Inside The Simulacrum

In the metaverse, I suppose you can pick fights and manage to preserve your anonymity. Fertile ground having been laid by many post-modernists, there are no binary principles such as true-false, real-unreal, center-periphery. Online these days there are fewer human faces and more avatars.
As Baudrillard theorized, we’re now in a mediated reality where all things are signs pointing to something else. According to Baudrillard, “the dominant simulacrum becomes the product, which can be propagated on an endless production line. In current times, the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.”

I’ve long been interested in masks and totems as form of semiotic communication that I find in many ways are historical pointers to our online avatars of today. Has history vanished, as Baurdrillard suggested? Are these avatars that we create forever destined to be only referential to previous masks and destined to collapse under the weight of their own anti-historical hyper-reality?

“If there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin.” - Jean Baudrillard

And where is the role of an artist inputting into text into a neural network programmed to scrape billions of other images? Is the artist author, collaborator or vocal audience member? We AI artists can collaborate, suggest and cajole the neural networks. Perhaps then it’s all a matter of personal aesthetics. We can choose our tribal masks or our bored apes. ###

gouldart