CONCEPT
The Provenance Problem
The insight, mapped by Philip K. Dick through the metaphor of the electric sheep, that the simulation can be perfect—functionally identical to the original—but that the knowledge of where a thing came from changes the experience of the thing, and that the gradual normalization of the simulation as the reference point corrodes the capacity to recognize the real.
Provenance is the history of where a thing came from. For most of human history, the provenance of cultural objects—tools, texts, artworks—was inseparable from their function: the hand-thrown bowl bore the trace of the hands that made it, the written text bore the trace of the mind that composed it, and the trace was part of what the object meant. Philip K. Dick’s electric sheep names what happens when trace disappears: a mechanical animal indistinguishable from a biological one sits on Rick Deckard’s roof, and his neighbors believe it is real, and only Deckard knows the truth, and the knowing poisons something in him he cannot name. The simulation performs the function. The function is not the problem. The problem is that Deckard knows, and the knowing creates a gap between the sheep’s convincing exterior and its
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