/lit/ - Literature

>>11242098
>now my world is customizable and watertight and alterity comes in ice cream flavors

i know this feel. but i actually think that this is kind of a great place to start from. we humans like ice cream. and psychic ice cream is the best.

what does vidya do? it takes the next step out from cinema. true, atm the masterworks of cinema are better than the masterworks of vidya. but it's because we're still figuring out the dimensions of this stuff.

give somebody a kind of virtuality to be in, give them a shell, a complex semiotic machine to put their mind in, and see what they can do with it. i'm hung up on HoI not because it's a war game, but because in a kind of deleuzian sense i wonder if this is what it means to be a kind of BwO. you're given this gigantic and purely semiotic second body...but where are 'you,' the player, in all of this? the object isn't necessarily to win, it's to be an artist of state...

maybe this sounds crazy but i'm really hung up on this idea these days.

>>11242127
>it's like a test: how much of the real can we simulate without also having to reproduce our commitment to it? how can we re-create the grit of actuality without sacrificing the escapist core? or, how can we exorcise from actuality whatever it is that provokes our flight from it?

yes. all of this. Absolute Escapism is no more a possibility than Absolute Realism. we're somewhere in between those poles. but simulation which sets itself up in advance to be deconstructed becomes Spectacle, becomes irony, becomes total ressentiment. it warrants exactly what critical theory does to it.

what we might be doing is saying, look, you have no way of knowing who you are except through simulation, except through virtuality. what is being simulated, the content, doesn't really matter. what matters is *fidelity.* it's true that the map is not the territory, but with virtuality you kind of are the map, and simulation is the territory, brought to you by algorithms and computation.

i know this probably sounds completely bizarre, and it's very off the cuff, but i'm sort of wondering how much a synthesis of deleuze and baudrillard is possible without sacrificing what makes either of them interesting. we *make mechanisms for the specularization of consciouness.* we can't simulate the ultimate simulator (us). so what can we do? make virtual masks, virtual landscapes, try not to try and box in that which always escapes...