Post-modernism is a late 20th century movement in various arts that represents a departure from modernism. It is characterized by mixing styles and genres, self-conscious use of styles from the past, and skepticism of theories and notions of objective truth. Post-modernism challenges the distinction between reality and representations of reality, as in Baudrillard's concept of the hyperreality where media and reality converge. It questions the existence of objective truth and facts given technologies like Photoshop that can distort reality.

1. What is Post-Modernism
Post-modernism:
• Is a late 20th-century style and concept
in the arts, architecture, and criticism,
which represents a parting from
modernism and is characterized by the
self-conscious use of earlier styles and
conventions, a mixing of different
artistic styles and media, and a general
doubt of theories.
Simulation:
• Hazy border between the real and imagined.
• This meta-conceptual realm is a form of hyper-reality. This is where the real
world and the media world are combined.
• Associated with the premodern period, where representation is clearly an
artificial place marker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and
situations marks them as irreproducible real and meaning clearly gropes
towards this reality.
• Distinction between media and reality has vanished as people believe media is
their reality.
• This theory is used in the film the matrix in the format of the ‘Red and Blue’ pill.
Does ‘Truth’ really existe:
• Are right and wrongs
just interpretations and
facts?
• The truth within images
can be challenged due
to Photoshop
technology- As
Photoshop can distort
images to beauty and
sometimes make them
very unrealistic.
• The film ‘They Live’
uses this theory.
Modernism:
• Modernism refers to the broad movement in
Western arts and literature that gathered pace
from around 1850, and is characterised by a
deliberate rejection of the styles of the past;
emphasising instead innovation and
experimentation in forms, materials and techniques
in order to create artworks that better
reflected modern society.
Baudrillard:
• Was a French sociologist who was
born 1929 and died 2007.
• Advocated extreme versions of
postmodernism
• Ideas about simulacra and
simulacrum
• To a way a particular society
realises or brings off reality e.g.
how society simulates the real.
• Sometimes there is no ‘real’ e.g.
We are no longer sure what is
real and not real
• Meaning has become destabilised.
Hall- of –mirrors (mise en abyme):
• Escher’s drawn architectural illusions, to
story- in a story in a story narratives for
example this happens I the film ‘Inception’.
• Thinking when looking in on itself taking
one out of an experience and into the
theoretical
• This evident in the film ‘inception’ where
the technique of mise en abyme is used.
The Zenith of cultural production:
• It’s the idea that our culture ‘eats itself’
e.g. because everything has been made,
cultural therefore must remake itself in
an nonconcrete way.
• Because of this artistic products are now
influenced into making things such as
parodies, homages and intertextuality.
• Intertextuality is evident in the film pulp
fiction where they perform the dance
scene.
Art:
• The idea that anything can be art
• Postmodern art is a body
of art movements that require to
contradict some aspects of modernism or
some aspects that emerged or developed
in its aftermath. In general, movements
such as Intermedia, Installation art,
Conceptual art and Multimedia,
particularly involving video are described
as postmodern.
Post-modernism with music:
• Postmodern music is either
simply music of the postmodern era,
or music that follows aesthetical and
logical trends of postmodernism. As
the name suggests,
the postmodernist movement formed
partly in response to modernism.
• The ‘Three minutes culture’ e.g. MTV
generation the fact that people’s
attention span is short.