– When you woke up this morning, you found the world largely as you left it. You were still you; the room in which you awoke was the same one you went to sleep in. The outside world had not been rearranged. History was unchanged and the future remained unknowable. You woke up to reality. But what is reality?
– An ambivalent opposition between what I know and what exists regardless of my cognition. In other words, does reality exists per se beyond my mind, my eye and my experience, or is it ontologically non-existent, so is it an illusion, or rather, a dream?
– I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

//

Reality needs to feed itself on fictions, because the reality of the world is never enough for human being. It is even less relevant within the technological, visual and iconographic landscape in which we are now immersed, a space where fictionality has acquired a special ability to become real and to erase the originals, of which it is a representation in a perpetual kaleidoscope effect.
The image, as reproduction and representation of reality, confirms its inherent and insidious falsehood.
The gaze, in its interpretation of reality, is increasingly technologically mediated and as such also false, deceptive and producer of new simulacra.
Hyperreality is as uncertain as dream, which is dreamed like the dreamer who dream himself, and so on.

– In the dreamer’s dream, the dreamed one awoke.

The hypertrophic nature inherent the new anthropological spaces of collective intelligence exalts states of subjectivation created by the hybridization of real and fictious, in which is manifested the collapse of the imaginary over reality. We are witnesses of a technological migration – from fantasy to effectuation, with implications concerning the consistence of our co-existence in daily life experience.

The universe of dreams that until yesterday resided in the psychic, emotional and private dimension of man, has currently lost its secrecy, can be easily communicated and shared with others, can become common experience beyond linguistic tool. Everything can be objectified, represented, made alive. Our technological body carries a whole world, an environment in which to thrive, express, grow and to gain strength. And if this happens, the dogma of the uniqueness of reality starts to waver: “Self crushing” brings with it the plurality of the worlds. Parallel universes have left sci-fi books and the most daring cosmological hypotheses of quantum physics to become next-door worlds, which you can enter and exit with extreme ease.

Our social behavior moves into a narrative universe where the flesh no longer needs redemption, because it has already become virtual; body of light. In this perspective, the universe surrounding us becomes the corpus hermeticum of new fanta-technological and para-spiritual mythologies, which describe new collective representation/identification criteria, not only in psychological terms but also in terms of sensory apperception.

New technologies enable us to live the corporeity in a new, immaterial, psychological and philosophical form, something similar to the ghost-like and miraculous form traditionally attributed to ancient saints, ascetics and shamans; in this sense, technology allows us to live a sort of unsettling “journey into the spirit”, which in its original form is characterized – according to ancient traditions – by the dreamlike coincidence between the subject and the object of knowledge, and by the immersion into a sort of transcendental identification with the world. Here, then, electronics – which didn’t allow us to get to Mars – allows us to live this dream collectively, giving it a metaphysical (or speudo-spiritual) body which turns out to be totally credible, engaging, immersive and interactive.

//

All we got left is figuring out why there is today a widespread, and increasingly obsessive, eagerness for evanescent worlds, a feverish desire to project ourselves, at least illusorily, into the rarefied world of non-things. A world that, in today’s collective imagination, takes on the form of phantasmagorization. Because, although things in that dreamy world lose their materiality, the resulting non-things are still lived as simulacra of things. Or rather: as if they were bodies without bodies. Ghosts of bodies. Ghosts of things.