ABSTRACT
At first appearances, this thesis covers old ground about the impact of technology on humanity, but a closer look reveals an escalation of the stakes in contemporary society. This project hopes to raise more questions about ceding privacy, autonomy and individuality. I take my lead from Jean Baudrillard’s book, The Perfect Crime: the Murder of Reality, which provides the conceptual model for my analysis, art installation and studio-based research. I use an experimental approach that creates associations between writings, images and visual objects in juxtaposition. Rather than trying to solve the crime, I use the crime as a lens to examine the cultural narratives generated by Baudrillard’s theory while constructing a representational world of the crime in my thesis exhibition. I probe the act of changing from real to virtual with writings by Baudrillard, cultural critic Byung-Chul Han and historian Yuval Harari and I incorporate time by drawing on the writings of physicist Ilya Prigogine and philosopher Henri Bergson whose concept of “duration” defines time without space. Is the murder of reality a paradox? Or is there a complete elimination of the real to create a unipolar situation, a disembodied humanity? What does the collapse of representation leave us with?