Simulacrum

[1] The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god.

He gives the example of Greek statuary, which was crafted larger on the top than on the bottom so that viewers on the ground would see it correctly.

[5] Nietzsche addresses the concept of simulacrum (but does not use the term) in the Twilight of the Idols, suggesting that most philosophers, by ignoring the reliable input of their senses and resorting to the constructs of language and reason, arrive at a distorted copy of reality.

[6] French semiotician and social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues in Simulacra and Simulation that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal.

According to the philosopher Florent Schoumacher,[12] in societies of hypermodernity, in the West, the social contract states that we are obliged to use “simulacra”.

Recreational simulacra include reenactments of historical events or replicas of landmarks, such as Colonial Williamsburg and the Eiffel Tower, and constructions of fictional or cultural ideas, such as Fantasyland at The Walt Disney Company's Magic Kingdom.

Beer (1999: p. 11) employs the term "simulacrum" to denote the formation of a sign or iconographic image, whether iconic or aniconic, in the landscape or greater field of Thangka art and Tantric Buddhist iconography.

For example, an iconographic representation of a cloud formation sheltering a deity in a thangka or covering the auspice of a sacred mountain in the natural environment may be discerned as a simulacrum of an "auspicious canopy" (Sanskrit: Chhatra) of the Ashtamangala.

Examples of simulacra in the sense of artificial or supernaturally or scientifically created artificial life forms include: Also, the illusions of absent loved ones created by an alien life form in Stanislaw Lem's Solaris can be considered simulacra.

A Potemkin village is a simulation: a facade meant to fool the viewer into thinking that he or she is seeing the real thing.

Image of a real apple (left), and plastic food model apple (right). The fake apple is a simulacrum.
Mole & Thomas, Human Statue of Liberty (1919)—12,000 people in the flame of the torch, 6,000 in the rest of the shape. Plato was referring to an optical illusion such as this in his discussion of simulacra.