RND/ To consider some – at this late stage in the game of AAAA Global Videogaming (/Culture) – ‘plainly odd’ screenshots of Paris, as much a fantasy as place – a grand displacement:
In their nascent incompleteness, indeed in a form still more dreamlike than actual, these technologies are ripe, as it were, for various imaginary schemas, projected futures, dreams, hopes, and fears. Just as the emergence of steam, electrical, telephonic, and other technologies clearly exerted powerful effects on the imaginations of the populaces in which they appeared (which seem to decrease to the degree that these technologies become normalized and socially integrated into the banalities of everyday life), exponential growth has also occurred not simply in technological advances but more significantly in cultural fantasies surrounding the eruption of new and altogether different futures from those we had previously envisaged.
Cyberspace and virtual reality (VR) represent arguably the most intensely concentrated focal points for this phantasmatic explosion, firing the imaginations not only of the technologically literate but of those interested in entertainment, knowledge, and information – in short, of global populations.
– Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (The MIT Press 2001)
3840 x 2160 .jpg
In which the large grey blocks of undeveloped real estate seem to be encroaching on the (virtual) Paris. Or perhaps they’re its default state – the ideological / architectural underpinnings of the whole (hyper-fragmented) city.
One is also reminded of the opening of EVANGELION 3.0+1.0.
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// how to play big science