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‘Hyperreality World’

  • Date:2018-10-16
‘Hyperreality World’

With the support of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts' 2018 Digital Art Creation Competition Program, artist Tao Ya-lun (陶亞倫) will stage "Hyperreality World" from Oct. 16 through 20. As hyperreality is produced from data and programs, it is not so much naturally generated as artificially simulated; rather, it can be thought of as an embroidered reality created through hallucinatory resemblance. Ergo the prefix "hyper" meaning that it rings truer to us than reality itself.


The implosion taking place between media and society has resulted in the collapse of their boundaries. The blurred boundaries between true stories and media have made the latter just a little less than the real world. Nevertheless, the media-simulated world implies not so much that media represents the real world as that media, in their own right, produced a new world and is now dominating it.


Artist's Statement:


Contemporary virtual imaging technology demonstrates unprecedented degree of ionization and alienation, accomplishing the four steps towards a world of simulacra:


(1) It is a projection of an awe-inspiring reality.
(2) It not only obscures the breathtaking reality, but also heterogenizes its noumenon.
(3) It crumbles the magnificent reality into dust.
(4) It becomes completely detached from the ultimate reality, turning into a sheer simulacrum of itself.


As simulation technology prevails and improves every day, the gap between public feelings and real-life experiences has been increasingly widened. The hyperreal world is composed of nothing but self-referential simulacra. Mimicry not only transforms the absent into the present and shapes the imaginary into the real, but also severs all its ties with reality and absorbs the reality into itself, rendering the differentiation between real and non-real utterly unnecessary.


What is left is thus a world constructed exclusively with the self-reference of pure symbols (i.e. the signifiers without the signified), from which we may infer that, in the foreseeable future, the world built on the symbolic contents of computer simulation will be little more than reality. Such kind of reality replaces and transcends the original one, leading to the formation of a world of hyperreality.



‘Hyperreality World’

  • Date: Oct. 16 - 28, 2018
  • Venue: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
  • Address: No. 2 Wuchuan Rd. Section 1, West District, Taichung City, Taiwan (ROC)