” Abstraction today is no longer that of map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being of a substance. It’s the generation by models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, not survives it. Henceforth, it’s the map that precedes the territory – Precession of simulacrum – it’s the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the table today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It’s the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the desserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself ‘
Jean Baudrillard | Year 1983
