‘Reality can change before our very eyes, now opened, if we manage to detect in it the hand of a master programmer, of a divine hacker, providing its creatures with the freedom to evolve and to change in accordance with their analysis and their understanding of the ‘programme’. […] behind the appearance of things lies something unsuspected, astonishing, wonderful, lying in wait, hiding, immeasurable. Behind the world, or beyond it, lies another world’ (Quéaud in Crozat, 2013:10)
The rapid advancement and pervasiveness of technology in contemporary Western societies has drastically changed the way in which individuals perceive the reality around them and reflexively themselves. New media has introduced digital platforms in which it is possible to shape a secondary virtual identity online (Dick, 2013). The introduction of highly advanced technologies that allow for the experiencing of alternative simulated realities, as virtual reality (VR) and new emerging augmented reality (AR), creates unique environments in which it is possible to fool the senses while submerged in a simulated space (Anthony, 2017). In 2016, Dave Ranyard, former head of Sony’s VR division (ibid.), founded Dream Reality Interactive in London, introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the equation. These high-tech innovations are a natural step in the evolution of computer science and they offer exciting possibilities. However, they could also become problematic since they deepen the difficulty in dissociating what people perceive as real from what is not. On this matter, London based designer Keiichi Matsuda has presented the short movie Hyperreality in which he conceives a vision of a future where phisical reality (PR), VR and AR merge in a media saturated city (Matsuda, 2016). Matsuda’s short film provides a point of reflection on the impact of new emerging technologies. It takes its title from the term used in philosophy and sociology to define the inability to consciously recognise and distinguish reality from a simulation: Hyperreality (Baudrillard, 1994; Eco, 1986). Theories and concepts of hyperreality have been discussed widely in relation to traditional media. These philosophical concepts appear to be extremely powerful and well founded in their description of contemporary Western society and their relation within new media and technology. However, in an era in which the desire to experience alternative realities is made possible, it appears necessary to extend and develop these concepts to engage in a debate on the impact that technological advancement will have on the individuals perception of their environment and identity. Hence, ‘How the TV series Westworld can be utilised as a valid point of reflection to engage in a debate on hyperreality in technologically advanced society?’ will be investigated as a main research question.
In October 2016, television network HBO launched the science fiction series, Westworld, inspired by Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie of the same name. The first and only series of the show is composed of ten episodes that takes place in an amusement park that simulates the Wild West, in which different technologies intertwine, creating an alternative reality in which humans can interact with embodied AIs. The series raises questions about reality, identity, consciousness, free will and freedom. It touches a variety of themes that are relevant to the understanding of our current society, especially about new media and technologies. This paper will consider mostly the dichotomy of the real/non-real as well as human/non-human. Human visitors to the park can enjoy a vacation in a simulated space made more appealing by the presence of strong sophisticated AIs, indistinguishable from humans. These AIs are not aware they are living in a simulation; they are used as props for the amusement of the human guests who are visiting the park to ‘indulge in a fantasy’ (HBO, 2016). The spectator is therefore presented with a scenario in which the concept of reality is a volatile one. The relationship between humans and machines is unbalanced as the guests can meddle in countless ways with the hosts and their narratives whereas the latter cannot harm a living organism. The characters of Westworld, much like its audience, are unable to perceive the differences between the real and the manufactured thus, they are in a condition of hyperreality. The borders between reality and representation are not easily identifiable. The state of confusion inhabited by the characters leads them to search for a form of meaning as to define themselves. Therefore, Westworld lends itself well as a case study to open a discussion on the theories and concepts utilised in this paper.
As often happens with the sci-fi genre, the series expresses concerns about the rapidity of the advancement in technology and references socio-political issues in the postmodern era, highlighting the possible impact of living in a simulated environment and the consequences that the experience of the hyperreal could have on people’s identities. Science fiction is the place of metaphor where the subtle boundaries between real and imaginary dissolve in the construction of an alternative world. It is a hyperreal depiction of a possible universe. The structure of science fiction stories can thus adhere to any aspect of human existence: sociology, politics, psychology, anthropology and social sciences. Moreover, with its wealth of narrative schemes, characters, situations, scenarios (which are nonetheless artificial superstructures), science fiction can allow an organic and penetrating understanding of the current society. With science fiction, we can both, understand the present and see the possible future in it; which, in turn, allows the writers to open up a discussion on one of the most salient debates on going in contemporary advanced society: the dichotomy between reality non-reality and human non-human.
The intention of this study is to consider these issues and to introduce an interpretation of the series utilising the theoretical concepts of hyperreality and simulation. Specifically, this paper will explore how Westworld provides its audience with valuable content to better understand our current society and culture. As well as, the possible outcomes that inhabiting these highly technological advanced environments will have on individuals and reflexively, on their perception of reality. This paper will focus on the analysis of the main symbols and character’s narrative constructions that better conveys a sense of hyperreality and simulation within the series. The chosen symbols will emphasise and present the connection between Westworld and the philosophies and concepts that will be employed in this study. The narrative progression of two of the main characters will show the state of confusion and perplexity that individuals experience in the hyperreal.
Exploring the Hyperreal
In our contemporary culture, individuals find themselves continuously surrounded and immersed in hyperrealities. Two of the most prominent philosophers to talk about the concept of hyperreality are Umberto Eco in his Travels in Hyperreality, and Jean Baudrillard in his Simulacra and Simulation.
Umberto Eco & the Absolute Fake
Written in 1975, Eco’s collection of essays, Travels in Hyperreality, follow the author’s trip in the discovery of the America’s Absolute Fake. Eco’s description of the complete fake is confined in the American territory, which is defined by the author as ‘a place with a lack of history and a propensity for the future’. Eco takes into account several locations in America and focuses his analysis on the phenomenon of the theme park. He argues that:
‘There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relationship with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition’ (1986:6)
The Italian writer accompanies the reader in the discovery of the ‘American landscape that he says is being recreated in the image of fake history, fake art, fake nature and fake cities’ (Transparencynow.com, n.d.). One of Eco’s main arguments is that because of a compulsive need and demand for the ‘real thing’, what is represented in contemporary society is the absolute fake; a replica so perfectly reconstructed that it overtakes the real becoming more real than its original. The artificial artefacts examined by Eco include a variety of paintings, sculptures, houses, hotels, theme parks and cities like Los Angeles. He describes contemporary culture as one that is full of copies and themed environments devoted to entertainment and states that ‘the absolute fake is an offspring of the unhappy awareness of living in a present without depth’ (Eco, 1986:31). The author identifies the apotheosis of hyperreality in the Disneyland Theme Park and Disney World Resort where all the features are devised and constructed to be more exhilarating and more satisfying than those present in ordinary life. He suggests that in comparison to Disneyland and Disneyworld the reality outside of these parks, can be perceived as dissatisfactory. Eco believes that this is because technology enriched societies now have the possibility of re-creating copies and replicas of objects that perform better than their originals. He identifies an example in the rise of animatronics. While travelling along the artificial river in Disneyland, he can glimpse upon mechanical imitations of alligators, whereas while exploring the Mississippi River he did not experience the presence of real alligators, finding that, ‘you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland, where the wild animals do not have to be coaxed. Disneyland shows us that technology can give us more reality that nature can’ (Eco, 1986:44).
Also, unlike other hyperreal environments visited by the author, Disneyland does not try to mimic reality but rather ‘makes it clear that within its magic enclosure it is a fantasy that is reproduced’ (ibid., 43). The corporation behind the theme park then utilise this blurring of reality and fantasty as a consumeristic ploy, ‘the main street façades are presented to us as toy houses and invites us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing (…) What is falsified is our will to buy, which we take as real, and in this sense, Disneyland is the quintessence of consumer society’ (ibid.)
Eco, in his references to Disney World, describes the construction as a new concept of amusement site not intended as space for ephemeral play like its sibling Disneyland. More precisely, Disney World aspires to replace reality in its entirety offering its residents the enchantment of a permanent dream. Disney ask their customers/visitors to disconnect from the outside reality upon entry and offers them the opportunity to enter another dimension, a daydream that recreates a world even more fulfilling than the ordinary one.
What is striking about Eco’s writing is that in the four decades since his book was published 1975, a number of his findings and realisations can still be considered relevant to the understanding of our contemporary culture. Thanks to technological advancement a multitude of contemporary man/woman’s satisfactions are seemingly realised through the simulation of this alternative reality. These new realities are perceived as more engrossing and engaging, and consequently, individuals tend to devalue social interaction in the real world (Papacharissi, 2011). The spectacle offered to the visitors of false realities, which in semiotic terms constitutes the sign, does not only represent a constructed reality but also replaces it. In a dimension located beyond the distinction between reality and dream, the sign in hyperreality aspires to substitute the authentic. Hence, in Eco’s view, the original is surpassed by its copy and is preferred as it performs better. To validate this statement, the author recounts an experience of a trip to the Getty Museum. While visiting the museum he finds himself bored, confessing that ‘after days of fake Last Supper and Venuses de Milo, I cast absent glances on these drearily authentic pictures’ (Eco, 1986:31).
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation
Reproductions are preferred to their originals, as suggested by Eco, but copies still maintain a distinct reference to their originals with which to draw a comparison. The Italian semiotician’s arguments are built upon Charles Sander Pierce’s theory of signs, in which interpretation plays a key role in the understanding of reality. The real must then exist as something to refer to in the process of simulation.
On the other hand, in Jean Baudrillard’s interpretation of hyperreality, the original has ceased to breathe and reality has been permanently replaced with an overflowing production of signs of the real. Baudrillard expresses and takes this concept one step further with a more cynical view of the real with the introduction of his key concepts of simulacra and simulation.
The notion of simulacrum was widely discussed in the 1970s and 1980s. During these crucial years, the presence of electronic media had reached a discrete level of saturation in the collective social imagination. Thanks, in part, to the development of microelectronics and the ever-growing circulation of computer science and telematic networks, a new technological digital cycle, more focused on personal media rather than mass media, began to appear. However, in the second half of the sixties, Daniel Boorstin and Guy Debord put forward the idea of the ‘spectacle of the real’. The idea arose as a consequence of the hegemony of communication and the excessive process of mediation of the image by mass media, which led them to label our society as ‘Société du Spectacle’ (Debord, 1983). This view was influenced by the arguments proposed by Walter Benjamin (1936) in his paper The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Debord argued that the first phase of growth in the gap between reality and its image, between the real referent and its depiction and between presentation and representation, had begun. The contemporary concept of simulation had evolved historically out of concepts first devised by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, before being reconfigured in the 1960s with the work of Boorstin and Debord and finally reached its current status in the 1970s and 1980s with the conceptualisations of Jean Baudrillard.
Baudrillard’s now infamous text Simulacra and Simulation opens with a quotation from the Greek philosopher Ecclesiastes, ‘The simulacrum is never what hides the truth-it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true’ (Ecclesiastes in Baudrillard, 1994:1). Baudrillard draws on and utilises this as the foundation of his construction of his precession of simulacra; he contends, that the most beautiful allegory of simulation can be found in a tale of Borges, that of the imperial cartographers which drew a map of the empire so precise that it covered exactly the entire territory. As the author comments:
‘Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of territory, a referential being, or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.’
(Baudrillard, 1994:1)
In Borges’s story the map first undergoes the same decay of the territory it covers but eventually the latter reaffirms itself. In contemporary culture, it is the territory that has disappeared while the map survives. Thus, the empire is now able to construct the real to fit the shape of the map perfectly.
Baudrillard describes the ‘precession of simulacra’ in four different stages. These various stages mark the gradual evolution of a new theory of signification of the system of signs previously introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure. In the traditional system of signs the signified always precedes the signifier, whereas in Baudrillard’s interpretation this order is reversed, therefore, it is now the signifier, the symbol, the image and the icon that precedes the signified. Thus, there is an increased separation between signs and their meaning, a separation between nature and culture and between truth and reality. In the first step of the precession of simulacra, the ‘image is the reflection of a profound reality’, successively the image ‘masks and denatures a profound reality’. In the third phase, ‘it masks the absence of a profound reality’ and lastly the image ‘has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum’ (Baudrillard, 1994:6). In correlation with the four phases of the imagery, another essential point in the understanding of Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality is the definition of ‘three order of simulacra’ (Baudrillard, 1994:121).
In his essay, Simulacra and Science Fiction the philosopher develops the concept of the order of simulacra, first introduced in Symbolic Exchange and Death in 1976, redefining the three orders as (1) Natural, (2) Productive and (3) Simulation. Baudrillard (1994) connects these three orders with three historical moments; the first order starts in the Renaissance with the pre-industrial era. In this preliminary period, the natural simulacra are mere copies of the real, and a distinction between the simulated and the original is still clear. To this order belongs the literary genre of utopia, prevalent at the time, in which alternative worlds were described leaving plenty of room for imagination, demarking a deep opposition and contrast between the real and the imaginary.
The first order is the one of the automaton, the theatrical counterfeit of the mechanical man; the machine is the imperfect double of the man, able to interact with him but unable to mask its identity. The second order of productive simulacra originates in the newly emerging industrial era, where the boundaries between real and simulation begin to decline, and new possibilities outside of reality are added and then portrayed in science fiction novels. The automaton has been replaced with the robot, more similar but still quite different from the human.
In the last third order, based on simulations and information, the line which distinguished the imaginary with the real has completely disappeared making it impossible to establish a difference between the two. In this final period, Baudrillard states that ‘the era of hyperreality begins’ (1994: 124); fiction does not exist anymore, or rather fiction is now everywhere and has absorbed reality transforming the latter into a perfect simulacrum of itself. At this stage, a hyperreal version of the man emerges generated by his model in the form of the android, the clone and the duplicate, hard to distinguish from human, not equivalent to him but rather ‘more human than human’ (Horrocks and Jevtic, 2011).
Like Eco, Baudrillard puts forward the case of Disneyland in his explanation of the concept of hyperreality. He states that the simulated world of the amusement park belongs to the third order of simulacra. The park has been created to mask the absence of a real space outside Disneyland, ‘to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation’ (Baudrillard, 1994:172).
Theme parks are utilised as a deterrent in the masking of an already hyperreal society as what is perceived outside of the park is nothing more than fiction. Therefore places like Disneyland do not refer to any reality whatsoever. While in the first two orders of simulacra the real still exists and it is possible to measure the quality of a copy by comparing it with its original, in the third order the real is no longer part of the equation, and the simulation precedes and determines the real. As Baudrillard comments further:
‘When the real is no longer what it used to be [and] nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity…This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence’ (1994:6/7)
Hyperreality and Technology
Both Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard highlight the importance of media and technology in the development of a contemporary hyperreal society. Although Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation was written in an era dominated by traditional media, his theories became more influential as new media technologies progressively challenged the perception of reality. The perpetual production and circulation of simulacra, may alter the individuals understanding of their surroundings modifying their socio-cultural values.
In Western societies, technology has reached a peak in which it is possible to satisfy more or less every fundamental need; therefore, individuals are no longer driven by a need to consume, but rather, want to satisfy their desires and caprices. The media then assumes the role of creating these desires by manipulating reality, creating adverts to sell products and circulating news and information. Thus, the media offer a representation of the ‘real’ which is often combined with the ‘unreal’ to make news more appealing for the audience. Daniel J. Boorstin (1971) is one of the first theorists to have introduced this concept in his text The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. He referred to the term as ‘pseudo-events’, referring to events crafted and devised by the media to maximise the offer of news that increased exponentially because of the introduction of new technologies in the 19th century. These fabricated events, opposed to natural phenomena, which occur spontaneously, satisfy the request for news from people and improve the condition for a hyperreality by dissolving the borders between what is real and what is not and commencing the flow of fake news. There is no doubt that images have the power to contribute to the establishment of a collective perception of reality and it is thanks to technology that the potentially limitless creation and production of copies can take place. The complete fake can be reproduced an infinite number of times turning the nature of reality operational rather than rationale as it was before, and this is because there is nothing rational to measure reality against.
More recently Nobuyoshi Terashima has defined hyperreality as ‘the technological capability to intermix virtual reality (VR) with physical reality (PR) and artificial intelligence (AI) with human intelligence (HI)’ (2001:4). In this view, the hyperreal is the result of the exponential growth of advanced technologies such as nanotechnology, genetic engineering, AI and human cloning. The interaction between HI and AI will produce an application able to complete tasks that would normally require human intelligence; the synergy of PR and VR, where 2D images can be rendered and reproduced in a 3D virtual reality ecosystem, will be a feasible possibility. This process will allow the creation of an ecology in which 3D images become part of a concrete reality in such a natural way that physically real objects will emerge in synchrony with virtual objects, creating an environment called Hyperworld (HW) (Terashima, 2001).
Communication & Culture 