» 2007 » March *kenspeckle

Jean Baudrillard, a famous French theorist of culture, media, and literature, whose work I'm unfortunately only slightly familiar with, passed away yesterday in Paris. After reading up a bit this morning I think I'll have to check out his work in more detail soon.

Baudrillard is known primarily for his work on hyperreality, a theoretical perspective on postmodern culture wherein representations ("simulacra" in Baudrillardian terminology) have replaced the "real" (whatever the real is supposed to be) to the point that "the real no longer exists."

I'm not sure the real ever existed in the sense Baudrillard means, but I'm fascinated to read more nonetheless. Wouldn't want my knowledge of Baudrillard to be drawn only from simulacra of his work.

[via rhizome]

mockup of how face2face will be implemented from JR's site

French "undercover photographer" JR and his French/North African tech-savvy collaborator Marco put together this amazing but somewhat unfortunately named project called face2face [via wooster collective]: They're posting enormous close-up portraits of Israelis and Palestinians paired up by occupation on both sides of their heavily guarded borders.

The absolute best part of this project, in my not-so-humble opinion, is the sheer goofiness of these pictures. I'm a huge proponent of humor as a cure for pretty much all of life's ills—there were probably more jokes at my grandfather's funeral than there are at most people's weddings.

Anyway, JR and Marco hung portraits in the Palestinian territory this afternoon and will be doing the same on the Israeli side of the border this Wednesday. Their project even has a trailer that starts slow but gets interesting around 1:45 (-3:40 if the counter is running backwards). Especially fascinating is the parallel between the descriptions of the relationship between god and the human form that come from interviews with Jewish and Muslim religious men (at 4:15 or -1:17):

a simulacrum of Baudrillard's obituary

peaceful portraits