Hyperreality

Do you ever do something obsessively?

I stayed home from work today, not feeling too well. But not feeling bad enough to lie flat in bed. So, I’m sitting on the couch with my laptop.

This means multi-tasking. (“Multi-tasking” is what we who have dial-up do so we don’t go insane. Sometimes we go plow an acre while waiting for a site to load.)

• Read through my blogroll
• Read email
• Read newspapers online
• Start composing my next blog post
• Look at the new photo hunt season first week challenge at JorgDotOrg
  
• Organize photographs and look for something appropriate for the photo hunt

And that leads me to the next task. The photo hunt challenge this week is “something new.” I thought of the sumac trees out back that are just turning orange, which has been quite a theme for me this week after all (orange, that is). The newly orange leaves might be a nice seasonal subject.

I have a photo from under the sumac, looking up at the sky. But the sky is white, the photo taken on a cloudy day. Not very interesting.

Before photoshopping:


Hmm, maybe I can photoshop the sky blue! That’s where the obsessive behavior comes in. I’ve been photoshopping blue into the sky for hours now. (There must be a quick way to fill all the white with blue at once! But no, every white area goes like this: select tiny area with magic wand tool, edit, fill, ok, select, edit, fill, ok, select . . .you get the idea. If there is a quick way, and you know it, I don’t know if I want you to tell me now. Wait a few weeks. I have too much time invested in this photo. It might break my heart.) It’s like coloring, or finding puzzle pieces. It’s like playing a game. It’s mindless and when you’re not feeling well, mindless is good. It’s fun to do in between multiple tasks.

Wouldn’t it be easier just to wait for a sunny day and take another photo, you ask? Well, maybe. But then, I may have to wait several days, and by then the sumac will be entirely orange, which is fine. But I like how the leaves are part green and part orange in the photo.

Well, while photo-shopping the sumac, I opened an email from my brother Nelson saying that his son Dave in Sydney watches this site on wiki: hyperreality. Dave’s a smart guy, works in artificial intelligence, and I don’t have a clue, but I read the piece anyway.

Here are some examples of hyperreality from the wiki site:

Examples of hyperreality

• a sports drink of a flavour that doesn't exist ("wild ice zest berry")
• pornography ("sexier than sex itself")
• a plastic Christmas tree that looks better than a real Christmas tree ever could
• a magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer
• a well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal)
• any massively promoted versions of historical or present "facts"
• the Gulf War, to the extent that America understood it: Baudrillard, in fact, claims that the Gulf War never even happened
• Many world cities and places which did not evolve as functional places with some basis in reality, as if they were creatio ex nihilo (literally 'creation out of nothing' - 'creatio' is a noun) : Disney World, Celebration, Florida; and Las Vegas
• TV and film in general, due to its creation of a world of fantasy and its dependence that the viewer will engage with these fantasy worlds

How about that! I was photoshopping a fake blue sky into a photograph while reading an article about hyperreality! I encourage you to read the piece and think about what you think reality is, and isn’t.

So, the photo. It seems obvious that the photo with blue is more appealing (maybe the blue is too dark though). But it’s a “lie.”

But then, as Nelson and I discussed, what photograph isn’t a lie? You can’t feel the breeze in your hair as you did when you took the picture, he said.

After photoshopping: