I/We Art and Coming into Being

I/We Art the Red Pill and the Transition from Modernism to Postmodernism

The mass destruction of the second world war shattered not just the lived world but our belief in any universal truth or that progress would inevitably lead to a better future. These beliefs ended with the war and started the movement toward a postmodern world where knowledge is seen as unreliable where nothing can be known with any certainty. The Matrix 1999 directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski takes this to an extreme, suggesting that the real is totally manufactured. To come into being and see this as a created reality you need to take the red pill or live in an illusion by taking the blue pill. If you take the red pill you are then released into the actual lived world and the offer of a means to bring about a new social order based on the real. The film signals a link to Jean Baudrillard’s work Simulacra and Simulation 1981. Baudrillard, like the Matrix argues, that we are increasingly living in a simulated world where over time this simulation has no relationship to the real and becomes a simulacrum. Simulation and simulacra can act to mask the real, perverting any basis from which to build meaning.

I/We Art Images and Video

While agreeing with Baudrillard I would suggest that the impact of the disconnection from the real at a time of rapid social and economic change does not produce a false reality but a kind of chaos which is better described as endless contradictions. Such contradictions can create social tensions, opposition, struggle and conflict but also calmness or joy in finding a resolution. Arguably what this means for the “I” the self is a need to continuously adapt, a kind of coming into being again and again in seeking to make sense of the lived world, the “We”. (A depiction of adaptation and coming into being as a continuous process can be seen the Matrix). However, I/We art does not offer a red or blue pill. In a postmodern AI driven world can we be sure that either is real? Instead the work seeks to invite the viewer to experience and apply their own sense of self allowing reflection on how we seek to find calmness or joy through resolving contradictions / chaos, described here through representational and abstract elements.