Simulacra: are we living in a simulation?

“There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
Edith Wharton

“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed by the masses.”
Plato

So which is it? Are the candle and the mirror essentially the same, both equally illuminating? Or are the illusions, the mirrors, the lies not just the equal of the candle, but indistinguishable, even preferred by most? Has the choice between the candle and the mirror become a cultural wedge issue, illuminating not the viewer but the viewer’s own attitudes and ethics? Or are we all living in a mirror of the world?

The implied, but unstated, hierarchy in Edith Wharton’s posit is that only one of her options can illuminate on its own; the mirror requires the candle but not the reverse. The mirror can redirect the light, not generate it.

 Kubrick’s lighting, with only candles, the scenes in Barry Lyndon is notable not just for the tales of his connivance in ‘borrowing’ enormously sized lenses to capture the meager light on film, but for the phalanxes of mirrors used to ‘multiply’ the candlelight.

Mirrors can’t, like some kind of digital copier, actually multiply the light; that would in effect be a perpetual motion machine, generating more energy than is actually embedded in the candle. Mirrors do redirect and focus the light that would otherwise illuminate other surfaces. It’s like the dentist’s headlamp; the same wattage that would barely illuminate a room can blast a blindingly powerful beam into your gaping maw.

As Joni Mitchell sat in The Kennedy Center loge to receive the extraordinarily ugly award and hear the extraordinarily seductive performances of her songs, it was hard not to think of John Kelly. The performers on stage at the Kennedy awards were there to celebrate, not simulate, Joni’s renditions, and it was thrilling to see how beautiful these songs were in the hands of younger talented musicians. Without a requirement to perform, or speak or even accept the award in public, Joni sat, smiled, mouthed words, clapped, teared up and laughed at the show, wearing the awful medallion that Ivan Chermayeff designed; ribbons and medals that no amount of double sided tape or fussing can ever cause to be flattering.

John Kelly’s performance art includes his Joni performances, formerly done in wigs and skirt-like garb, with a falsetto voice and live instruments, to not just imitate but to become a new version her. His renditions are so note perfect (for the versions memorialized on her albums) that it is easy to lose oneself in the illusion. In some ways the illusion is better than the recorded reality (which is, itself, merely a mirror of the original studio performance captured for the album).

This is not like Chevy Chase ‘doing’ Gerald Ford without any attempt to imitate him, except for the exaggerated clumsiness (itself a funhouse mirror of a guy who was a star athlete in college). Kelly’s fidelity to the recordings is stunning and emotional, maybe even more than the actual album, which makes sense; a live performance can evoke feelings only hinted at when listening to an album. To get even more meta-mirror-like, we once saw him perform on Joni’s birthday with Joni in the audience. We got to catch a glimpse of Joni reacting to Joni being reflected in a performance of her work absent her in person as performer, but with her in person as audience. Funhouse mirrors abound!

The varieties of simulacra can hardly be more elaborately posited than at Lascaux in Dordogne France where, in 1940, a dog named Robot stumbled into a cave opening exposed by an uprooted tree. The cave was filled with 20,000-year-old art covering vast areas of walls, but after millions of visitors in the first 20 years of its modern discovery it was closed to the public; the damage from humidity and introduced organisms blooming on the walls began to degrade and destroy the art.

Closed in 1963, the find was too important to exclude the public, but too fragile to admit them to the original (called Lascaux I). Over the subsequent 50 years a series of increasingly ‘accurate’ copies were created, both on site and as traveling exhibits, advanced by new technology as it became available. From photographs (which could never capture the three dimensionality of the paintings or etchings as they are mapped to the highly sculptural walls and floors) to cement-modeled and painted copies, to miniaturized scanned models to now, Lascaux IV (as it is designated); a full sized, minutely accurate (in form), nearly perfectly rendered copy just down the hill from Lascaux I (but, surprisingly, painted not by laser scanners and printers, but by a team of 25 artists using the original pigment formulations; still handmade, to a large extent, like the original…).

Its location is puzzling; an acknowledged copy (no one pretends you are visiting Lascaux I) could be anywhere in the world…why there? Why not the Louvre? Why not Central Park? What does it gain by its inconvenient location, within a short hike of the original? What does adjacency add to the experience?

If part of the functioning of a simulacra is its dislocation/simultaneity, being both ‘there’ and ‘not there’ simultaneously, why is proximity a factor in plausibility? Is plausibility (the idea that it might be real) even an issue in an acknowledged copy? Accuracy yes, proximity not so much. If any attempt was made to ‘fool’ the public, the enormous new building by Snohetta architects may reference the stratigraphy or the fractured geometry of the cave (or idea of a cave) but is not an attempt to simulate anything other than their own angular version of modernity.

Until relatively recently, the only way to reproduce a painting was to create another painting, by hand, in its presence. For lost masterpieces these copies are sometimes the only way we have any sense of the original. Photographs were next, first in black and white, then in color, sometimes in stereoscopic images (for 3D art), and eventually in very high resolution scans that can reveal detail barely visible in the original artwork, accessible anywhere in the world at any time.

Plaster casts of sculpture were even better than the paintings of paintings (or stereoscopic photos); they were real, 3D copies of enormous accuracy, if still taking advantage of dislocation to help startle the viewer. The inaugural exhibit at the Prada Museum in Milan “Serial Classic” explores the notion of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ in classical Greek and Roman sculpture, proposing that these terms have no real meaning in this context.

If the role of simulacra is to evoke an experience matching the original, then Hunter S. Thompson retyping works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (word for word, entire books) to experience how it feels to type a masterpiece is among the oddest most personal experiential epiphanies. It’s like grabbing the stylus in an autopen signing device to see how it feels to sign Fitzgerald’s name. Or sitting at a player piano to attempt to feel how Gershwin played. Maybe it is more like tracing a drawing to understand the physical act of creation without engaging independent will. It’s an attempt to osmose content through form.

Architecturally it might seem relatively simple to create a simulacrum of experience; after all these are mostly physical constructs that can theoretically be remade to an astonishing degree of accuracy, much as Lascaux has been. My former partner and Pentagram co-founder Theo Crosby became more enamored with the idea of re-creation as his will for, or success at, independent creation waned. He spent years working to recreate the Globe Theater, finally completing it where it now stands on the South Bank in London.

He once mentioned a Japanese consortium interested in rebuilding famous architecture in a theme park; Morris’s Red House (the one Theo was involved with) could sit next to Corb’s Villa Savoye, which might be sited across from Case Study #8, the Eames House. It’s not an entirely new idea; most previous versions have assembled these collections by saving and moving famous structures.

Greenfield Village at The Henry Ford (and really, THE Henry Ford? What does that even mean?), or Meiji-mura, Japan’s own collection that includes the entrance to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Palace are both outdoors museums of famous structures.

The Cloisters, a museum at the northern tip of Manhattan, is a single collaged assembly; historical buildings were moved and reconfigured as a single complex. Making the new out of the old is an act similar to in form, but quite detached from in concept, the ancient tradition of disassembling one building and reassembling it to make another (usually entirely different) building.

Williamsburg VA (unlike Williamsburg Brooklyn) is a fantasy constructed to amuse and entertain tourists (so maybe not so unlike the one in Brooklyn!). Celebration FL, on the other hand, is constructed as a place to live out the fantasy of a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ period utopia, making the suburbs great again. A collection of famous architects designed all the public buildings, and all the houses were pre-designed to compose ‘Truman Show’ quality neighborhood perfection, with every exterior detail and color fixed in perpetuity by local housing agreements.

That’s the thing about Disney, nothing can age; it all must look practically new at all times. And you can never lift the veil and see the workings behind the scenes. Employees are called ‘Cast Members’ cementing the idea that it is all performative, treating real neighborhoods with real families just as they would fake pirates performing repeated scenarios in Disney World nearby.

Before Celebration actually existed, when it was just miles of graded sand ready for infrastructure and structures, we designed a ‘Temporary Preview Center’ that tried to evoke the sense of place when there was no place. Instead of a sample house (the typical sales center of a development is the first house built, later sold) we used the beautiful watercolor renderings of houses, blown up to full scale facades with real front yards, fences and landscaping. And real front doors you could use to enter the preview center itself, a set of rented trailers joined and outfitted with a ‘work in progress’ concoction of blueprint floors, framed (but incomplete) walls and other tropes of incomplete house building.

The most transgressive aspect was the ability to see behind the enormous, flat, house-shaped billboards on which the watercolors were mounted; you could see they were just the false fronts for the trailers housing the actual interiors. It became, for a while, so much a part of the community that it functioned for years past its expiration date, when the real town was built and accessible; a simulacrum the of the intentionally fake existing alongside the unintentionally fake (or at least thoroughly contrived) neighborhoods of Celebration. It was, briefly, a Joni/John paradox.

Most of what I’ve been thinking about is the analog world, where I used to spend most of my time. Travel, books, art, music, movies, television, cities and buildings are all essentially analog though occasionally delivered digitally. The digital world is different, and less my place; I design buildings and other 3D elements, not a world of renderings or a game world or VR or CGI or AI interface.

I like to think I live in the physical universe, not the virtual metaverse, but what have the last two years been if not an exercise in a simulacra as life? We spent months rarely venturing out of our homes except to scurry around to buy food and supplies, and occasionally transact something that can only be done in person, and even then hiding in masks and gloves. Everything else was done as a simulation of our prior lives.

Funerals, work, doctor’s visits, cocktails, holidays, sex and consuming was experienced virtually as never before. TV shows were assembled virtually and delivered digitally, from remote locations that, ironically, gave us more intimate views of our colleagues and icons than the highly produced and filtered versions we were used to pre-pandemic.

How is this different from the Matrix? We are now, to the largest companies on earth, data sets tapped to power their own engines of commerce; how different is that from our bodies being tapped as energy stores to run the Matrix? Our personal information is stolen, traded, parsed, bundled and exploited for the profit of others. We are controlled by our data to an extent that we barely realize; a decade ago an article revealed that Amazon knew when a woman was pregnant even before she might know. Two decades ago I mentioned the brand Harley-Davidson in an email that I assumed was private (it was a private domain, not Gmail) only to see Harley ads pop up in seconds on my browser. A half decade ago a friend, just after the elections in 2016, was at a noisy bar, a bit drunk commiserating the results and stepped outside to take a call. He ranted that someone should just shoot that guy…the next day he got a call from the FBI to discuss that. If these examples were true 5, 10 and 20 years ago, what do we think is possible now?

We live within a simulacra of a truly free life (not to sound too conspiratorial; I live there too and mostly still appreciate the ease and reach of my digital queries). We have subscribed, literally, to the tech world’s notion that efficiency is worth surrendering our own voice, our participation in how we are governed, our privacy and right to live unsurveilled. All this to buy cheaper shoes?

We were, in a sense, enormously lucky that when everyone had to barricade themselves inside for months and months, the world (the white collar world, that is) could still work. Not quite so easy for healthcare workers, or plumbers or firemen or FedEx folks.

Living, however briefly, in that almost entirely online metaverse has taught us something; we are not yet made for that level of virtuality. The pandemic has taught us many things, and many frightening truths, but it has reinforced that idea that we are remarkably like our counterparts in the pre-industrial world, even the ancient or prehistoric world; we are ‘people people’. We love engaging IRL, we will even sit outside in the winter just to enjoy a restaurant meal, we (briefly) flocked back to Broadway and all manner of live performance, and millions of us decided to change nearly everything about our pre-pandemic lives.

Simulacra may be nice for tourists, but as residents we still prefer the real.

For now, anyway.