“Today, no staging of bodies, no performance can be without its control screen. This is not there to see or reflect those taking part, with the distance and magic of the mirror. No, it is there as an instantaneous, depthless refraction. Video, everywhere, serves only this end: it is a screen of ecstatic refraction. As such, it has nothing of the traditional image or scene, or of traditional theatricality, and its purpose is not to present action or allow self-contemplation; its goal is to be hooked up to itself. Without this circular hook-up, without this brief, instantaneous network that a brain, an object, an event, or a discourse create by being hooked up to themselves, without this perpetual video, nothing has any meaning today. … What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in doing so, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness. … The model that seems likely to emerge is that of an ideal of performance, of the genetic fulfillment of one’s own formula. In business, in emotional life, in their projects and their pleasures, everyone will seek to develop their optimum program. Everyone will have their code, their formula. But also their ‘look’, their image. …the whole topped with a tousle of software. A generation neither fired by ambition nor fueled by the energy of repression, but completely refocused upon themselves, in love with business not so much for profit or prestige as for its being a sort of performance, a technical feat. They hover around the media, advertising, and computing.”— Jean Baudrillard - from “America” 1986
