week three_article four_blog nine

Gail Faurschou_Obsolescence and Desire: Fashion and Commodity Form

“Today, the properly postmodern consumer’s clothing will match his or her furniture, which in turn will be coordinated with all other living accessories to complete the “total environment”-a virtual total experience.”
-Faurschou

Does a concept such as the virtual have any weight any longer in a culture which finds it increasingly difficult to separate virtual and real? Is much of what we experience today not in some way shape or form virtual? And when does a virtual world become reality; more real than real itself? Consider the examples supplied by Faurschou: of the parallel universes' offered by Lauren’s various fabricated environments of the ability of contemporary cosmetics to custom-build a new you. Such developments are, in many ways, equivalent to the holodeck from Star Trek: the Next Generation episodes our parents used to watch where a single white-walled room was capable of becoming a new destination, a new environment, in a moments notice and at the command of a voice. Such once futuristic possibilities do not seem even remotely as fantastical as they once were. Increasingly, we exist in virtual realities, in virtual space, and to some extent, in virtual time (although time is perhaps one of our most enduring constants). Perhaps the place of architecture and of cultural production lies within these new realities, these new frameworks of time and space. Perhaps we should embrace the potentialities that these parallel universes hold, and explore them wholeheartedly, rather than searching for ways out of them. Rather than searching for a return to something previous, perhaps?