virtualization of design and production a thesis - Bilkent University

een lost and even made impossible. Reality has left its place to a virtuality
however this virtuality is not a reflection of a dominant ideology but “instead it is
something that continually reproduces social and political programs lead by the
hyperreal.” (Sargın 13) Baudrillard claims that modernity is an historical
background that depends on relations of production along with the reign of
industrial revolution. But on the other hand virtual world is the time of
information and sign systems depending on modeling, codes and cybernetics.
Therefore, in such an era, reality seems to diminish and the virtual seems to take
over it revealing itself as the element of the real. But these two are never the
same so Baudrillard names this point as “hyperreal” which is “generation of a
real without origin or reality” (Baudrillard 1).
Baudrillard tries to explain the concept of hyperreality regarding by a Borges
fable in which we read the map of the Empire so perfect that it covers the real
surface of the Empire. The map frays as the empire declines. The reality and the
abstraction decline together. For Baudrillard it is allegoric because it possesses a
‘second order simulacra’ regarding the representation of the territory of the
Empire. But he uses this fable to illuminate its contrast with current
circumstances. As he states:
“This imaginary of representation, which simultaneously
culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer’s mad
project of the ideal coextensitivity of map and territory,
disappears in the simulation whose operation is nuclear and
genetic, no longer at all specular or discursive. It is all
metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being and
appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary
36