THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

OUR PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL WORLDS ARE MORE INTERTWINED THAN EVER. CAN ART TEACH US TO PARSE THE LAYERS OF HYPERREALITY?

By Jemima Skala

Your vision flickers, cuts briefly, imperceptibly, to black.

Did you blink or click?

Was it the shuttering of your eyelids or the shifting of a screen, pixels interrupted to rearrange themselves almost—almost—seamlessly?

In 1981, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard coined the term hyperreality in his work Simulacra and Simulation, defining it as “a generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” It was the same year IBM introduced its first Personal Computer to the market, widely adopted by business and industry, and France Telecom launched Minitel, the first freely available Web, providing every phone subscriber with a free terminal. The technological simulations that Baudrillard wrote about were rapidly integrating themselves into everyday life.

Crucially for Baudrillard, hyperreality and “the era of simulation [are] inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials”: The thing you’re looking at feels familiar, but has no definable source to point to, the result of squishing together multiple models until they’re no longer distinguishable. Now, it’s common for a meme to circulate the backwaters of the internet and various social media, growing and developing until, to be able to understand it, you’d have to have been online for years—seen the first joke, maybe the second and third. Comprehension and humor have become a club reserved for the terminally online; references are made in the offline world to things like ‘the Spiderman meme’ or ‘old man shouts at cloud.’ People understand these call-backs, visually recalling the image or video in question.

Consider Disneyland, a manufactured miniature of America itself, without any of the difficulties of everyday life: all the food you could ever want, prepaid queue-jumping passes, total leisure that ends with an unforgettable fireworks bonanza. On the subject, Baudrillard writes, “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real... This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere.” The park is hyperreal in its construction of childhood nostalgia, a distraction that becomes indistinguishable from the thing itself. Simulation is the process by which this happens—in its most seamless form, creating hyperreality. Essentially, by removing all friction and rendering adults childlike over their stay, they transform—buying into and believing the fiction.

The concept of hyperreality continues to be prescient. AI may be writing your coworkers’ emails, and you’d hardly know; deepfakes are meddling with elections all over the world; and you can now make spreadsheets on the Meta Quest headset, meaning VR encompasses work as well as leisure. Clearly, with all the calls to switch off, unplug, get a dumb phone, and go analog, hyperreality and simulation are undeniable parts of our lives.

So how do we reconcile the presence of hyperreality in everyday life? Art is one way for us to critically engage with it, allowing us to think more deeply about how it shows up in our lives and whether we want to resist it. Through the films we watch, the art we consume, the books we read, the music we listen to, we are constantly in contact with hyperrealities. Each encounter imparts a different lesson, intended or not.

Art that explores the tools of hyperreality, particularly technology, is useful here. Suzanne Treister’s photography series Fictional Video Game Stills (1991-2) employed Deluxe Paint II to render images that look like early video game stills. In an interview for Tate’s Electric Dreams exhibition (2024), she breaks down the project: “The computer was seen as something which was going to kind of ... eat your brain. And I had to explain to people that I wasn’t going to make work simply dictated by the machine, but rather that it was going to be about the machine and what the machine could do.”

Treister used a camera, not screengrabs, to capture these scenes; the blocky, early computer screen curves away, evoking a close-up, face-on perspective. “Have you ever played this game before?” a text block asks, and the instinctive answer feels like yes—even though it’s an impossibility. Treister foregrounds the idea that humans can work alongside technology to create new and interesting things.

This is the bind we face with generative AI, the foremost new source of hyperreality. When used to bolster human creativity rather than replace it, it has the potential to be revolutionary. It is also important to remember, however, that technology bears the fingerprints of its makers. Generative AI is trained on material produced by humans, and will reproduce their biases. Filmmaker Harmony Korine does this in his latest venture Aggro Dr1ft (2023), which can only loosely be called a film insofar as there is a basic plot. (Expert hitman and family man Bo chases his last kill in and around Miami’s criminal underbelly.) It’s deliberately videogame-esque. Though Korine is credited as the writer, it wouldn’t be surprising if he leaned on AI, as the script reproduces misogynistic tropes of women as accessories to violent male fantasy. We know that generative AI is only as good as its prompts, so here the biases of filmmaker and technology become muddied together. When not approached critically, hyperreality becomes a tool for alienation, a method for leaving out rather than calling in—though Korine would undoubtedly laugh off any criticism, as the film is edgy for the sake of being edgy.

In the work of German photographer Andreas Gursky, hyperreality plays upon our desires for perfection, order, and control in a world increasingly devoid of those things. His post-production process has become an art form in itself, a way of pushing the boundaries of “what the machine [can] do,” as Treister says. In Gursky’s case, the machine is a camera. His work occupies a space between photojournalism and photography as fiction. In the latter case, images are meticulously digitally manipulated to emphasize scale and detail, leaving scenes with so much life they become flattened: The wends of the Rhine River become one straight line against the horizon; an expanse of shelves and budget goods are so brightly colored they become an overwhelming mass rather than a collection of objects. Gursky’s photos look tantalizingly real—but the polish of each image is too tempting to be so. His work can be considered a call to pay attention, to sit up and think, in the face of information too good to be true. It’s best we hone those skills, offline so that they’re sharpened when they come into contact with the tantalizing sheen of social media fake news. Meta recently announced that it’s getting rid of independent fact checkers, opting instead for a system of community notes similar to that of X. Everyday users will be responsible for flagging content as factually incorrect. Against a steady rise of misinformation, where fact constantly blurs with fiction both on social media and away from the scroll—our news sites, political campaigns, job interviews—if something looks too good to be true, Gursky’s work is a reminder that it just might be.

On the flip side, the work of trans artists SOPHIE and Juliana Huxtable reminds us that hyperreality is a playground from which we may create and explore new possibilities. In their music and presentations as artists, artifice is foregrounded rather than obscured through electronic sounds and textures, and, in Huxtable’s case, mindbending esoteric lyrics. Through the disjoint between what we are used to and what they present us with as artists, they begin to break apart assumptions of what is true and what ought to be so. Legacy Russell, in her 2020 book Glitch Feminism, refers to Huxtable as someone who embodies glitch, which Russell defines as “an error, a mistake, a failure to function.” If the glitch is an error, it’s also a learning point, an opportunity for rebuilding: “The glitch creates a fissure within which new possibilities of being and becoming manifest.” We can think literally about the glitchy aesthetics of Huxtable’s music and art in relation to Russell’s words here, where glitch becomes a crack in accepted realities, a point through which new light can shine. Russell argues that the glitch can serve as a blueprint for how marginalized individuals—queer people, Black people, women—can use the non-performance of the glitch to their advantage, fusing their online and Away From Keyboard (AFK) selves. The glitch is a rallying cry for Russell to find a sense of liberation in failure to function. Hyperreality becomes a way to expand our identities and define them on our terms.

In a similar vein, SOPHIE is widely credited with founding hyperpop, a genre characterized by brash synths, melodies so saccharine they hurt your teeth, beats stretched and sped up beyond belief. Over the course of her career, the artist abstracted herself beyond the reach of her own body, remaining anonymous for quite some time. This, and the experimental sonic landscape she created, is the ultimate example of the possibilities of hyperreality. SOPHIE explored the outer limits of what it means to be in the public eye, and what music might sound like in the 21st century. It’s a hyperreal sound in the most Baudrillardian sense: equally alien and recognizable. Hyperreality as a playground, but also as a shield.

We have to consider the bigger picture: These artists present the positive aspects of hyperreality. But they’re created with tools with disastrous side-effects on the very communities that find them empowering: marginalized queer kids finding community on social media sites, which in turn become more and more friendly to right-wing figures and views. This, compounded with censoring particular words and content on these platforms, limits self-expression.

If hyperreality is baked into the very fabric of our existence, if it coats our world so utterly, how might we begin to recognize its effect on us? The so-called “social media novel” is a difficult thing to get right, but succeeds by finding the crack in the screen, reacquainting us with apps and processes that have become mundane. Jem Calder, in his short story collection Reward System (2022), describes engagement with technology in minute detail, so the reader has no choice but to parse it alongside him: “He held up his obsolescent-model smartphone and activated its side button, tapping the picture of the late-teenaged girl that constituted its lock-screen.” Here, an action that takes seconds forms a whole paragraph; Calder insists on close observation as a way to cut through hyperreality, making the illusion known to us again.

Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This (2021) takes a different approach, accentuating how intertwined URL and AFK worlds are now that hyperreality is our only reality. Written in fragments, Lockwood’s nameless narrator posts on and endlessly scrolls “the portal.” The seams connecting her digital and real lives are almost invisible. Lockwood makes no dramatic judgment of hyperreality as all-good or all-bad—it just is. Though online life may seem trivial, it’s an undeniable part of how we navigate the world: “The words shared reality stretched and stretched, flapped at the corners like a blue felt blanket, and failed to cover everyone’s feet at once, which all shrank from the same cold.”

Blink.

Click.

Shift.

Where can hyperreality go now? Further and further in, more and more entwined. When viewing its effect on culture and art, it’s tempting to be swayed towards hopefulness on one hand and numbness and fear on the other. Tempting, even, to swing between the two, passing through the middle ground hurriedly. As Russell notes, we cannot be naïve and make a simple equation between digital and revolutionary innovation, hyperreality and perfection. All its folds and wrinkles must be taken into account to form a holistic picture.

Hyperreality is a final state we arrived at a while ago, refining itself up to the present day. It’s not something to be feared or steered clear of, even if we could, but viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism and wonder in equal measures. Now more than ever, hyperreality can empower just as much as it can obscure, if not more so, and should be celebrated when innovatively employed.

The frame shifts, the screen freezes. A glitch has emerged. You can’t remember if you were playing or dreaming. The knowledge settles into you that it doesn’t really matter. You let the dream wash over you again.

Did you blink, or click?