Don't Let the Simulation's Beauty Convince You It's Real

The architecture faculty who designed Project Athena’s Garden dreamed of transparent understanding of design process; today scientists are reconciled to opacity and seeing only a CAVE’s shadows. Over the past twenty years, simulation has introduced its dazzling environments and we have been witness to our own seduction. A mechanical engineer instructs his students: “Don’t be fooled by the graphics.”17 Luft says that beautiful codes promote the “illusion of doing really great scien...

 Cyberpunk RPG

The world of Cyberpunk is a combination of savage, sophisticated, modern and retrograde. Fashion-model beautiful techies rub shoulders with battle-armored road warriors, all of them making the scene in the hottest dance clubs, sleaziest bars and meanest streets this side of the Postholocaust. Each character in this world is playing a role--a face that the person projects to the outside world as the real thing. There are nine Roles in Cyberpunk: Rockerboys, Solos, Netrunners, Corporates, Techi...

 The Tyranny of Public Opinion

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberias, but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbour. What espionage of despotism comes to your door so effectively as the eye of the man who lives at your door? Public opinion is a permeating influence. It requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

 Disneyland's Simulation Reinforces the Myth of the Real

Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But...

 Metaphor of a Map as Hyperreality

If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the ...

 Mathematics as Exploration

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.