Tim Stutts: ITP Project Blog

Before Spring Break I picked up a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s “Screened Out,” at the Strand Bookstore. The book is a collection of essays, whose topics range from AIDS as the savior of mankind, to the catastrophe opportunity of total positives, and to formula one racecars exemplifying an almost divine symbiosis between man and machine. I had recently become familiar with Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra—the phenomenon of that which is unreal disguising all traces of it’s own evidence, so that the unreality is disguised or canceled out. I particularly identify with J.B.’s rants on the Disneyland and the surrounding Los Angeles. Having lived in Hollywood for five years and then left the world of audio post-production for New York City—which Baudrillard coincidentally also sees as a failure of a place—I can now point people to a useful text, when they ask my reasoning behind severing myself from Hollywood and all of it’s simulacra.

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I was browsing Wikipedia today looking for text dealing with the environment, and discovered this lovely gem, which had somehow slipped past the radar of the community. Hours later I checked back, to find it corrected. We should think twice before we take opinion as truth, especially when anyone can potentially join a site like Wikipedia and, in a masked attempt to avoid plagarism, present information based on personal bias, as opposed to formal research. Perhaps the motivation to join such a site in the first place is to have one’s own say. This user was obviously more biased than most. This coincided with Mushon Zer-Aviv addressing the broader issue with Wikipedia in Tactical Media.