Un-Simulations, Tricksters and Radical Thought
I think Baudrillard is a good starting point for this conversation: as I look back at my work over the past fifteen years, I’ve continually worked with the theme of inverting simulations or the virtual. I initially did this by attempting to invert and play with the internet and notions of reality wrapped around it – see ”Interface” (1995-1996) <http://conceptlab.com/interface/> or “The Simulator” (1997) <http://conceptlab.com/simulator/>.
About five years ago I started exploring biomimetics and computer simulations of biological intelligence, and produced “Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot” (2004-2006) <http://conceptlab.com/roachbot/> which attempted to rethink a trend in robotics to increasingly use simulated models of insects. In this case, I saw scientific research pursuing a goal of a sanitized, simulated model of something, but afraid to directly engage with the real thing. In this project, I replaced the sanitized, simulated model of insect logic on a microprocessor – which is frequently used to control mobile robotic systems – with the real thing, an actual cockroach. It’s an extension of the logic and a perversion of it at the same time: it can show that simulations are inherently curated, manicured and biased.
In my most recent work, “Out Run” (2009) <http://conceptlab.com/outrun/> I’ve been exploring the theme of simulation in videogames and points at which games cross over into everyday physical reality. In my Out Run project, I am taking a sit-down arcade game cabinet that is modeled after a Ferrari Testarossa and enabling it to actually drive. In other words, I am “un-simulating” a 800 pound driving video game built by Sega in 1986 and converting it into a small car. While driving your miniature Ferrari, the video game screen in front of you will completely obfuscate your view, but software is being built to render the real world in the style of the original 8-bit videogame. It is like a fantasy taken to its extreme and gone humorously wrong. I expect that it will be quite dangerous driving a car with only a 1986 computer simulation of reality as your windshield, but perhaps not too different from people that have blind faith in GPS navigation systems while driving.
Coming back to Baudrillard, I think it is worthwhile to note that about fifteen years after he published “Simulacra and Simulations” (1981) that he brought forward the concept of “radical thought” as a method out of his somewhat fatalistic view of simulacra and how images degrade from reflections to perversions to masking absence to pure simulation. One of my favorite passages of text is from Baudrillard’s description of radical thought in “The Perfect Crime” (1996) and I think it pertains to some of the work that Michelle, Kate and I are involved in:
“Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion – in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real… The absolute rule is to give back more than you were given. Never less, always more. The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us – unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.”
I think of radical thought as being similar to the historical role of the trickster – one that disrupts the everyday by inverting conventional behavior, using humor, and being open and at peace with life’s paradoxes and multiplicities. Being a clown doesn’t accomplish much, but trying to intelligently invert social conventions and assumptions can constructively and artistically rewire our understandings of who we are. Mapping real space using virtual models is a part of “working over the illusion.”
