Dystopia and artifice in late twentieth-century visual culture

The premise in this thesis is that in the context of the late twentieth-century visual culture of the West, a condition of dystopia is distinct. I argue that since the Sixties, developments in computer technology (‘new technologies’) have unleashed worlds of artifice and that the visual media are the prime mediators in perpetuating dystopia. I argue that the human sensory real has always been and still is intertwined with the artifice of dream worlds, but demonstrate that most utopian constructs, such as the current ones regarding globalism and technological utopia, are still not pleasant places although they intend and purport to be exactly that. My interpretation of the late twentieth century is that there are many coexisting worlds and different concomitant and layered spaces of both real and virtual kinds. It seems to have become impossible to fully verify the ‘real’ observed experiences and observations, and cyberspace can become as real as the ‘real’. The main argument is that...