Simulacrum

Over the past week through the readings and through class I have been thinking a lot about simulacrum and experiencing copies of things without originals, and purely virtual creations. It makes a lot of definitions and realities of our existence blurred and makes their definitions unclear. It makes me wonder if our experience of everything in terms of foreign policy, wars, and our knowledge of the rest of the world that we get from the media is all second hand and the meaning and our ideas become virtually generated. For the most part none of us experience first hand the policies and conditions of many foreign countries especially in terms of war, but we all seem to believe we have some idea and some information on what is going on through our media coverage and media texts. Our idea of the reality in those situations could be completely different from actual reality. It also made me wonder while thinking of the definition of simulacrum whether or not viewing televised sporting events and sports is a form of simulacra. We all know what the event and sport is, but we are getting a different version and definition of the particular event or sport by viewing it through media texts.

In art terms and digitally created media forms of simulacra seem to be all around us. To give a personal example since my mother is a music teacher we always had the program finale on our computers which allows you to compose music and is helpful for transposing and creating sheet music with many different options and ways to do it. My mother always used it to transpose songs into different keys, but when I would use it I would always create original music on there, and often use the playback function in which a computer piano and other computer generated instruments would play the piece back to me. Much like garage band it allows for original music to be created and played back, requiring no musical talent or knowledge. This software allowed me to create music much more difficult than I could ever play on any instrument I knew how, and I believe could possible allow for the creation of music too difficult for almost any human to play. I often would create these long intricate and difficult pieces of music without any idea what I was creating, often just madly clicking notes in different areas, and then would have the computer play them back to me and save the songs. This is much like garage band except for it would allow me to print off the sheet music I had created and I could if I liked give that to talented musicians and have them try out my creation. This simulacra form seems to be the direction in which a lot of music is being created. Whenever I see commercials, particularly low budget ones, I can always tell if they are using computer generated loops from garage band because of my familiarity with many of the popular loops. This makes creating songs easier and faster, that sound close and sometimes indistinguishable to regular human created music.

To switch thoughts again, when the idea in class of a future where robots would be challenging robots in sporting events and competitions, I thought of an episode of Futurama in the second season where creator Matt Groening predicted this. The episode focuses on Bender one of the main characters who happens to be a robot, who becomes a pro wrestler in a pro wrestling robot league. Due to youtube copyrights, the only clip I could find is very short and happens to be in spanish, but you see two robots in a wrestling ring in front of crowds of people. It also reminded me of many episodes of Futurama in which the soap opera "All My Circuits" is shown, which happens to be a soap opera television program in which all the actors are robots. The first clip linked to that is very short, but you can understand the point, the second one happens to be also in spanish, but portrays a letterman-esque late night show in which the host, audience, and guests are all robots.

To finish this long and tangent filled blog post, I also found it interesting and cool to see Ray Kurzweil on The Colbert Show last night, talking about many of the things we have been reading about and learning about in class this semester. The interview was short, but definitely worth watching, and I really liked how he brought up how democratizing new technologies can be, since we have learned about many of the political effects of certain technologies this semester.