Criticism: Accepted

The Roundabout Way of Things: A Manifesto

Populus vult decipi (the people want to be deceived)
--Ancient Roman saying

Media Introduction
Queue Music: Not classical or sweeping, but kitsch - wistful and naive. Introduction is in time with the eighties Altered Images song "I could be happy."

The introduction begins with a very young girl in a crib. From a first person viewpoint we/she look out from the bars at a dim, neglected grey nursery room. There is a single window, with a series of slight cracks, through which we can make out a miserable and hazy urban block.

After a short time to establish the newborn in this austere setting, a parent enters (looking extremely plain in shades of grey and without personal embellishment of any sort) and whisks us away.

Cut away to a bright flash of white light as an optical technician, one eye impossibly large due to magnifying instrument, reaches forward into our viewpoint with something transparent at the end of an instrument. Once again we fade to white, but not before a close-up of the child's eye - it dilates as the technician carefully inserts a shimmering lens.

Back in the nursery room, a 3rd person viewpoint reveals the child giggling, through the bars of her crib, at the wall with the cracked window. Her eyes emit a faint glow in the dim light, and we are compelled to ghost through the back of her head to see the world as she does.

In quick succession scene elements begin to change: cracks on the wall begin to smooth over from the ends inward, dents disappear, cobwebs vanish, a rosy hue fades over the room's midtone grey, and finally an animated bear begins to dance on the wall surface.

We leave the girl and begin to move towards the window as it mends itself. Just before we pass through the glass the outer haze recedes and sunlight bursts into the room. Outside we find an urban block in the middle of a miraculous renewal: plant life is sprouting, trash shriveling as if melted by the intensifying sunlight. A parched fountain sprouts water and becomes ornate as a haggard old man huddled on the sidewalk first becomes a featureless grey form, then a symbolic frowny face, and finally vanishes.

We track into one of many looming high-rises and pass upward through its floors. Each room is pure magic - images dance across surfaces, textures shimmer impossibly. Occasionally a flicker streaks across our view, and the scene is stripped of its embellishment. At these moments, a midtone grey covers everything: people, objects, furniture, and walls - all become minimal and diminished. Inconsistencies may be noticed...say between the belly of a grey-clad inhabitant and the Adonis he emerged from.
Our ascent ends on a balcony many floors up. Vivid surfaces distinguish each high-rise in view. They are all quite tall, but in the distance one monumental spire pops. A brief flicker and it vanishes momentarily - its not real.

Trompe l'oeil (To fool the eye)

The eyepiece, or looking glass, is a socializing instrument, for it provides access to contemporary society. While participation in the communal illusion is not explicitly mandatory, the eyepieces are ubiquitous and thus taken for granted. Those who choose to live away from the sterility of a high-rise, where spaces are not conceived to facilitate illusion, are alone with a bleak reality. Ground level is a cluttered, neglected place that is, along with the sky, aggressively redesigned in the standard projected perception. Those actually on ground level, as with most undesirables, will likely be removed in the layering of the experience filters, or even transformed and interpolated as some sort of wandering animal, since no party to the robust illusion will ever be in a position to physically touch an object on ground level and dispel the artifice.

The infrastructure of society, referred to as an "infostructure" by technicians, has evolved to facilitate the delivery of an ambitious overlay of experience. Cutting edge design aggressively overlays the outside world, while carefully re-imaging, and allowing personal customizability for, the blank surfaces, props (cups, seats, anything tangible) and appearances of the people that are found in a high-rise. As a result, the physical possessions of the typical citizen are very austere, and often show signs of neglect that are simply "patched up in post." A cup without the eyepiece is a boring affair that becomes capable of any number of permutations "through the looking glass." The uniform, limited space of everyday activity is an affordance – functioning much like a green screen did in the cinema. This standard organization allows for communal experience design, where social interaction adds validity. As a result, a faulty device is experienced as acute anxiety – sudden alienation.

"A Vast Tapestry of Lies on which we feed"
--Pinter

The genesis of contemporary society is rooted in a desire for wellbeing and happiness but an inability to affect meaningful change. Unsustainable modes of life, particularly in the appetite of the first world, slowly eroded the natural balance of the world’s ecosystems. Climate change, flagging biodiversity, and toxicity drove populations indoors and while the larger issue of responsibility always loomed, the immediate frustration of a restricted, fearful population took precedence. At this crucial juncture the first world, eventually the only ones in any position to insulate and maintain human life (at a cost, as we will see), began to campaign against the perception of limitation; against the reality of a world in decline.

It is somehow fitting that as mankind diminished the earth we became more proficient at simulating it. Concepts such as the ecological footprint, which predicted insufficient resources and space for privileged lifestyles, failed to foresee the effects of the proliferation of virtual space. Meta-worlds, worlds upon worlds, began to see mainstream use as a remedy for the shrinking boundaries of physical reality. As reality pushed mankind back, society pushed back over the top with its own version of reality – one where materialism could sustain itself without material; consumerism without physical consumption. Production of material goods faltered as the production of experience thrived.

Consequently, the grand achievements of modern society are vapor. One in particular: As time passed under the illusion, a great monument rose to commemorate the uniquely talented fabricators. This tower, impossibly high, rises with each successive maestro, who in his turn designs and implements another section to its peak. While the physicality of this tower is treated as an inside joke even among the population (a glance without the looking glass easily confirms this), it has great weight as a symbol of how robust the means of perception have become.

While minor details are customizable, this illusion exists on a grand, social scale. The looking glass confers access to all the shared experiences that define culture. The glass became ubiquitous because it offered us an escape from the ruined landscape of our folly – there was no need to force it on anyone. Now, after generations of usage, no formal law yet exists to legislate its usage, but it is an alien urge to want to remove it for any extended period of time. Put simply, without the glass people see the prison that progress has erected around them.

On that note, it is worthwhile to comment on ‘modern’ man. Contemporary occupants of the skyscrapers are a contradictory lot. They eat little and only of the barest essentials, drink solely water, and have few physical possessions – Physically, their lives are standardized uniformity. However, through the looking glass their meager possessions become incredibly variant, their fashion striking, their food presentable, and their world painterly. It is an odd mixture of austere and opulent. In fact, while a member of society still lives with little regard for their impact on the real world, they have become practically ethereal…

"God dwells in the details"
--Van der Rohe

So, as generations have lived and passed on “through the looking glass,” a quite unexpected upside has come of our mass exodus from bitter reality. The land is recuperating in our absence - the mixed blessing of the fetish for projection. There is a small but growing movement to safeguard this transformation, and such a movement needs solidarity.

We will reveal ourselves in the minute details of the illusion; so that we may organize kindred spirits who seek to venture responsibly back out into the world. This responsibility is of grave importance, as without the burden of accountability one should remain yoked to the eyepiece. While the real world is not yet suitable for habitation, our goal should be to venture out every so often and do what good we can to marry ourselves to what is the basis for all our fantasies. To ensure that those who would join us are dedicated to the world we all left behind, we will leave clues for those who are tempted to remove the eyepiece. Information can be hidden throughout the illusion, but one must be predisposed to find it – anamorphic imagery, glitches in the experience, superimposition of the real – these are all tools for organizing those who would reject the artifice.

As with all sacred bonds, a ceremony is appropriate, and I have one in mind. What I propose is a conflation: Each spring, from one window of one room, in a building of our choosing, the impossible tower that embodies the space of our hibernation will collapse through the looking glass. After the dust settles, we will take our eyepieces off (for once not surprised that it does not stand), travel to our best guess of where it would have stood (were it ever to have existed), and tend to a garden.