Shining threads

Shining threads

Saturday 16 June 2012

Reality/unreality

It's all real yet none of it exists in any substantial sense.

This petrol world - oil for fuel, plastic for toys, pollution for air.

We dwell in a version of reality which we are asked to buy into. To invest in a stake, betting on a better future, or at least securing a place in a better-than-other-places now.

Everywhere we are confronted with assaults on our sense of what is - stylised, touched-up, genetically-engineered, digitally-enhanced, perceptually-lifted. To be natural is to be boring. Hyperreality lifts us into a fantasy realm, divorced from mundane consequences. Like a credit-bubble, it's fun whilst it lasts. Whilst the skin beneath our make-up decays and the self beneath our persona quietly dies. This is a Demiurge's world we are led to believe in. Caves of compromise. Castles of convenience. Endless programmes of titillation and distraction from the main event. Which is everything you truly desire.

A battle between the ideal, the actual and the possible. Between how we want to see it, how it appears and how it could be. 

Coming back to our senses is our contemporary salvation. The crucifixion of the symbolic. Where crosses and crescents are discarded so we can stand tall and free on the hill-top, seeing the sky clearly without perceptual filters added on by culture.

Beyond art is the art of life. Beyond the art of life is life. Beyond life is.....


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