Neuromancer 1984, p67.
The video is a short mashup of images from the pre-Sweden sex case celebrity life of Julian Assange combined with the final monologue from the first Matrix film. The possibility of total information freedom in an age when space is created by information means the city of the future will be as virtual as it is physical. This is the simulacra. Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original. Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.
“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true” ( Poster, Mark; Baudrillard, Jean (1988). Selected writings. Cambridge, UK: Polity).
Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of symbols, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity (simultaneous existences). Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that anything like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable.
Who owns this mixed reality space is what is being decided today.
There is no private ownership on Utopia, with goods being stored in warehouses and people requesting what they need. There are also no locks on the doors of the houses, which are rotated between the citizens every ten years (On the Best Kind of a Republic and About the New Island of Utopia, Thomas More, 1516).
Re-Mixed City 