布希亞的影像藝術：虛擬現實和實境電視

Abstract

On the basis of Jean Baudrillard's late ideas concerning integral reality and virtual reality, this essay aims to understand the ways in which he challenges television culture and simulationist art, and further explain the grounds on which he recovers an art of disappearance by means of the photographic image. The article proposes that since the early 1980s Baudrillard became interested in providing a response to the fractalization brought on by simulation and the virtualization brought on by hyperreality. Because virtual reality reverses the work of de-simulation and is constructed via the de-ideation of pure objects, also giving rise to commodity fetishization, Baudrillard makes a strategic turn to surface images, the traces left behind by the disappearance of the inhuman other, and invokes the seduction of pure signs. Firstly, we will make distinctions between the mechanisms of simulation and the fractal order, analyzing the objectively ironic effects of de-simulation as well as the forms of commodity fetishism which occur in virtual reality. Secondly, we will examine the banal and futile character of reality television and simulationist art, thereby recognizing that contemporary culture and contemporary art have together reached a charmed state of zero-separation image flows. Thirdly, we will offer an interpretation of non-aesthetic photographs in order to demonstrate the disappearance of art and in a larger sense the disappearance of the Utopian image.