hannah hayat

"the museum, instead of being circumscribed in a geometrical location, is now everywhere, like a dimension of life itself." -baurdrillard 16 this section of Simulations  had me thinking about museums and the things humans claim are valuable. baudrillard claims that without stockpiling the past, humans lose their lineage and their culture, which i don't think i agree with. human beings are such fluid creatures, constantly changing each moment, maybe letting go of the past would provide for a more successful future. hell, we've been stockpiling for centuries but look where that got us these days... "...everything is dead and risen in the past..." baudrillard 13 also got my gears going about if our lives are already predestined, which makes this class and these readings pretty amusing to me.

untitled, 2019. magazine cut outs on paper. i have always be intrigued by the absurd. i humor the idea that human life IS absurd.  “Collage is the cut, the tear, the rupture and the overlay of our contemporary culture. It is the hybrid language of urbanity—remixed, re-contextualized, and wholly built from the fragments of daily life.” -Pavel Zoubok i want to explore this sort of absurdism through collage. this quote combined with the readings of Simulations  and my past works in collage have inspired me to use collage as a medium to explore the surreal, reality and absurdity. i will be creating a digital portfolio of 5-8 collages that "mask and pervert a basic reality" (baudrillard 11). i think by using found images of things that already exist in our reality, but placing them in ways that cause us to question its reality as well as our own. there are signs of reality, things we have seen before but also an element of bizarre that i find very appealing.

man with frog , 2019. magazine scraps on paper. blog reflection 1 "to simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't" -baudrillard (5) what is true and what is not? the fear of finding that all is nothing. i find this fear pointless. if all is nothing, but this nothingness is our reality, we might as well be present in it than spending our lives figuring out where we stand in the realm of "real." baudrillard explains that a simulation "threatens" the difference between "true" and "false" but if we think it's true, does it matter if it's false? what happens then, that we find we have been living in a falsity? is it so bad? what if it is something much better than a said "reality" ... i think the book aims to have us question what is around us-- and in our present culture, i think that has a lot to do with media. we are fed oogles and ogles of information by simply stepping outside. are things really as