Information as Simulation : Living With Abstraction

The curator of the 1985 Les Immeteriaux exhibition at paris’s Centre Georges pompidou, jean Francois Lyotard,used the exhibition to provoke question about contemporary states of artificiality and synthetic “nonbering” which grom uot of the instabilities and change inherent in postindustrial society where the primacy of the manufactured object has been dissolved into other states of energy (or microelements) rather than concrete metter: a “disappearance of the object” in favour of its artificial facsimile.

The exhibition space design as a labyrinthiantour of “sites” or hanging island, each wiyh a separate theme, interpreted and defined many of the major features of postmodernityaas a new moment in culture and offered a significant perspective of how the terms of our cultural condition and relation to historical and philosophical issues have brought about a crisis of outlook in the late twentieth century.

“A series of of key themes was brought forth and reiterated: the primacy of the model over the real, and of the conceived over the perceived. That we live in a world in which the relation between reality and representation is inverted was made clear by countless examples. Much attention was paid to the copy, to simulation, and to the artificiality of our culture.In fact, Les Immateriaux suggested nothing so much as our common fate in living with abstraction.”
For example, completely artificial flavoring, fragrances, experiences-an in version of former experience of “the real thing” as part of new but artificial states. The exhibition’s dramatically lit theatrical spaces, where suspended odjects and images loomed out of the darkness, demonstrated the already pervasive artificiality of our present existence –for example, Site of simulated Aroma, Site of All the Copies, Site of the Shadow, Site of the Indiscernables, Site of undiscoverable Surface.

Due to current strong interest in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics, the mind itself is under study. There is now an especially strong empetus to understand its functioning more precisely. So far, it has been possible to imitate only the most primitive aspects of the human voice or of behavior.

The Postmodern self is transformed and atomized. It is seen as a multilayered complex which represent a new diversity of understanding encompassing multiple heterogeneous personal domains sheared away from conscious life. This suggest that there is no one single platonic “truth”, but many vantage point to experience-not a single truth, but only many aspects.
This remarkable shift toward decentering personal perception (which has gradually taken place over the past decade) marks a new period whose special effects we are only beginning to discover. It Characteristics, for example, are like those brought on by the too-rapid consumption of information (as in tv, newspapers, and magazines, where real events are homogenized and equalized for fast perusal) where the individual has lost the power to respond to any of the material he is consuming. The poet Archibald MacLeish warned as early as 1958 “We are deluged with facts,but we have lost, or are losing our human ability to feel them.

source : FACA Arkib