Almost exactly: realism at 7/8 scale

摘要

It all began rather innocently, on a fact-checking mission inspired by a passage from Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality (published in Italian in 1973, under the more revelatory rubric Il Costume di Casa, or Faith in Fakes.) Eco's essay is a cogent rumination upon the pervasive American obsession with sham experience and mock reality - a paean to our cultural preoccupation with the simulated, the imitated and the counterfeit. As evidence of this American faith in fakes, Eco offers a 'Wunderkammer, an ingenious example of narrative art, wax museum, cave of robots' built in Austin, Texas by President Lyndon B. Johnson - a presidential library containing a full-scale model of the Oval Office.