The Hyperreal Hustle: Why You Can't Trust Your Senses Anymore
by Amber Hoegee
In the neon-drenched, digital landscape of Grimes’ “Shinigami Eyes,” the boundary between what’s real and what’s artificial is gone. This music video is the perfect way to understand the simulacrum, which is essentially a “generation by models of a real without origin or reality”. We’ve officially moved into the era of the hyperreal, where the line between the real world and the imaginary one has vanished, leaving us to question our own senses.
Grimes herself mentioned in a PBS interview that we’re at a huge turning point where technology and AI are “democratizing” art. She suggests that when “everyone has the same tools,” true talent will “rise to the top”. But there’s a more clinical side to this tech evolution. We have algorithms scanning “millions of paintings” and “petabytes of data” just to “generate new data”. This creates a “feedback loop of the human soul,” where an artist’s actual emotional reaction is captured and fed back into a digital system. In “Shinigami Eyes,” the lyrics “I’m the setting that you export” really embodies this notion: the artist isn’t a fixed person anymore; she’s a digital asset to be exported, recycled, and used in a “spectacular and political manipulation of consciences”.
Thumbnail of Grimes’ Shinigami Eyes Music Video (2022)
According to Jean Baudrillard, there are four phases of an image, and this video is the final stage: it has “no relation to any reality whatsoever,” and exists as its own “pure simulacrum”. The video doesn’t even try to reflect a “profound reality”, it just “masks the absence” of one. It’s what you might call the “murder of the real,” where we swap out the real world for “signs of the real”.
So, how are we supposed to make sense of what’s in front of us today? We aren’t just sitting in the back of the crowd anymore; we’ve been sucked into a “mass integration” where we are actually part of the machinery. We’ve been “satellized” by these big models of control, and in that orbit, our own insignificance starts to feel weirdly “hyperreal”. We don’t just listen to music with our ears anymore; we’re living in a “tactile universe” where just looking at something is really just a form of “tactile manipulation”. We’ve become “agents of the execution of culture,” crowding around art as if it were a “disaster site,” totally fascinated by a system that seems to “breathe catastrophe”.
Ultimately, engaging with music like this is a form of “hypersimulation”. We aren’t just listening to a song; we’re part of a “scenodrama of production” where the “medium is the message” and the real has been “purged of its death”. This deep dive into the hyperreal makes us lose trust in our own senses. When technology can “manipulate pre-existing imagery” in ways that are scarily undetectable, we can’t tell the “authentic” from the “produced” anymore. Our engagement becomes a “hallucination of the real”. As the lyrics suggest, we’re “making friends with demons” that require “special eyes to see” because our own senses aren’t enough to navigate a world where “truth, reference, [and] objective cause have ceased to exist”.