The name is absent

Introduction

The confusion between reality and unreality is not a new phenomenon
exclusive to the moment in which we live, but it has certainly acquired of
late emergent and distinctive characteristics that shape it in a particular
manner. The influence of technology in this process is undeniable. Thus, the
introduction of new visual technologies that profoundly affect our
observations of reality, communication, expression, knowledge and
entertainment in a society governed by the principles and structures created
during the Enlightenment, has produced a rupture between what we know
and what we think we know. This research will not specifically refer to a
crisis in western knowledge, but, rather, to a potential crisis of the social
structures that conform to what we understand today as Western Society.

There are as many interpretations of the confusion between reality and
unreality as stages in different cultures. Relevant philosophical authors in the
history of western culture such as Plato, René Descartes, David Hume and
George Berkeley, writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and cultural
psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan have tried to illustrate, in a diversity of
forms, the relationship between reality and unreality. Today a vast canon of
authors such as Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, Frederic Jameson, Manuel
Castells, Scott Lash and Paul Virillio strive to analyze, understand and explain
the world around us, a world of 0s and 1s that is immersed in, and connected
to, a material reality. Virtuality and reality have fused and, in the process,
we have been dragged into an unknown region, a zone that has received
different names including Cyberspace and Hyperreality and that I denominate
(un)reality. It is this wholly intriguing region that is explored in this thesis.

It is undeniable that technology has assumed a fundamental relevance
in the perception of reality. The digitalization of the image, the virtualization
of the media, and the relevance attributed in our lives to videogames and the
Internet have changed the way that we observe and, most significantly,
participate in the world. The technologically mediated perception and
experience of today is heading towards a virtual and/or interactive

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