America (HD remastered)
The work reflect on the relationship among reality and simulation, as well as their reciprocal representations. Using the video game "Microsoft Flight Simulator" (2020) and "America" (1986) by Jean Baudrillard, the work offer an overflight above a simulated Los Angeles escorted by the words of an exhumed-as-an-artificial-voice Baudrillard.
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Luca MirandaDirector
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Riccardo RetezDirector
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Riccardo RetezWriter
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Luca MirandaWriter
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Luca MirandaProducer
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Riccardo RetezProducer
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Project Type:Other
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Genres:Documentary, experimental
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Runtime:7 minutes 24 seconds
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Completion Date:December 11, 2020
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Country of Origin:Italy
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Language:English, French
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Student Project:No
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Digital Cinema Package:Unavailable
Miranda Luca is an independent researcher and artist that lives and works in Italy. His research concerns the ambit of game studies and visual studies and investigates game mechanics and concepts such as immersion, identification and interpassivity. His practice looks at the relationship between reality and simulation, their historic and political rhetorics, and the aesthetic potential of the avatar.
Retez Riccardo is an italian PhD scholar in Visual and Media studies at IULM University and digital content creator interested in contemporary visual culture and in particular in cultural and game studies. He worked for academic periodicals, edited university events and wrote a publication about the relationship between cinema, video games and audiovisual forms of a vernacular nature.
America (HD remastered) can be considered a form of adaptation that uses Microsoft Flight Simulator (Xbox Game Studios, 2020) to reenact the essay America wrote by Jean Baudrillard in 1986. According to the author writings, the real has vanished into images of itself and so we are now in the age of simulation. The book is a provocative trip across a “New World of banalities”. In the freeways, malls, deserts, and cities of America, Baudrillard discerns an ecstatic vacuity, an apotheosis of the hyperreal. Finally, the concept of desert is considered as the metaphor of American culture – empty, vast, radiant, indifferent. We wanted to visualize the words of the author through the world of the most impactive simulator game up to date: Microsoft Flight Simulator. That is a game that uses algorithms and datasets to reproduce the representation of reality itself. We focused on one specific city addressed by the author, one of those that has a certain connection with the collective imagination: Los Angeles. That vast urban agglomeration is described by Baudrillard as an “incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see”, ascribable to the traits that feature deserts. The machinima proposes views of Los Angeles from several points of view of a fictional airplane that is flying over the city: from perpendicular and orthogonal views to angles that capture the immensity and “muted fluorescence” of all the lines that divide the city into streets. The images are matched with the words of Baudrillard read by an artificial voice – a simulation – in French, as they were first written. A white noise sound of an airplane cabin also drives the spectator into the video. The visualization of Los Angeles starts from the sea and ends with it, in a cycle of time lasting one single day – from night to night. The video shows the city, its lights and shadows, the mountains and deserts that surround it. Furthermore, along with Baudrillard's ideas, the desert performs a fundamental role, because “it has been absorbed into cinema”, since we cannot gaze at its horizon without seeing through the lens of those movie directors that shaped an ideal of American culture.
