Jean Baudrillard’s essay, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, speaks of the postmodern condition as one in which the only ‘reality’ is a virtual one, constituted in the interminable play of signifiers which saturate our experience. Today, he argues, Simulation is no longer … of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: the hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory … it is the map that engenders the territory. … It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are … our own. The desert of the real itself.
