Selections on God, Reality, Music & Pictures from Jean Baudrillard

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The eclipse of God left us up against reality.

Where will the eclipse of reality leave us?

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And yet there are no proofs of this reality's existence -- and there never will be -- any more than the are proofs of the existence of God. It is, like God, a matter of faith.

And when you begin to believe in it, this is because it is already disappearing.

It is when one is no longer sure of the existence of God, or when one has lost the naive faith in a self-evident reality, that it becomes absolutely necessary to believe it it.

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Integral Reality is also to be found in integral music: the sort you find in quadrophonic spaces or can 'compose' on a computer. The music in which sounds have been clarified and expurgated and which, shorn of all noise and static, is, so to speak, restored to its technical perfection. The sounds of such music are no longer the play of a form, but the actualization of a programme. It is a music reduced to a pure wavelength, the final reception of which, the tangible effect on the listener, is exactly programmed too, as in a closed circuit. It is, in a sense, a virtual music, flawless and without imagination, merging into its own model, and even the enjoyment of it is virtual enjoyment. Is this still music? The question must be open to doubt, since they have actually come up with the idea of reintroducing noise into it to make it more 'musical'.

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The computer-generated image is like this too, a digital image which is entirely fabricated, has no real referent and from which, by contrast with analogue images, the negative itself has disappeared -- not just the film negative, but the negative moment lies at the heart of the image, that absence that causes the image to resonate. The technical fine-tuning here is perfect. There is no room for fuzziness, tremor or chance. Is this still an image?

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JEAN BAUDRILLARD, (1929 - 2007)