Such mapping was already widely used in nineteenth-century cinema machines. The Phenakisticope, the Zootrope, the Zoopraxiscope, the Tachyscope, and Marey's photographic gun were all based on placing a number of slightly different images around the perimeter of a circle. Even more striking is the case of Thomas Edison's first cinema apparatus. In 1887 Edison and his assistant, William Dickson, began experiments to adopt the already proven technology of a phonograph record for recording and displaying of motion pictures. In short, time was prepared to be recreated, manipulated and reordered.
Digital media makes commonplace the simulation of non- existent realistic worlds.
These latter films seem to demonstrate that, given enough time and money, almost anything can be simulated. For what is faked, of course, is not reality but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens. It is only this film-based image which digital technology has learned to simulate. And the reason we think that this technology has succeeded in faking reality is that cinema, over the course of the last hundred years, has taught us to accept its particular representational form as reality. What is faked is only a cinematic image.