SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION
SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION
CREDITS
In these videos from Theo Tagholm, who lives and works in London, stock footage of American landscapes are used to explore the concepts of simulation, and how it degrades reality into moments which only temporarily map the reality that moves and changes behind its stationary facade. The video entitled Plain Sight begins setting out these ideas on the relation of man and the perceptions of our collective consciousness upon the truth of the reality behind them.
In the video Simulacra these questions progress more fully into a visual metaphor on the progress of civilisation and its movement away from the natural into an unnatural simulation. It begins with natural monuments only slightly fragmented by the still images before moving through the suburbs and highways into the completely artificial reality of New York. Here the fragments cover the scene multiple times generating a cacophony of movement, images and lights where the reality of the video is completely lost, subsumed into fragmentary reality of the photographic simulations. That is, until the simulation maps perfectly onto reality and begins to move with it, the wind turbines and water attempting to trick us into the naturalness of this non-reality. The line has been lost and the simulated becomes the reality… if only for a moment.
In the video Simulacra these questions progress more fully into a visual metaphor on the progress of civilisation and its movement away from the natural into an unnatural simulation. It begins with natural monuments only slightly fragmented by the still images before moving through the suburbs and highways into the completely artificial reality of New York. Here the fragments cover the scene multiple times generating a cacophony of movement, images and lights where the reality of the video is completely lost, subsumed into fragmentary reality of the photographic simulations. That is, until the simulation maps perfectly onto reality and begins to move with it, the wind turbines and water attempting to trick us into the naturalness of this non-reality. The line has been lost and the simulated becomes the reality… if only for a moment.
