Matrix trilogy notes on Hyper reality, This was quite the sunday afternoon...

‘Baudrillard himself stated in interviews that The Matrix has nothing to do with his work, and is at best a misreading of his ideas. It has been suggested that Baudrillard never saw the film’
http://themasticator.blogspot.com/2007/03/quote-of-dayobituary-jean-baudrillard.html

THE MATRIX

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television…It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
Everything in the Matrix seems to be real to us as it is something we can relate to in our everyday life, police, crime, city, cars. Agents – FBI, higher suspicious authority. The film questions us to whether or not this is real life we live in today.

Key elements in the film suggest something isnt right when trinity and the agents jump a buildings rooftops and the police officer even says ‘that’s impossible’ Which leads us to think of it as a deep desire, or dream wanting to be able to do that.

‘The Matrix makes explicit reference to the work of Baudrillard, especially the 1983 essay "Simulacra and Simulations". Baudrillard assumes the proliferation of images in advanced capitalism, with the expansion of commodities and the relentless advance of technologies of visualization and simulation. In the essay, Baudrillard describes a movement from "representation" (of something real) to "simulation" (with no secure reference to reality). This movement from representation to simulation changes the relation between sign and referent, so that we lose the connection, once presumed to exist, between sign or image and the reality to which both were thought to refer. To develop this argument Baudrillard asks us to think about situations where the simulating sign or image usurps the priority of the reality it is supposed to "serve":
1: the perfect map as that which duplicates the extent and every detail of the territory of an "empire" (in a Borges parable): as the empire decays, the fragments of the map shows bits of its former grandeur
2: the patient who simulates symptoms of madness so well he/she is declared to be mad
3: the infantile simulation of reality and history that is Disneyland: it secures the (comparative) "reality' of Los Angeles
4: the simulation of a hostage drama turns real when a hostage dies of a heart attack and the police shoot
5: the image is supposed to help believers worship God; but they come to rely upon these images so much that they become the true object of worship; therefore iconoclasts (in the Byzantine Empire) attack the images as an usurpation of the priority of the true God’
http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/warner/english122tg/MartixBaudrillard.html

‘Ever had that feeling that you don’t know whether your awake or dreaming’
Neo matrix

‘Maybe you just need to unplug’
This is a reference to entering the ‘real’ world
When neo try’s to escape he is to scared to step on the scaffolding which suggests an anziety of fear, but is this real fear?

‘You have been living two lives’
This is suggesting two lives, reality and fantasy
‘One of these lives has a future and the other does not’
The reason that he says this is because the fantasy life cannot last as it is fantasy whereas reality lasts.
When Neo has his mouth shut by skin. Neo woke up. And he thought that it was a dream which links into many of theories.

‘You know that road, you know where it ends and thats not where you want to be’
This means that there are two roads which means one is the real road and one is the fantasy, We are led to believe that that road was the reality road
‘You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.’

Alice in wonderland reference to where things are not as they seem, an hyper reality
‘A prison for your mind’

‘Buckle your seatbelt Dorothy cause Kansas is going bye, bye’
This again is another reference to a hyper reality story
‘What if when you woke up, you didn't know the difference between the dream world, and the real world?’

After this scene it shows the rebirth of Neo into the ‘real world’ all of reality seems to be what we know as fantasy and is not anything like what we could ever believe to exist, However the pain aspect of things seams more real than the matrix world.
‘why do my eyes hurt, you’ve never used them before’
This gives us all a curious thought on whether or not we are in the matrix and everything we see and believe is all a lie, a fantasy built up by someone else
‘you thought it was 1999 whereas it is closer to the year 2199’
The future

Everyone is dressed as a scrubber in the real world whereas in the matrix they are all dressed nice. This is our fantasy to look good and be desired.
‘
What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can hear, what you can smell, taste and feel, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain’
‘as we gave birth to Ai’
Artificial intelligence taking over the world, we are dependent on machines to survive and we therefore think it would be great to see a more technical future where we as humans had to do less and it was all done for us. We become lazy. AI gets out of control, thus we are not the ruling species of earth then.
‘the matrix is built to keep us under control’
Surveillance panopticism

‘I know kung fu’
This is the desire to learn things this fast and be able to do things to the best of our ability. Everything we want to be. Some of the moves are to the highest physical desire of being able to do things, run faster, jump higher. However the jump thing... is far from reality or reality as we know it.

‘if your killed in the matrix you die here? The body cannot live without the mind’
This shows that reality is physical and that fantasy is thought.

‘sweet dreams’
This was interesting to me as in all essence what is a dream in the real world?
Also technically neo is still a virgin.
When he is eating a steak it reaches a point where it explains how your brain can tell you anything i.e. he knows his food is not real yet his mind tells him how it tastes and it makes him full.
‘The matrix cannot tell you who you are’
Reality tells you who you are, fantasy tells you who you want to be.

‘Do not try to bend the spoon — that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spoon’
How the hell does Morpheus’s glasses stay on? Is it a hyper reality that he doesn’t need the glasses arms to hold over his ears? As its not real what is real?
In a way your mind controls you, if something happens in a fantasy/ dream this can lead you to believe that it is going to happen/ is happening in reality?

The ringing phone in the matrix is the source, the mirror, the entrance/ exit from one world to another.
When Sypher kills everyone, it is because he wants to live in a dream world, he would stop at nothing to get his dreams fulfilled, it shows how the imagination can drive people insane, are people in mental institutions really crazy or more sane than the rest of us?

‘human beings are a virus, a disease’
This means that the matrix is AI therefore it is saying that human beings are a corruption, vice versa role play to the reality we know.

‘there is no spoon’
Even though neo seems confident in the matrix he is really scared of everything he is doing, he says this to remind himself that in the matrix nothing is as it seems
When neo gets shot in the matrix, he gets shot and dies. This kills his thought which therefore effects his body. Then in reality trinity says something to him which causes his mind to think something else and therefore believe.

He is still alive, as he starts to believe his hyper reality slowly develops into the Males perspective of the perfect being.
At the end neo speaks to the matrix i.e. speaks to hyper reality its self, letting it know that he is in control of it and not vice versa be starts to show how anything is possible and changes from the perfect human to a superhero if you will.

THE MATRIX RELOADED

Neo dreams of Trinity falling in the real world/ whilst she is in the matrix, this is a hyper reality that is built into another hyper reality.

‘hmm upgrades’
In the matrix the computers are fighting back and have gotten stronger in order to stop the ‘anomaly’

‘He’s doing his superman thing’
This is based on the fantasy that everyone has to be a superhero, have special abilities.

In the real world everyone sees Neo as a super hero and the answer to the problem which is that the machine world rules all were as neo is fighting against the matrix from the inside (like a disease)

The party in Zion resembles the fantasy that humans have of sex. Hence it being a full on sex fest, this on the other hand is led to be ‘real life’
‘I can’t sleep much, it’s a good sign, shows that your still human’
This means that he has not yet lost himself to his fantasy self

‘what is control’
We need machines and they need us.

‘all i want is a kiss, but i want you to make me believe its her’
This is based on the fantasy and desire of having something you don’t have, in this case a sample of what it is like to be loved

‘something is different’
Towards the end of the film, neo begins to turn what was hyper reality into reality, due to the power of belief he was able to demonstrate that reality and hyper reality is what you make it out to be.

THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS
Neo’s body becomes a vessel from reality to fantasy
In this movie the neo becomes trapped in hyper reality, a prisoner to its torment, almost like a coma.

In hyper reality the rules do not apply it is all fantasy, no gravity etc
Good and bad reality not everything in fantasy is as you want it to be.

‘Nothing this week is meant to survive’
This basically is comparing reality to sub-consciousness

When neo loses his vision in reality he uses his hyper reality to paint a picture of what he believes things look like. He sees agent smith as agent smith and not the vessel whos body he had possessed.

In the end there is a big battle between hyper realities in order to save reality, as hyper reality has got so out of control

Hyper reality role play

So in my opinion one of the best examples of hyper reality is role reversal. I found some interested images to strengthen what I was trying to communicate. Basically the man dreams of the woman doing certain things where as the woman dreams of the man doing all her dirty jobs, in a nutshell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ytpgxWJ2cM

Critical studies essay proposal form ( Task 3)

I have decided that my provisional essay title will be - ANSWER

The main issues I will be adressing in this essay are how to determan what is reality from fantasty and the thrust of my argument is based on whether you can be sure that what you are living in is reality in comparison to a fake world? Also what makes you use hyperreality?

I will be looking at a wide source of visual material from ?????? to??????

I will be using Hyperreality as a methodology, Are things as they are?

I will be refairing to one major theorist within this essay, his name is Baudrillard.

I will be reading books about Baudrillard to collect quotes and give myself a better understanding of the Hyperreality concept, Some of the books I will be refering to are:

Baudrillard for beginners
Introducing Braudrillard
and any other additional material I can find at the libary/ online.

One of the major examples of Hyperreality is the famous Keanu Reeves film - The Matrix.

Communication Theroy

Lasswells Maxim - 'Who says what to want in what channel to what effect'

Communicator - Communication - Reciever - Method - Consequence
'Medium is the message'

Traditions of communication:
Transmissional - sending/recieving, like emails
Noise source, anything that detracts from the message
Effectiveness as communicators - reduciong/ elimination of noise

Cybernetics - control and communication in the animal/ machine 'Weiner'
Systematic analysis of system behaviour
Sematics -Story of signs, what a sign stands for, relations of signs, practical use of signs
Rhetoric - a question which the asker already knows the answer/ doesn't expect a reply
Metaphor -a description of some thing which isn't as stated.
Paradox -is used to describe situations that are ironic
Paraprosadokian - changes the meaning of an early phrase, but also has a double meaning

Marxism

Globalization

A description of 'an on going process by which regional economies, societies and cultures have been interigated through a globe spanning-network of communication and execution.'

Hegemony - Dominance of one society over another, Power/leadership.
Capatalist - The extention of the free market, Global
Socialist - Local/regional into Global unified world - Technological utopian, Economical and social.
Capatalist - Removal of restrictions, extention of free market - global.

Hyperreality

The inability to determin Consciousness from fanasy, Prime example: JD from scrubs:

VIDEO

other examples consist of someone watching porn, believes they are there doing those things, although they are at the safety of thier own home.

Deep dark desires.

Imagination.

Dreams, Perfect world, How you want to be.

An escape to another world where you are not you.

In essence i believe this is fueled by jelousy and the fact that everyone wants what they cannot have.

Psyco-analysis

In this lecture we learned all about the Psyche Theory, which are the three theoretical constructs in terms of activity and interaction in mental life. these three are the Ego, Super ego and the ID. Conscious Preconscious and Unconcsious, Freaud made a diagram to explain this which consisted of an Iceberg, the point was that although you can see the top of the icebearg, there is a whole lot more beneath, only 25% of the icebearg shows on top where as there is three times the size of that below. I drew a diagram of this for myself to show you.





















Conscious - is ego which according to Freud is 'Part of the Id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external work'

Super ego - ' The super ego can be thought of as a type of conscience that punishes mis-behaviour with feelings of guilt'

ID - 'The id contains everything that is inherited that is preasent at birth... the id is unknown to us'

Theodor W. Adorno, Analysis on Popular music

I believe what Adorno is trying to say is that all pop music follows the same rules in content and advertising/ promotion, no matter how different the artists try to make the music, they all follow the same rules whether no matter what the music genre is:
e.g. Drum and bass, rock, metal, hip hop, dubstep, Pop punk, Techno etc.

Although all these catogories are different, they would be catogorized very different on content such as I-Pods and in shops such as HMV, if I was to go into the rock section in HMV, I would find bands such as Green Day, Four year strong, A Day to Remember, HIM, Chiodos, All American Rejects, Nivarna, Foo Fighters etc. in reality these are not all conveyed as rock. Adoro even said that he was looking forward to the day when all those awards came down. Which is in reference to the music award cereomonies, such as MTV.

I think that he is talking about a culture change due to music and a 'new world' hence his critical analysis on how all pop music follows the same rules, he once said that 'Criticism is a indispencible part on culture' Which I think means that he doesn't mean to be offend but this is his view on all pop music.

Panopticism, Mitchel Foucault (research text summary)

What is Panopticism?

Panopticism is a social theory which developed by Michael Foucault (the French Philosopher) in his book, Discipline and Punish.

This is the manipulation and effect on Society over time. An example he gives in the book is one of a 17th Century town when the plague appeared. To begin with there is a 'Strict Spatial Partitioning' Which means that the town will be shut down and split into four sections. Panopticism is all about surveillance, this first comes into place when Syndic is assigned to each street keeping everything in order. I wasn't sure what a Syndic actualy was so i researched into it and it turns out that they are 'One who helps in a court of justice'. So, the Syndic has a few jobs as well as keeping an eye on everything, One of these is that he is assigned to lock every single door to every house on his issued street and then gives his key to 'The Intendant' which traditionaly refers to the holder of a public administration office, But in this case they would be the holder of the keys. There is one intendant per quater. This states an order which stops the world from being free, whoever tried t get out onto the streets could possibly be killed.