Between San Francisco and Los Angeles, Eco was able to visit seven wax versions of Leonardo's Last Supper. The reality of the absolute fake Eco called hyperreality. A perfect simulation and a computer toy world are works of hyperreality. They fake so wholly that as a whole they have a reality. Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept.
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance.
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself. In the desert of the real, we are busy building paradises of the hyperreal. However, the territory of the simulacra is blank.