We are still on our quest for meaning and purpose in a vast and indifferent universe - we are just distracted. It is merely a filler for the gap of meaning and habit left by traditional religions, after their symbolic expulsion in the nineteenth century. Starting with an adaptation of Ozymandias by Percy Shelley, this chapter suggests that consumerism has become our new religion and daily occupation. The narrative voice switches to first-person, mirroring works such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Twilight of the Idols, quoting metaphysical fundamentals such as ‘we are condemned with freedom’ and exploring their consequences. The third chapter, House of Cards, is an ode to Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the architects of modern existentialism. In our daze, we are no longer projects of genuine selfhood, but an amalgam of the stories we buy into. Our quest for productivity has exhausted and isolated us, and in this state, it is easiest to sell convenience to us. We are reduced to expressing ourselves through consumption and branding - not creativity, individuality, or original thought. Hardly anything remains original or authentic in a system where anything can be replicated and mass-produced. The second chapter, Simulacrum, is inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacrum and Simulation, in which the philosopher laments the distortion of our reality resulting from producing a fake version of ourselves and participating in a fake version of our world. It gives us anxiety, while also overwhelming and sedating us. We are pressured to consume and participate in the running commentary, to constantly share our private thoughts and experiences in public. Our social spaces are spammed with misinformation masquerading as insight. Much of modern life has been reduced to a shallow, repetitive, fast-paced torrent of mass information, that we no longer have the capacity to fully process. Our addiction to social media and junk-food entertainment has caused the loss of the emotional dynamic that would otherwise govern an outward-directed, cognitively-creative life. The Current is a metaphor for how our relationship with the internet has heralded an unprecedented broadening of horizons, and exposure to the experience of millions of others that coincides with a proportionate, private alienation. Instant gratification and compulsion characterize our twenty-first-century lives in the hyperreal world, where many significant life experiences are now virtual, leaving us hollow. The first chapter, Welcome to the Current, pays tribute to Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, in which the philosopher examines the changes to society and humanity brought on by mass media and communication. It urges us to overcome this nihilism by refining our individuality in solitude and nature, before adopting a mood of rebellion and questioning that seeks to bring about change in society, while on an individual level encourages us to bring meaning to our struggle by embracing passion, self-ownership, beauty, and art.Īrcadia is comprised of five chapters, each paying tribute to a particular philosopher, while also referencing dozens of poets, artists, authors, and thinkers that have shaped contemporary human psychology and culture. Arcadia is a celebration of hybridity, loaded with political, social, historical, and cultural metaphors, cleverly-illustrated with objects from Reisinger’s imagination.Īrcadia explores the anguish of our modern loneliness, alienation, status anxiety, and depression – all brought on by our pervasive consumerist phantasmagoria of a culture. Arcadia alludes to the iconoclastic philosophy of existentialism – the philosophy that draws all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism, that holds freedom and responsibility as the supreme values, and authenticity as the primary virtue, encouraging an inhabited way of life that creates a new definition of existence as choice, action, and self-assertion. Written as a traditional narrative poem, illuminated through digital art, and elevated with electronic music, Arcadia is allegorical, linking literary art with a visual sermon.
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