Margaret J. King’s article “Themeatics: The art of hyperreality” (2025) is an examination of how hyperreality can be a positive expression of human creativity and communication, and it uses Disneyland as its principal example. Essentially, King argues that the schemes originally devised by Walt Disney Imagineers to entertain guests and keep them immersed in the park produced a novel full brain-body experience that “has since become the standard expectation of virtual reality (VR) in gaming, sports, spectacle, signage, retail, dining, and, in cognitive science, research into the brain dynamics that drive all these” (2025). They define hyperreality not as an alternative reality but an irreversibly merged hybrid of fictional constructs and tangible experience which serves to elevate human experience and bypasses the analytical, rational mind in favor of engaging with emotional response. Theming and “themeatics” as the article defines it is the unification of multiple forms of media under one consistent theme in order to reduce contradictions in the guest or viewer’s experience and “…make sense of a disconnected, asynchronous, conflicted reality by transmuting memory, meaning, category, ideal, and archetype into a three-dimensional model (King, 2025).”
Main Street, USA gets special attention as the prime illustration of how this model of hyperreality functions. It exists not as a recreation or preservation of a real main street but instead an original work which draws equally from real memories of Walt Disney’s hometown, authentic architectural styles and flourishes from the late nineteenth-century, and the collective historic imagination’s vision of an idealized small town. Its effect on the cultural imagination was so profound that the National Trust’s “Main Street America” project was informed by the park, with the preservation effort geared towards preserving real life examples of what the park attempts to create and revitalization efforts of main streets across America using the fictional creation at Disneyland as their North Star (King, 2025). Main Street, USA – as King explains it – functions not as a replacement of culture or tangible reality but in conversation with them. In this view, the world of symbols and signs which characterizes hyperreality serves to enhance human communication, existing as an evolution of centuries of art and thought and allowing for more full expression and easier communication across cultural borders.
This article presented an interesting counterpoint to much of the work I’ve found discussing hyperreality. For one thing, it offers a useful set of examples for explaining the concept and how people encounter it in daily life, But more than that, by taking a positive view of the concept and the modes of communication it enables, the author offers a strong foundation for the point of view of the “instructor” character in my project, and for the Department of Hyperreality as a whole. I’m almost tempted to have the Department quote part or all of King’s definition of hyperreality in their mission statement, as it’s one of the few takes on Baudrillard’s much cited concept which doesn’t use it as a means of criticizing modern society and digital culture, but instead can position it as a different or even elevated form of culture. They even make the point that personal memory itself is unreliable, shifting with every recall and subject to our own biases, and so shouldn’t necessarily be held up as some sacrosanct thing when compared to fabricated reconstructions (King, 2025). The Department could simply take that reasoning and expand it to culture and history at large – even before the advent of digital technology and the information overload that followed, historical records were unreliable and prone to editing by people seeking to control the narrative. So why not just take that as a given and acknowledge that we’re crafting a narrative, not in an effort to consciously falsify things but in order to admit that whatever we create will inevitably come up short? For the Department, the truthfulness of a given narrative doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s internally consistent. King’s “themeatics” offers a way to accomplish that in both the virtual and physical world, engaging the full sensory human experience in a concerted effort to create a cohesive experience which fully immerses the individual in a fabricated – but no less real – reality.
As far as other progress on my project, I’ve now emailed the other prospective members of my committee and am going to start up conversations to get feedback on my concept and refine it further. I’m also going to start in on my training modules and the initial project pitch, as those could help me to define the scope of the project and show me what else I still need to learn. Also, while I haven’t yet taken the Temple equipment workshop (I’m scheduled for the 2nd), I do have access to a camera which can film in 4k and am going to start planning some test footage, as I don’t want it to be too time consuming but still provide a good sense of the tone and vibe I’m thinking for the finished project.
Work cited: King, M. J. (2025). Themeatics: The art of hyperreality. The Journal of Popular Culture, 58(1–2), 7–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13383