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Shortly after the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator (2022), a remarkable amount of experimental, avant-garde machinima landed in the White Cube. Three, in particular, stand out: The Cool Couple’s Flyin’ High, Luca Miranda & Riccardo Retez’ America (HD Remastered) and Sebastian Schmieg’s Lights will guide you home.

First screened at the 2021 Milan Machinima Festival, America (HD Remastered) is a sui generis adaptation/replay of America (1986), Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical travelogue. Upping the ante re: the so-called “crisis of the real” denounced by Guy Debord in his 1967 treatise, The Society of the Spectacle, Baudrillard famously argued that reality itself has disappeared: it is no longer a mere representation because simulation took over and basically ate the world. After a series of provocative essays and books including Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Seduction (1979), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Baudrillard wrote a groundbreaking non-academic book titled America (1986), entirely devoted to the land of simulacra. Thirty five years after its publication, this instant cult still provides illuminating insights into the unconscious of a puzzling country, ever so close to imploding or exploding, depending on the point of view. America is a road (and plane) trip across the “New World of banalities”: on America’s freeways, malls, deserts, and cities, Baudrillard experienced an overwhelming, ecstatic emptiness. In his account, the desert is the central metaphor of American culture: empty, vast, radiant, and completely indifferent to history, knowledge, and culture. In short, America chronicles the desert of the real. To reenact Baudrillard’s journey, Mirand and Retez appropriated Microsoft Flight Simulator, a game that uses algorithms and accurate datasets to reproduce the landscape of the United States. They flew over Los Angeles which Baudrillard describes as “an incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see”. America (HD Remastered’s stunning vistas of Los Angeles are directly lifted from a virtual plane. The video is accompanied by Baudrillard’s original words read by a text-to-speech software tool in French.