"Why I Fear the Virtual; When Reality Dies"; a prose piece
Author's note: I wrote this piece to reflect a stream-of-consciousness, web of thoughts that belonged to a paranoid soul afraid of the power of the Internet, technology, and representations. Inspired by readings from Plato, Wendy Steiner, and John Berger. This piece was written for a course called Art, Design, and Digital Culture. This course explored the principles of design and digital image-making using Photoshop, Illustrator, and Processing. The course also focused heavily on discussing the integration of media with the arts and the effect this had in creating a virtual American society. The first part of this project was to write a scenario piece, and the second part was to illustrate it--bring my text to life--by creating a GIF on Photoshop.
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WHY I FEAR THE VIRTUAL; WHEN REALITY DIES
I enter a place where freshness of mind and mindless rituals reside incongruously with another. Halted rapture. And of course, dysnomia.
Black, white, black on black, white black white, black on white, white on black, back to the bursting mahogany fires of night life. This is a world, blurred by two realms of real, one at the hands of the enemy gate.
The last breath of who I was, who I am, who I was meant to be. Escapes.
You are nothing but skin and bones.
Images, pixels, representations, like usable fairy dust.
The claws of virtual vultures tamp my soul with torrential tides of the tactilely blind.
My character, my person. Greying things.
The real has departed, a skeleton at the feet of the virtual.
And nobody gives a damn. Let me fall, let them fall. Let us fall into a pseudo-world, overtaken by layers and layers of represented regurgitated gurgitated vomited and re-vomited. Representations. Aliens.
Ugly, fetid things festering in bubbling pus stews and boiling over to smother this world, my world.
What was once true strikes me as untrue, but how can I say such unkindly words when truth is predestined? No matter, they say. Truth is yet another perceived image, now rendered obsolete by people who realize that truth lies in the lies of the beholder.
I see my muses. Severed fragments of cutaway squares clinging desperately onto their faces, their doughy cheeks hardened and chipped away like a sculptor’s hacking at lacquered bronze. Like Rodin. I see my muses, once sensually present in warm flesh and simmering blood, now disintegrating, integrating, with the wind, lost in sin, collecting dust, imposing shameless dispositions.
I see my muses. Human beings walking aimlessly in an abstracted world of imbued shades of the untrue. Undone like pitiful strings hanging flimsy off a broken ribbon.
I see my muses, like when I once looked at the world and saw cornfields instead of city gore. Like the time I did not have to rely on intangibles to render my reality, refine the footing of my character’s gravity, perform my thoughts. Even when I am thinking, I am performing. I am an actor.
Here I go, so, I am a hero. Here I go, fixing my muses, grounding them in inexorable ancient verities in hopes that they will awaken from this tragedy. Brutal combat destroys me, but portraiture is immovable. My muses will remain models of portraiture.
I am forgetting something.
My muses do not exist, how ironic is this.
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