The Majestic Game, Interactive Media Environments, and a New Turing Test: Blurring the Boundaries Between Virtual and Real
Damian Ward Hey

There is something potentially more disturbing going on here than the participation in a murder mystery in which you get e-mailed by a simulated murderer or voice-mailed by a screaming, simulated soon-to-be victim. There is the looming threat of Baudrillardian hyperrealism.

Howard Rheingold comments that “hyper-realists see the use of communications technologies as a route to the total replacement of the natural world” and that:

The most radical of the hyper-realist political critics charge that the wonders of communications technology skillfully camouflage the disappearance and subtle replacement of true democracy — and everything else that used to be authentic, from nature to human relationships, — with a simulated, commercial version. …

Why torture people [political dissidents, or other ‘trouble-makers’] when you can get them to pay for access to electronic mind-control? (Rheingold, 2000, pp. 317-318)

The danger that alarmists fear is that the simulation will become socially and politically more “real” than real life situations whose contexts are buoyed by actual socially overdetermining economic, political, religious, etc., institutions. People will then begin reacting more en masse to the inconsequential world of simulation than to the real world. When this happens, the argument goes, one of two things, and possibly both, will occur: 1). The economy and socio-political structure of our society will collapse because people are producing in simulated situations rather than “actual” ones and/or 2) The wily hegemony of our society will further the narrative and blur the ability to distinguish between reality and simulation, whereby, as seen in the Rheingold passage, “electronic mind-control” will be exerted by the same hegemony over the hapless worker-inhabitants of simulated realms.

• Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association

Lance Strate, “Media Ecology as a Scholarly Activity” (President’s Address) … “The Majestic Game, Interactive Media Environments, and a New Turing Test: …
www.media-ecology.org/publications/MEA_proceedings/v3/index.html  

• Alternate Reality Games: Daily Narratives Turn Into Interactive …

The Game concerns the redemption of its main character, turning him into more of …. a test bed for experimenting and prototyping new ways to communicate, …
www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/12/22/alternate_reality_games_daily_narratives.htm  

“In a startlingly prophetic vision of his from 2000, the twin towers burn.”

http://travel2.nytimes.com

Hat tip to Jeff Wells’ Rigorous Intuition as always.

Little School of Horrors -

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

He stopped doing it years ago, because if he hadn’t he’d have killed himself or someone else by now, but New York artist Joe Coleman used to blow himself up.As “Professor Mamboozo” - either his geek avatar or, as he described it, a raging spirit that would take possession of his body - Coleman would arrive uninvited at the house parties of strangers, provoke a confrontation and ignite the mass of firecrackers he’d strapped to his body. In the confusion, smoke and fear he would slip away before police arrived. When Mamboozo debuted on New York’s avant garde art scene in a 1981 performance at the Kitchen he also rolled in bloody meat, bit the heads off live rats and pressed a shotgun against the forehead of the woman who had booked him and asked, “How’d you like the show?” The traumatized crowed was an audience no more, Coleman having yanked them out of their art house detachment through horrification ritual and the sudden shock of their own possible, imminent death. (”I told them as hard as I could without killing them,” Coleman told Re/Search in Pranks.)

I thought about Coleman the other day when I read of the teachers of an elementary school in Tennessee who convinced their sixth graders a gunman was attacking, and repeatedly told the hysterical children it wasn’t a drill.

 <snip>

The New York Times, reviewing a retrospective of Joe Coleman’s paintings last September, wrote that, “in a startlingly prophetic vision of his from 2000 the twin towers burn.”  

http://rigint.blogspot.com