Baudrillard Make Up Day PPT

Quick, Ugly PPT

Reminders!

Amalgam day

Since we didn’t physically meet last week, we have a number of things to address. I’m going to start today with discussing Baudrillard, have you do some work together, and we’ll see where that leaves us.

Next meeting we’ll catch up what was listed for today. Also, since I’m feeling like a nice guy, anyone who needs an extension until Thursday to finish their first 3 Lynda tutorials can have it. I will grade them Friday afternoon at about 1 pm. Be done by then and I won’t check your time stamps.

Getting

“real”

With

Jean

Baudrillard

Let’s play the theory game. On the next several slides are quotes from Baudrillard. Most are from your reading ,but some aren’t.

We’re going to dissect them, re-think them, and then use the discussion of them to define why Baudrillard matters to us as we consider design and visual rhetoric.

Baudrillard’s comments are in light green.

Dr. Phill’s talk-back to him is white.

Note before we start: Baudrillard is a bit of an agitator. He’s going to at times say things about religion, gender, life or terrorism that might be upsetting.

I do not endorse his opinions, and I don’t expect any of you to. What I want you to be able to do is understand the thought-work he is doing.

If anything here offends you and you’d like to point that out, we will all respect that. My goal is not to create discussion of things beyond the thought work being done. Sadly, I cannot control an author’s content.

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”

― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.”

― Jean Baudrillard

“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.” ― Jean Baudrillard

“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.” ― Jean Baudrillard

“But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.” ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“How many faces, how many bodies can you recognize, with your eyes closed, only by touching them? Have you ever closed your eyes and acted unconsciously? Or loved someone so blindly, you could almost feel their energy in a dark room and be moved by the powerful touch of their ideas?”

― Jean Baudrillard

“How many faces, how many bodies can you recognize, with your eyes closed, only by touching them? Have you ever closed your eyes and acted unconsciously? Or loved someone so blindly, you could almost feel their energy in a dark room and be moved by the powerful touch of their ideas?”

― Jean Baudrillard

“If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.” ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.”― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

The world has become so real that this reality is only bearable at the expense of perpetual denial. “This is not a world,” after “this is not a pipe,” Magritte’s surrealist denial of evidence itself – this double movement of, on one hand, the absolute and definite evidence of the world and, on the other hand, the radical denial of this evidence – dominates the trajectory of modern art, not only of art but also of all our deeper…

perceptions, of all our apprehensions of the world...The world is the way it is. Once transcendence is gone, things are nothing but what they are and, as they are, they are unbearable. They have lost every illusion and have become immediately and entirely real, shadowless, without commentary. At the same time this unsurpassable reality does not exist anymore. It has no reason to exist for it cannot be exchanged for anything. It has no exchange value.”― Jean Baudrillard, "Violence of the Virtual and Integral Reality."

What it all means:Baudrillard in Dr. Phill’s terms…

While I’m not sure how I feel about the person, I am very fond of Baudrillard’stheoretical work. He is occasionally a bit to playful, and he and I disagree on love, on the rights of women, on personal faith, etc. but…

Here’s what he tells us:• There is no real anymore. We can’t get to

it.• It doesn’t matter that there is no real.

What matters is that we recognize that we’re divided from it and how we are divided from it.

• Those who design/create have the power to mimic and essentially “make” real (since there is no real), we must “see” while knowing we do not see.

• Since there is no real, nothing is more real or less real, really.

• It’s okay not to understand everything; people who claim they do are just deceiving themselves

• We– designers and creators– have more control than we ever thought

How does this lead back to our work as a class? What can Baudrillard do for us?

A practical set of tools:

The 4 logics of an object (these pre-date your reading)

Use Value Exchange Value

Symbolic Exchange Sign Value

Use value:

The value an object has because it does what it does.

A car allows you to drive from location to location.

A flashlight provides light.

Haters… gon hate.

Exchange value:

The value an object has because someone else would want it/buy it.

A Corvette has more exchange value than a Hyundai, generally, because the ‘Vette is more highly desired.A certain audience would prefer an led-in-the-foot Hello Kitty flashlight key-ring to an expensive maglight.Haters… have no exchange value.

Symbolic value:

The value an object has because someone has assigned it that value within a small social system.

If that’s the Hyundai your deceased father taught you to drive in, it might mean more to you than a shiny new Corvette.

Likewise if that Hello Kitty flashlight was a gift from your boyfriend during a three day power outage that he brought with flowers, bottles of water and a pizza… it might mean more than it did.

Haters… well, they’re hating over something!

Sign value: The value an object in relation to other objects. This is often about status (e.g. my iPhone 6 is cooler than my mom’s old Motorola flip phone, even if technically hers works better as an actual phone).

We know that a Hyundai represents specific things (frugality, desire to be eco-friendly if not hybrid, thick skin around car haters).

Likewise if you’re a cop or an outdoorsman, you better bet you want the tough, rugged MagLite that can endure being used as hammer and still work. If you’re me, buying a flashlight for your van, you want the MagLitebecause you’ve seen cops on TV fend off villians with them and you sort of want to be Batman. But you’d never admit that on a PPT slide.

Haters… if Kanye West comes in and interrupts my lecture to tell you all he feels me, and he’s gonna let me finish, but Cornell West is the best lecturer of all time, how much did MY status just go up?

Baudrillard claims the first two are easy to understand: what it does and what it’s worth. It is adding the other two highly social elements that confounds us.

Let’s try it on some objects.

Simulations of different Reals

Simulations of different Reals

Simulations of different Saturations

Even comedy uses these tropes

Activity In pairs, or groups of 3, I want you to look at all the stuff we’ve just discussed and, if you need,

re-watch the video I just showed.It’s meant to be funny, and I hope it made you

all chuckle as much as I did the first time I saw it. But now I want you to look at it seriously as an

object of discourse and think about how complex we can make it. How does it fit the

object types, the values, the ideas on simulation?

Think about it, come up with ideas to share, jot them down, and email them to me.

What do we have to know—bare minimum– to “get” the joke? How many different bits of

cultural knowledge make it… let’s not judge “more amusing” but more inter-connected?

Why is it funny?

How is it like reality?

How is it NOT like reality?

See, Baudrillard isn’t that hard.

My question to all of you, to see if the dots connected… why is all of this important to visual

rhetoric?

The short answer: With the “real” gone, inaccessible, it is left to

those who create the symbols and simulations to wield the power of shaping “reality” as we

know it.

YOU as designers are the architects of the real.

If there’s time we’ll briefly talk Helvetica.If not, for Thursday:

we will address the tagging stuff assigned for today, talk through the tagging assignment, and

discuss fonts.Keep up on the reading, but we won’t discuss

Hegemonic Visualism until next Tuesday.