This project is based on the recognition of several factors which inform everyone's life at the end of the second millennium. These include:
1. Our lives and our very existence is shaped by our participation in, and our ability to conduct monetary transactions.
2. Power relationships have been subsumed in economic relationships, to the point where our ability to participate in power relationships is mediated by money.
3. In our increasingly data dependent world, the flow of information about us and others forms the foundation on which we exist.
4. Reality is formed by change and the fundamental forms of change are shaped by commerce or the exchange of money for goods or services.
5. Value still exists, but in a form which conflates the traditional categories of intrinsic and instrumental value, by which money becomes the instrument of value determinations and monetary exchange exists as an independent and true measure of our validity and/or our intrinsic value.
BEING AND EXISTENCE
Being is usually equivalent in the verbal sense to ‘existence.’ As the most general property of all reality this is often considered to be the defining subject of metaphysical inquiry. In the existentialist view the problem of being must take precedence over that of knowledge in philosophical investigations. Being cannot be made a subject of objective inquiry; it is revealed to the individual by reflection on his or her own unique concrete existence in time and space. Existence is basic: it is the fact of the individual's presence and participation in a changing and potentially dangerous world.
THE NEW REALITY
Ultimately it is neither the goods purchased nor how the money was generated with which the goods were purchased that matters. Of paramount importance is only the process of exchange, a participation in the transference of money from one possessor to another. Reality is, simply put, determined by our economic ability to exist. Thus the new hyperreality is not one of substitution for and between realities, but a process of change, particularly exchange. Realizing this, the situation becomes one in which the hyperreality of simulation and a precession of simulacra as discussed by Baudrillard, is supplanted by this new reality of economics. The controls of the spaceship are replaced by the cash machine. Not one born of a hysteria of production and reproduction of the real, this new reality returns us to an existential point: no individual has a predetermined place or function and no one can discover his or her supposed duty through reasoning; everyone is compelled to assume the responsibility of making choices and the most fundamental choice is to spend money.
