This document discusses different perspectives on reality and media presented in The Matrix and other works. It presents Jean Baudrillard's critique of The Matrix, in which he argues that the film presents a "classical, Platonic treatment" of simulation and that the Matrix itself could produce a film about the matrix. The document also discusses the idea that changing reality requires doing something different rather than references to that reality, and contrasts views of reality as discernible versus reality as something that is created through action.

1. Media Life
Inleiding Mediacultuur I
12 The Matrix [options]
#medialife #IMCI

2. options in media life
①war against the machines
②surrender to mediated reality
③become media (and hack life)

7. INTERVIEWER
Why do you feel that
Truman’s never come close to
discovering the true nature of his
world?
CHRISTOF
We accept the reality
of the world with which we’re
presented.

9. Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)

11. “It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and
there in the deserts that are no longer those of Empire, but of
ours. The desert of the real itself.”

12. “...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such
Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the
space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an
entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive
maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of
Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of
the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it
point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography,
succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such
Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence,
they abandoned it to the Rigors of sun and Rain. In the
western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to
be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the
whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of
Geography.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1946)

14. Jean Baudrillard’s critique of The Matrix:
“its classical, Platonic treatment”

15. “The Matrix is surely
the kind of film about
the matrix that the
matrix would have
been able to
produce.”

16. “simulation is no
longer that of a
territory, a referential
being, or a
substance. It is the
generation by
models of a real
without origin or
reality: a hyperreal”

17. “the more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is
struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even
infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure”

18. a Matrix-based reality
cannot be fundamentally
altered, as even Neo
ultimately turns out to be
just another inevitable part
of the program.
so what can you do
in a reality that
cannot be changed
by references to that
reality?

19. Baudrillard’s answer:
“theoretical violence, not truth, is the only
resource left to us”

20. “We begin to become aware of just how
much of our reality is open source and up
for discussion.”
Douglas Rushkoff – 10 September 2003

21. “if we really want to change
reality, then we have to try and
do something different.”

22. are you someone who is ''in […] the
reality-based community, [believing] that
solutions emerge from your judicious
study of discernible reality”?
or
someone who believes that “when we
act, we create our own reality”?
writer/former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind
talking with Karl Rove, senior adviser to President Bush in
The New York Times magazine, 17 October 2004