Since their inception in the XIX Century, mass media have been crucial in shaping the image of the urban environment on our collective subconscious. In the early 20th Century, newspapers and magazines bustled with exacerbated but fascinating images of the city of the future, which appeared as hyperbolic portrayals of the perception that the contemporary citizen had of his own effervescing modern environment. Cinema soon joined this process, as a privileged, mechanical eye that could record, analyse and reinvent the accelerated modern city and its evolution. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) epitomized the powers of the new medium, providing the viewers with a window that allowed them to see this Lacanian Other come alive, somehow encapsulating their own experience of the new urban reality. Over half a century later films such as Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) took the torch as fictional future representations of postmodern space that provided the postmodern citizen with a suitably hyper-real substitute of reality. Three decades after that, the videogames and virtual reality experiences based on those very films promise to break the final barrier, allowing us to cross to the other side of the membrane, and freely move through that which is, literally, an augmented reality.

中文翻译：

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大众媒体与后现代城市体验。从大都会到银翼杀手；从电影到虚拟现实

自 19 世纪诞生以来，大众媒体在塑造我们集体潜意识中的城市环境形象方面发挥了至关重要的作用。在 20 世纪初期，报纸和杂志充斥着关于未来城市的夸张但迷人的图像，这些图像似乎是对当代公民对自己活跃的现代环境的看法的夸张描绘。电影很快加入了这个过程，作为一种特权的机械眼睛，可以记录、分析和重塑加速的现代城市及其演变。弗里茨·朗 (Fritz Lang) 的《大都会》(1926) 集中体现了新媒体的力量，为观众提供了一个窗口，让他们看到这个拉康式的他者栩栩如生，以某种方式封装了他们自己对新城市现实的体验。半个多世纪后，《异形》（1979 年）和《银翼杀手》（1982 年）等电影将火炬作为后现代空间的虚构未来代表，为后现代公民提供了一个合适的超现实现实替代品。三十年后，基于这些电影的视频游戏和虚拟现实体验有望打破最后的障碍，让我们能够穿越到膜的另一边，并自由地穿越那实际上是增强现实的东西。