In a recent piece for the New Yorker about Unreal Engine, which is used to render the graphics in video games and virtual sets for film productions, Anna Wiener paraphrases film studies professor Julie Turnock, who makes the point that visual realism isn’t always about imitating “what the eye sees in real life.” She brought up filmmakers’ use of visual elements like shaky camerawork and shafts of light glittering with dust motes—gestures toward realism whose presence is sometimes gratuitous, or even defies logic. (These have also become common in video games: there are no cameras in video games, but there are lens flares.) Turnock traces this back to efforts in the seventies and eighties to make the early “Star Wars” films look gritty and naturalistic. “There’s a whole series of norms that have grown up around what makes things look realistic,” she said. Some attempts at realism, it struck me, were so realistic that they could only be fake.
This is a terrific piece, with uncanny (as it were) parallels to psychotherapy, especially this quote, which summarizes subtle disjunctions between therapists and patients around conceptualized emotional experience. Some patients are so caught up in intellectualization that this becomes a distinction without a difference, a kind of “virtual” concept replacing lived presence: “In Critique of Judgment, Kant develops his argument from the first critique that there are “no rules for judgment” — no way to simulate the process of “experiencing” things before the fact — and more or less equates the ability to tentatively conceptualize things in a state of “free play” with the possibility of aesthetic experience, of pleasure in the endless effort of balancing sensation with comprehension. “
I think it's also hard to consider a definition of the real by Epic that doesn't fall along these same lines because that conception of the real is what allows them to continue to exist and pull in more and more money. Also on my mind reading this was Boorstin's book "The Image" and the idea of the pseduoevent. You and Nathan discussing "deep reals" also reminds me of this idea I had of a "hyperevent", the inverse of a pseduoevent, where, out of maybe such a demand for something "real", seemingly innoucus things will be stuffed with meaning to saturate pent up demand. A key example being the saga of Adian's Kickback. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/style/adrians-kickback.html
This is a terrific piece, with uncanny (as it were) parallels to psychotherapy, especially this quote, which summarizes subtle disjunctions between therapists and patients around conceptualized emotional experience. Some patients are so caught up in intellectualization that this becomes a distinction without a difference, a kind of “virtual” concept replacing lived presence: “In Critique of Judgment, Kant develops his argument from the first critique that there are “no rules for judgment” — no way to simulate the process of “experiencing” things before the fact — and more or less equates the ability to tentatively conceptualize things in a state of “free play” with the possibility of aesthetic experience, of pleasure in the endless effort of balancing sensation with comprehension. “
I think it's also hard to consider a definition of the real by Epic that doesn't fall along these same lines because that conception of the real is what allows them to continue to exist and pull in more and more money. Also on my mind reading this was Boorstin's book "The Image" and the idea of the pseduoevent. You and Nathan discussing "deep reals" also reminds me of this idea I had of a "hyperevent", the inverse of a pseduoevent, where, out of maybe such a demand for something "real", seemingly innoucus things will be stuffed with meaning to saturate pent up demand. A key example being the saga of Adian's Kickback. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/style/adrians-kickback.html
Ripe for a Flusserian interpretation! The “iconic” trees are a perfect example of the technical image pointing not towards reality but to concepts