Will the real Kim Jong Il please stand up?

The idea of Kim Jong Il has become commodity. There is a reality inside North Korea, and there is another outside. Which is real and which is simulation?

For the past half decade an excess of images, simulations and caricatures of the North Korean leader have bombarded us. The media of excess has repeated the mantra of simulation in bold headlines, in news-print and digital text : “Is… ]]> Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:28:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/things/simulating-kim-jong-il http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/140/a-society-of-simulations This essay aims to increase our understanding of simulations and their impact on our notion of reality. Following on some observations regarding the dominant role of visual representations in our culture, I will argue that we are now living in a society, in which simulations are often more influential, satisfying and meaningful than the things they are presumed to represent. Media technologies play a fundamental role in our cycle of meaning construction. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it entirely new. Yet, it has consequences for our concepts of virtual and real, which are less complementary, than… ]]> Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:22:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/140/a-society-of-simulations http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/15/readers-build-vivid-mental-simulations-of-narrative-situations A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life. "Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story," says Jeffrey M. Zacks, study co-author and director of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St.… ]]> Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:04:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/15/readers-build-vivid-mental-simulations-of-narrative-situations