Living information Lectures on the Nature of Reality

Deck of lectures of the University of Amsterdam undergraduate course Living Information., focusing on how we navigate what we think is real in a comprehensively mediated context.

1. Living Information 04 Real Life

2. INTERVIEWER Why do you feel that Truman’s never come close to discovering the true nature of his world? CHRISTOF We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.

3. war against media surrender to media become the media

4. “ Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed…” Samuel Butler (1863)

5. war against media surrender to media become the media

6. “ why may we not say, that all Automata have an artificial life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring? and the Nerves, but so many Strings?” Thomas Hobbes (1615)

7. 1920

8. war against media surrender to media become the media

9. “divine machine or natural automaton”

10. “It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of Empire, but of ours. The desert of the real itself.”

11. “ ...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigors of sun and Rain . In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography. ” Jorge Luis Borges (1946)

12. 1816

13. low tolerance for inactivity expectations of perfection quick solutions misperception of actual events knowing more, experiencing less