copies of copies.
cracked.com recently featured a most excellent list of the nine most baffling theme parks in the world. there are some real strange ones here, like grutas park. this lithuanian theme park remembers soviet russia, where “monumental sculptures are positioned in a 2 km-long exposition, where guard towers, fragments of concentration camps and other details resemble siberia.” as the grutas wikipedia entry notes, “the park is rich in irony and is intended to amuse as much as to inform, but it awakens many painful memories; its establishment faced some fierce opposition, and its existence is still controversial.” no kidding. as a history buff i would probably find the place fascinating, but i can imagine being a young lithuanian going with grandma and grandpa and having a very different experience.
there are other equally bizzare entries, from south korea’s jeju loveland (where the theme is sex) to bon bon land in denmark. here all the rides and attractions are themed around toilet humor. there are literally stylized depictions of cartoon animal feces and vomit. um, no thanks.
the entry on the list that got my design mind thinking is beijing shijingshan amusement park. since 1986, this large amusement park has been charming guests with some very familar landmarks, including that famous fantasyland castle, a sphere resembling EPCOT’s spaceship earth, and costume characters from a wide variety of media properties. apparently, the completely bootlegged park escaped the attention of the west for many years, until it was featured on japanese television a few years back. that exposure, and the opening of hong kong disneyland in the fall of 2005 has led the park’s lawyers to begin negotiations with disney over their blatent copyright violations. the matter is especially sensitive because hong kong disneyland is an official partnership with that city’s government—and by extension—the government of china.
the commentary on the beijing shijingshan park so far is on its weirdness, or as an example of china’s rampant disregard for western intellectual property. yet when i read about it, my very first thought was “what would baudrillard think of all this?” jean baudrillard, who just passed away last year, was a french cultural theorist. his work simulacra and simulation touches on thematic design in that—like umberto eco—he discusses unreality. baudrillard outlined a progression of simulacra:
- the era of the original
- the counterfeit
- the produced, mechanical copy
- the simulated “third order of simulacra” in which the copy has replaced the original
disneyland’s main street u.s.a. is an ideal example of the third order. no town in america at the turn of the century looked and felt anything like disney’s version—it’s more of a montage of visual cues intended to make us remember what we we know, or what we think we remember, about that period. and in that sense, it’s a perfect copy. a perfect copy of an original that doesn’t exist.
so if you build a theme park that is a copy of something that was a copy of something that didn’t exist in the first place, where does that leave you? in terms of baudrillard, quite confused. in terms of disney’s lawyers, in trouble.