Simulation

A movie I watched today explained the role of media in the creation of simulated reality. I watched 3 short documentaries about resistance in Chiapas, Mexico that dealt with the creation of autonomous spaces/politics. Each dealt with a different project involved in resistance: education, water use, collective food production. All three were structured with members of the communities speaking to the camera about their experience in an interview style setting, interspersed with images of their projects. The format only featured the words of the community members, and never featured the documenters asking questions or showed images documenting the film making process. The un-reflexive eye of the camera translates movies/images into a simulation of people and places. By ‘writing out’ the process of authoring and presenting images as political subjects of documentation in film, the subjects become naturalized as objects of study. The eventual object of study (people in film, or other observation) gets considered as a natural subject, but in fact is under the gaze of an external observer that alters their mode of dealing with the world. The elision of the role of observer/documenter in social situations perhaps creates the ‘simulated’ world we live, where we pretend to be neutral social critics or pretend to be dealing with transparent social situations. Strangely, the myth of total knowledge prevents its content from ever being realized. Blah.

Duncan