Jean Baudrillard
Posted: October 22nd, 2006 | Author: Mr Laroza | Filed under: College, Design for Simulation | No Comments »This week we were discussing the french philisopher Jean Baudrillard. We were given a piece of text entitled Simulacra and Simulations and was asked to discuss and debate further.
Simulacra - an image or representation of someone or something
Simulation - noun. is an imitation of some real device or state of affairs
We were shown a few pictures and was asked our opinions of what they were and if they were simulation of some kind. First we were shown the Tasaday tribe of the Philippines (WHOOT!):
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/31/1072546583012.html
In 1971 Manuel Elizalde, a Philippine government minister, discovered a small Stone Age tribe living in utter isolation on the island of Mindanao. The Tasaday spoke a strange language, gathered wild food, used stone tools, lived in caves, wore leaves for clothes, and settled matters by gentle persuasion. They made love, not war, and became icons of innocence; reminders of a vanished Eden. They also made the television news headlines, the cover of National Geographic , were the subject of a bestselling book, and were visited by Charles A. Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida. Anthropologists tried to get a more sustained look, but President Ferdinand Marcos declared a 45,000-acre (18,210-hectare) Tasaday reserve and closed it to all visitors.
After Marcos was deposed in 1986, two journalists got in and found that the Tasaday lived in houses, traded smoked meat with local farmers, wore Levi’s T-shirts and spoke a recognisable local dialect. The Tasadays explained that they had only moved into caves, donned leaves and performed for cameras under pressure from Elizalde — who had fled the country in 1983, along with millions from a foundation set up to protect the Tasaday. Elizalde died in 1997.
This is the information I just found out. We were discussing without any prior knowledge that the Tasaday's were actually a hoax. We went on to talk about what was real about the Tasaday's and because they were discovered by researchers that decided not to introduce them ino the world. In doing this they made them a simulation. By this we ment that we were preventing them from being what they supposedly were a 'tribe'.
We were then presented with a picture of the Lascaux Cave in France they contain some of the earliest known art, dating back to somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 BC, or as far back as 25,000 BC. (This is not the actual picture shown to us).
We were then told that what we were looking at was actaully a copy of the real, a simulation. We were asked it that changed our opinion of the caves. It did. But if we didn't know that it was a copy we would have assumed that what we were seeing was the real... but thinking back we were actually viewing a picture making it a copy of a copy OF a copy...
Does that mean that everything that we've seen is a copy or simulation of somthing else. These examples proved that this would be true, but then again... what is truth? That would be another question mass debated next time...
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