THE CREATION OF HYPERREAL ENVIRONMENTS
One of the notions explaining how the landscapes of automated organization can be further conceptualized as closed systems is hyperreal and simulacra, as defined by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation.[7] Though this terminology has primarily been used to examine the semiology of consumer culture, advertising and the omnipresence of the mass media, it might as well be applied to spaces of automation.
Simulations or the impressions of real-world systems and processes that are blended with reality in hyperreality become more real than reality itself;[8] they create a self-sustaining loop where representations of reality are taken as reality. The original goal of these simulated spaces was to envision the facilitation of human-centric goals such as labor and service. This has nowadays been replaced by the simulation of efficiency, productivity and optimization. The end purpose is to maintain the system itself rather than serve any higher social or human need. Baudrillard posits that simulacra are copies that no longer have an original or authentic form. Due to countless cycles of abstraction and recreation of images through copies, an entity without any relation to any profound reality has been developed: the simulacra. As stated, the simulacra can also be attributed to spaces of automated organization themselves as well as to the multitude of objects within them, as they are designed to optimize and perfect processes through automation, reinforcing their logic without referencing the human or social purposes that initially justified their existence. As these spaces lack any reference, anything to be measured against, they seemingly dissolve the logic surrounding them, operating as apparently closed-off entities
‘The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelopes it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.’ [9]
The landscapes of automated organization can be considered as the third level of simulacra or the simulacra of simulation, grounded in the access of information, the cybernetic game and the model, whose principal purpose is total operationality and control or hyperreality. The further estrangement of these spaces is carried out by their deterritorializing character and their mode of work. The traditional functions, as maintained by Baudrillard, are automatized and displaced, leading to the disintegration of the functions themselves and creating new urbanisms that no longer resemble the models of conventional cities, where the hyperreal models, the hypermarkets, universities, and the automated montage factories, on the outskirts of cities, now serve as the nucleus. They can be intentionally designed with different levels of seclusion, as some of these organisational spaces are hosted in open and easily permeable sheds, easily accessible by the outsider, and some possess the highest level of security, being created as windowless structures with strictly guarded and constantly surveilled property boundaries.
