Midterm, Chris Langer

Midterm Part one

I had never really tried the guru meditation before today and it was relieving I think is the word to use. When I closed my eyes and paid no attention to the screen or the device whatsoever, I continued with the meditation without fail, but when I began to look at the device more closely, trying to work my way through the aesthetics and what this could possibly relate to, my guru fell. I felt like Baker, when he first forgot about the medium that book was in and finally embraced the action and experience for what it was. This allowed him to penetrate the technological features of his medium, in his case, the kindle and mine, Guru Meditation, and become entangled in the world of meditation. No longer was it an IPad, but merely a medium for meditating. Just as "grey became a nice color" for Baker, I appreciated the app for what it was. Embracing the iPad into the meditation world gave new meaning to technology. Technology can penetrate the ancient field of meditation and allow one to come to terms with an inner calm.
In Benjamin's Info aesthetics, he describes new media as requiring a computer to experience it. New media was just forced upon me in the form of meditation, something that in class we have argued and struggled with as something that shouldn't be allowed within the world of technology. What Benjamin is trying to tell us is that this shift towards the informational age is inevitable and we are moving quickly towards it, if not already there. This medium of the iPad, which at any moment could pop up with a push notification from a flurry of apps, contributed to a calm, seven minutes (broken up into sets of three minutes when I got distracted by the clouds). Our new cultural age utilizes technology basically at every medium and it is impossible to escape it at times. Bogost describes the feeling of meditating upon a smart device as a "providence" of escaping the world of tweets and emails, while still utilizing the same medium. What we tend to forget as consumers is that this is not only a communication/multimedia tool, IPads can be used as educational and spiritual tools as well. The iPad can plug us in to the digital, but also sweep us away from the digital world. I'm not sure if while being in Guru Meditation all push notifications are disable, but if they are, it is the perfect sanctuary, where we feel comfortable as digital natives with this high tech device while also harkening back to a serene time of meditation. Meditation is reproducible, as a work of art, in the sense that although we lose the distance to the "original" product of meditation, a simulated copy of mediation provides us with the same comfort, just in a medium we can fully penetrate.

Part Two

Searching for an app to write about, I clicked upon Google Earth. At first I saw the whole world from space, then slowly my world spun as the app was zeroing in on the last place I was exploring. It turned out to be my home in Saint Louis, with everything serene and beautiful. One odd feature though: my car was parked outside of it, the same car that is parked in the Freret parking garage right now.
Google earth prides itself on being a real simulation of every part of the world right now at this instant.

I'll try to take on Baudrillard with this app. He argues that " it is no longer possible to fabricate the real from the unreal." Other sites I would take as real, not simulated fabrications, because Google Earth promises the "real." But what I see is pure simulation, pure fabrication based upon the real, a hyper reality where imagination is gone. It is a "simulacra of simulation, founded on information" from Google satellites. There is no imaginary anymore. The distance between imagination and the real has been abolished and only the simulation of the real remains.

Baudrillard speaks of science fiction as dead, without an imaginary, which now must focus on revitalizing the "so called real world" that we think we experience. All of these apps and devices are part of this experiment. Google earth attempts to bring us back to what it was like to discover a new place, find a new world, and be truly inspired by the awe of it. But what it is really doing is simulating what we already know as unreal, the map. Google earth took the second order of simulacra, the productivist map, which was mass produced through industrial society in order to bring the real world to the people, and manipulate it into a hyper real idea, where we can now "re discover" the world, as if we are the true explorers. We can see what explorers see by participating in these " fragments of universal simulation that have become for us the so called real world." We are always "already in this other world," stuck within the simulation. We cannot escape the four month old satellite images of Google, we are forced to accept it as real. Up till now, this is as close to a true view of the world our IPad can give us.
Baudrillard states that "only the last order (the operational) can truly interest us." Maps do not interest our generation, we want the real, or the simulation of that real, the hyper real. This science fiction is the only thing that draws us in, because we no longer have the imagination, we merely want to see what used to be the real. We want Google to bring us back to reality, but all it can offer is the hyper reality of the third order simulacra.