Hyperreality Quotes

Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

For me, the melancholy of the late XXth Century is walking late at night by the Mont Blanc pen store and seeing these things always strike me as simulacra of luxury items. They seem like fakes.

Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.

The present age ... prefers the sign to the thing signified … for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

To the extent that we live in a postmodern world and it shapes the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, I would say postmodernism affects my work or influences my work.

Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.

... the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.

All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.

In America, you watch TV and think that's totally unreal, then you step outside and it's just the same.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.

Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.

When real is gone, then there is no longer a litmus test for that which deviates from it. It's all real because it's all 'real.'

... the thing that's happening today vis-á-vis computer imaging, vis-á-vis alteration, is that it no longer needs to be based on the real at all. I don't want to get into jargon - let's just say that photography to me no longer pertains to the rhetoric of realism; it pertains more perhaps to the rhetoric of the unreal rather than the real or of course the hyperreal.

In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, the media validate reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie.'

Jean Baudrillard is a friend of mine, I do not agree with him on that one! For me, the significance of the war in Kosovo was that it was a war that moved into space.

I'm predisposed to believe we live in a complicated, enmeshed reality. There's no authentic or organic.

Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected - accessible and user-friendly.

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.