BAUDRILLARD NOW
International academic journal "Baudrillard Now"
International academic journal "Baudrillard Now"
In the social media age, our interminable digital identities are works of art, and we are artists. In equal parts performance, photography, film, composition, and graphic design, we write ourselves into stories to depict a virtual existence. At the same time, the “tethered togetherness” (Schroeder, 2018) of the social media age illustrates how digital selves are not a collection of monologues but communal art.
Jean Baudrillard considered different pressing phenomena and introduced many concepts to describe today’s world of hyperreality – among them the screen, seduction, simulacra and simulations, and the silent majority. This article focuses on the screen as one of the phenomena generated by the machine of hyperreality. It describes the stages through which it is formed and examines how it affects human life.
The years of 2022-3 continue to bring with it a series of unfortunate global events and accompanying uncertainty. And yet, as Dr. Oleg Maltsev brilliantly points out in his recent work Maestro. Jean Baudrillard. The Last Prophet of Europe, all these events were foreseen and were in fact quite predictable.
As a motorsport enthusiast, Baudrillard’s essay, “The Racing Driver and His Double,” allows him to take some distance from these earlier experiences: as a driver he retains drivers and all the perceptual distortions of driving, and inherits speed as a “pure object” that is initiatory since it creates forgetting and emptiness (Baudrillard, “Driver” 6-7).
The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world. It is a paradox that the lack of objectivity of the world is disclosed by the photographic lens (objectif). Analysis and reproduction (ressemblance) are of no help in solving this problem.
The renaming of Facebook to Meta at the end of 2021 has sparked and updated discussions about the potential for a future where humanity increasingly operates, works, plays, and lives within the metaverse. In this article, I aim to illustrate through a specific example that the conception of virtual worlds, as represented by the metaverse, is an amalgamation of theoretical considerations and topoi from Jean Baudrillard’s work with cyberpunk literature.
What is Jean Baudrillard, if not the hypertrophy of theory? After the French theorist’s turn away from the sociologizing tradition from the 1970s onwards, ironic overflow becomes the predominant characteristic of Baudrillard’s work. We may entertain the following seducive thesis: what if the end of history, with its concommitant fatalism, also made possible the unconditional liberation of simulations through the hyperreal creation of concepts?
Unlike European Gothic, American Neo-Gothic from the Gilded Age finds many of its expressions in isolation. This article seeks to explore from the theoretical perspectives of reconstitutions, displacement, and social estrangement how this phenomenon translates to the narrative continuum of the ‘old Neo-Gothic house on the hill’, a collective imaginary shared by and projected in The Addams Family and Hitchcock’s Psycho, as well as its recent prequel Bates Motel.
I met Jean Baudrillard in the late 1990s at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, where he was having a show of his photographs. I was a student, writing my thesis greatly influenced by the books of the French scholar, however, his presentation left me a little baffled. The escape towards the analogue dimension, towards the ability of photography to recover the moment of the shot, seemed to me a rearguard operation compared to the formidable reflections on the digital that I had found in The Perfect Crime (Baudrillard 1996).
Visual elements can create a story that generates emotions, making audiences remember more of what they see and feel. Drawing is also independent of any language, which means it serves to communicate without the need of verbal response. My works have a specific mode and style depending on the story I am trying to convey.
Authors publishing here can use the following Creative Commons license for their articles: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
