Reality Engineering

“I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts.”
—Andy Warhol

Reality engineering is the study of how “The Real” is manufactured. Previous epochs have approached this discipline with frowning condescension (cf. Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky). We will eschew loaded words like inauthentic, spin, and fake. Instead, our coursework approaches the manufacture of reality from the giddy middle: with a euphoric yet critical belief that the most thrilling bits of modern life straddle the fence between artificial and authentic.

As an inherently diverse field, the coursework will span disciplines. We will dabble in many fields, including but not limited to: public relations (spin), marketing (buzz), biology (mimicry), art (trompe l’oeil), religion (god), economics (money), psychology (Capgras syndrome), medicine (plastic surgery), food (Splenda), and mass communications (Rathergate).

When your parents ask what you are studying, your response will be bold: truthiness.

Blurring the lines was always the norm, so our coursework utilizes classics from the broad canon of simulated reality:

1. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
2. Milli Vanilli, Girl You Know It’s True
3. Orson Welles, War of the Worlds
4. James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
5. Plato, The Republic, “Allegory of The Cave”
6. MTV, The Hills
7. Andy & Larry Wachowski, The Matrix
8. lonelygirl15
9. Danger Mouse, The Grey Album
10. The Blair Witch Project
11. FanFic.net

In the weekly LAB portion of this class, which accounts for 25% of your grade, you will build a project using one the following para-reality tools:

1. Photoshop
2. The Sims
3. Auto-Tune
4. Wikipedia
5. ACID Pro
6. MySpace

Your FINAL PROJECT, which accounts for 50% of your grade, will take the findings from your lab explorations and explode them into a fully-simulated environment, previous examples of which include:

1. Getting plastic surgery.
2. Starting a tribute band.
3. Launching an offshore gold farm.
4. Committing a crime and making your own video reenactment.
5. Founding an LSD-induced cosplay cult.

Rex Sorgatz

WRITER, BLOGGER, DESIGNER, PRODUCER, ENTREPRENEUR

(2009)