jean baudrillard 1929.2007

French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard has died aged 77 at his home in Paris following a long illness.

Baudrillard, a leading post-modernist thinker, is perhaps best known for his concept of hyper-reality.

He argued that spectacle is crucial in creating our view of events - things do not happen if they are not seen.

He gained notoriety for his 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place and again a decade later for describing the 9/11 attacks as a "dark fantasy".

Baudrillard focused his work on how our consciousness interacts with reality and fantasy, creating from them a copy world he called hyper-reality.

He said that mass media led to hyper-reality becoming a dominant force in today's world - an argument taken to a provocative extreme in his statement that the 1991 Gulf War primarily took place on a symbolic level.

Since little was changed politically in Iraq after the conflict, all the sound and fury signified little, he argued.

'Dark fantasy'

In his essay The Spirit of Terrorism: Requiem for the Twin Towers, he caused controversy again by describing the 9/11 attacks as a fusion of history, symbolism and dark fantasy, "the mother of all events".

While terrorists had committed the atrocity, he wrote: "It is we who have wanted it. Terrorism is immoral, and it responds to a globalisation that is itself immoral."

Born in Rheims into a peasant family, he studied German at the Sorbonne, later working as a teacher and translator. He taught sociology throughout the 1960s.

He was a prolific writer, penning more than 50 works including: Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Spirit of Terrorism: An Requiem for the Twin Towers (2002).

pixelated skin lecture at the NAI, rotterdam

The Pixelated Skin
Realities:United + Rogier van der Heide

Thursday 8 March at 2000

More and more, architecture has become image. And that image is, like other images, turning into a medium of communication - a medium that has moreover come to the surface. Guy Debord already foresaw this happening in his book The Society of the Spectacle. The skin of the building is changing: instead of static stone, concrete or glass, what we now see is increasingly often a dynamic image of the kind only made possible by electronics. The skin turns into a display screen on which the message is plainly legible. The building thus turns into an "urban transmitter" whose skin not only shields its interior but functions as a programmable information membrane. The surface has become a pixelated skin, capable of furnishing the city and its inhabitants with information and entertainment. Salient examples of this phenomenon include the well-known NASDAQ Building on Times Square in New York and the Galleria Department Store built by UN Studio in Seoul.

The German group Realities:United and the Dutch lighting designer and director of Arup Lighting, Rogier van der Heide, are both pioneers in this field. Van der Heide collaborated with UN Studio on the design and execution of the Galleria Mall. Realities:United have been involved in among other things the development of the "communicative display skin" for Peter Cook's Kunsthaus in Graz.

The participants in this lecture will talk about their projects and about developments that await us in this field.