Lecture Five Notes- Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality

Lecture Four Notes- Communication Theory

Lecture Two Notes- Critical Positions On The Media: Popular Culture

Lecture One Notes- Panopticism

Allan Sekula - Globalisation

Allan Sekula is an artist using photography, but also essays, films and lectures, in order to explore issues of globalisation and capitalism. One primarily photographic body of work is 'Fish Story,' a massive body of work that looks at the shipping industry all over the world. The photographs are shown side by side with essays, information and facts about the industry, and looks at many different aspects of it- it is a very large body of work which tries to go against the idea of a singular image being able to convey a message. This idea is almost anti-globalism as well, suggesting that society is based too much on appearances, fast information, ever changing imagery that only looks at the surface of things.
To make the work, Sekula travels all around the world, visiting ports, ships, and the people that are involved in the industry. He obviously got inside and involved in the world, trying to understand the way it works, how it is changing and its function in terms of globalisation.
Although the work has been exhibited, it works best in book format, because it gives the impression of building up an image or an idea over the pages, and gives you more time to digest the mass of information and revisit it many times.

Format Festival: Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

Larson and Shindelman have been commissioned by FORMAT festival to continue their project-  'Geolocation'- in the UK. Geolocation is a project that involves looking at peoples twitters and using the embedded geotag information in each tweet to visit the exact site that they made it and photograph there.
They describe this process as 'taking virtual moments and pulling them back into the physical world.'

This project is an example of what Baudrillard describes as the third order of simulation- the code. Everything is now made of codes in a sense; a tweet could be seen as a code because people are breaking their experiences and lives down to 140 character statuses. They are also embedded with codes, one being the information that pinpoints them to a specific location in the world. By creating photographs of these places, Larson and Shindelman are contrasting a real experience with a virtual, simulated experience that only exists within the code.

In this image, for example, the tweet could have taken place in any gym, anywhere in the world. The photograph anchors it to this particular street, which people who live in the area would recognize. It also adds an element of humour, with the 'Humps for 1/2 mile' sign included and referencing the sexual nature of the tweet, almost mocking the authors sincerity.

How does Demand show the historical event as simulacra?

Thomas Demand, Bathroom, 1997

Thomas Demand often uses images of historical significance as the starting point for his sculptures. Bathroom, for example, is a reconstruction of the image taken of the bathtub in which the German politician, Uwe Barschel, was found dead in in 1987; a death that has never been resolved. 

The original image, shown above, was taken by journalists working for Stern magazine. The reconstruction made by Demand is incredibly similar, apart from the lack of the body being present in the image. The absence of the body alerts us to the time that has passed since the death of the politician; history has already defined this moment and now we are able to recognize the scene without the most important element (the dead body). 

Through images such as this- reconstructions of events that have already deemed to be historically significant- Demand is questioning the very idea of history. The way that history is recorded necessitates that it must function in a chronological, linear fashion- that events are the cause of the next, or the effect of the last. In this way, he is suggesting our perception of history is itself a simulacra; not the original event, but the recording of it and the placing of it within historical documentation in order to fit with the larger narrative that has been predetermined by society. History is not immune from political ties or cultural perceptions- it is never simply recorded as the facts of an event, but always given a slant, a sense of narrative. Baudrillard used the Watergate scandal as an example of this, suggesting that it was deemed to be a scandal to create a 'reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale'. 

This idea could be seen to have a destabilizing effect on history itself, because it makes us question whether what we are taught, and perceive to be the facts of situations we never experienced first hand, is really what happened at all.