Reality
has experienced a considerable number of variations over the last one hundred
years. As people became increasingly
uncomfortable amidst the sensory distortion in modern technological society,
certain artists began to explore reconnecting themselves to the flowing blendable
continual stimuli of nature in the only place where they knew such stimuli were
still easily accessible: the world of dreams and the unconscious. European surrealists like Salvador Dali and
Rene Magritte and Mexican surrealists like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo
created visual worlds where viewers could reconnect to their own dreams and to
their own organic coherent senses of self.
In Latin America, the magic realism movement was based on reconnecting
to the natural world through traditional magical motifs. In magic realism, people and animals slid
into and out of magical spiritual worlds from which the conventional real world
was never neatly separated anyway.
Rather than more private dreams as in surrealism, magic realism
concerned itself with the collective magical dream motifs of traditional
societies that were still deeply tied to their natural roots and to their
mystical traditions. Writers like
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa and artists like Francisco Toledo
brought this magic realist world to life.
The
key for both these movements was to allow people to become regrounded in
created worlds filled with organic flowing blendable continual stimuli. These movements represented attempts to
temporarily suppress not only the sensory distortion of modern technological
living environments, but the subtle mirroring and modeling from all the complex
machines that surrounded modern people – mirroring and modeling that made them
feel like robots themselves.
Since
the coming of the digital age, people have developed other solutions for
dealing with the problems of living in modern technological society. They have developed ways to create new kinds
of configurations of stimuli for their fields of experience. New kinds of reality.
Two
of the new kinds of reality are related.
Virtual reality is a temporary replacement of conventional reality. Virtual reality is created by projecting pure
defined discrete digital stimuli into an experiential vacuum. It is an alternate reality that temporarily
fills our field of experience. Some
examples of this are medical simulation to practice a surgery, flight
simulation, war simulation, and simulation of new homes for prospective
buyers. Of course, there are always
video games, particularly multi-player video games. All of these realities are ones in which a
person temporarily immerses himself in an alternate world, a vacuum world
devoid of the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli that give phenomena
substance and that create richer more nuanced backdrops. But because of the lack of this kind of
stimuli, a person experiences himself in a world that is free from the organic
perishability that goes together with a sense of mortality.
Augmented
reality is a variation on virtual reality in which a technologically-created
alternate reality coexists side by side with conventional reality in order to
enhance it. Google Glass gives
information about phenomena as one looks at them. At the same time, Google Glass takes
pictures, finds directions with GPS and gives a person access to his
e-mails. With augmented reality, a
person is never totally separated from the conventional world of primary
experience. But the alternate reality
aspect of one’s field of experience when using augmented reality helps to
neutralize the unpredictable and therefore potentially more dangerous aspects
of conventional reality. In this way,
one doesn’t experience the perishability aspect of conventional reality while
dwelling in it. One minimizes, but
doesn’t eliminate the number of flowing blendable continual stimuli that one
experiences while in augmented reality.
Still in minimizing the organic perishability of primary experience in
one’s conventional reality, one is also separating oneself from the sense of
substance in one’s field of experience, and one is diminishing the possibility
of rich vibrant nuanced experiences in his life.
From
a different perspective, reality television is an attempt to bring some kind of
surrogate organic grounding to our lives through modern digital
technology. Instead of watching scripted
shows, where people feel mediated from the reality of the dramatic situation by
the script, in reality television, life – real life, primary experience life –
seems to unfold before the viewers’ eyes.
Of course, situations are frequently developed as the premises for the
human encounters we see, and these situations magnify the possibility of messy
human conflict, of heightened organic friction.
Whether it is young adults living together in a strange city or people
living together in a primitive environment, we get to see what appears to be
authentic unscripted human life.
The
essential point in this discussion has been that in the last one hundred years,
people have been playing around with some different new kinds of reality,
because they have basically found their conventional reality to be lacking in
some way. As technology has increasingly
taken over human living environments, there has been a loss of the organic
grounding that is necessary as a template for making and receiving organic
imprints, and, in particular, for a person properly bonding with other
people. There has been a loss of the
organic flowing blendable continual stimuli that are necessary for rich vibrant
experiences, for feeling fully alive as animals. The fields of experience of human beings have
increasingly become vacuum and tension-pocket living environments, environments
that alternately understimulate and overstimulate, environments that create
sensory distortion. In order to find
organic environments that fill our fields of experience, we have had to recur
to the one large space that hasn’t been directly filled with technology: our
minds.
With surrealism
and magic realism, painters built worlds with porous boundaries between modern
technological conventional reality and more traditional organic reality, such
that people could go back and forth between the two realities and try to
replant the organic grounding and the organic flowing blendable continual
stimuli back in the modern world. With
the surrealists, the more traditional organic reality was the private world of
dreams. With the magic realists, it was
the collective world of Latin American magical motifs.
Surrealism
and magic realism were developed at a point in history before the total
takeover of our attention spans by screens – television and computer screens. There was still a sense of greater connection
to the organic grounding that remained in human living environments, a greater
awareness of the need for organic grounding to function properly as mammalian
human beings. In today’s world, many
people try to survive amidst sensory distortion by trying to balance
configurations of defined discrete figure stimuli and endless infinite
continuous vacuum stimuli; that is, creating a balance among the very sources
of stimuli that create sensory distortion.
These are the people who embrace virtual reality and augmented reality.
There
is also the attempt to obtain grounding by identifying with characters in
reality television shows. Reality
television is an attempt to create heightened surrogate primary experience
through the mediation of a television screen.
It is much more mediated than the immediate sensory experience of a surrealist
or magic realist painting. Surrealism
and magic realism are explorations of grounded mental states: dreams and magic. Reality television is an attempt to infuse
grounding in the lives of ordinary people who, like their viewers, suffer from
the sensory distortion of modern technological society. But organic friction is artificially generated through heightened social conflict
between the people on the screen, and through heightened conflict with the
living environment, which is generated by putting the people on the screen
among those extreme primitive natural environments that remain. Heightened organic friction between people
and within primitive natural environments is an attempt to help viewers
overcome their own numbness by watching other people attempt to really come
alive on reality television. But
television itself is numbing, so the life situations presented on reality
television have to project exaggerated tension-filled conflict and stress in
order to help viewers feel alive. This
means that the life situations on reality television end up presenting negative
tension-pocket static-filled friction rather than the more organic friction
that the viewers really crave.
People
today are very concerned about reality, because reality in their daily lives is
so off balance as a result of the sensory distortion in modern technological
living environments. Without a lot of
readily available organic grounding, the solutions to the discomfort created by
the sensory distortion found in living environments can create a reality as off
balance as the reality that is readily available. If we want to return to a more natural
reality, we have to find a way of actually regenerating organic grounding in
our living environments. It is organic
grounding that humans really are looking for today.
(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow
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