Hyperreality

Hyperreality

Something that is beyond reality

Roland Barthes

Semiotic codes

• Media products communicate a complex series of meanings to their audiences through a range of visual codes and technical codes. These codes can broadly be divided into proairetic, symbolic, hermeneutic, referential, and so on.
• After many years of codes being repeated, their meaning can become generally agreed upon by society. For example, a scar on the face of a character can function as a hermeneutic code, indicating to the audience that they are ‘the villain’.

Signs, signifiers and signifieds

Anything that can have meaning 

The thing that creates meaning

The meaning that is created 

Simulacra

an image or representation of someone or something.

The synths themselves may be seen as similar - copies of 'perfect' humans which do not really exist.

The parallel world to our is own is a hyper-reality - it is present or near future represented from a meditated perspective. 

Post Modernism - Jean Baudrillard 

• In postmodern culture the boundaries between the ‘real’ world and the world of the media have collapsed and that it is no longer possible to distinguish between what is reality and what is a simulation. In fact, it really doesn't matter which is which!
• Therefore, in this postmodern age of simulacra, audiences are constantly bombarded with images which no longer refer to anything ‘real’
• Because of this, we are now in a situation that media images have come to seem more ‘real’ than the reality they supposedly represent. This concept is referred to as 'hyperreality'