Jean Baudrillard

This morning as part of our Context and Review module we were split into groups and given a theorist to investigate for an hour. Kieran Baxter and I ended up with one of my favourites to argue about: Jean Baudrillard. Below is a series of the notes we quickly made which would allow us to discuss his theory in the context of critically reviewing an animation.

Baudrillard was a French sociologist and theorist who extensively commented on technological advances throughout the mid twentieth century and had a particular interest in the ongoing state of the medium of cinema.

Despite being an avid lover of cinema he was concerned about the integrity of the medium believing it to be an artistic degradation of photography, believing that sound and movement diluted "the purity of the [photographic] image"

Concerned with the impact of manufactured images promoting a hyper-reality Baudrillard argued that we should get away from the cinemas and experience the community on the streets instead.

"The media's way of replacing any event"

In practice one should consider honouring the reality one is replacing with as much integrity as possible.

Concerned with locality and individuality Baudrillard argued against Marshall Mcluhan who promoted technology as creating a global vision and instead believed that the constant bombardment and search for symbolism in the modern world was creating a diluted community which was becoming increasingly nuclear and unstable.

He believed cinema should be in creative not commercial hands and was against the realism and global commercialism of the media throughout the 1980's.

Sooo...How does this affect our personal approach?

By doing a visualisation project based on an existing location it has made me reflect upon the way I will be approaching the existing site and location. By nature the project will be altering the audiences perception of the space and does retain the integrity of the site so it will be interesting to see what kind of reaction or interpretation the viewers project. Whereas I believe that film can be an extention of the purity of say a photograph of the same subject I agree with the fact that the globalisation which occurred in the eighties and early nineties did erode some kind of artistic integrity within the medium of cinema and consumerist society as a whole but feel with the rise in the awareness of sustainability that there is a drive in certain works [definitely not all or most] to recapture the original excitement and message of cinema. The line between actual and fabricated reality however continues to be every blurry...