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You are asleep, and your vision is a dream; all you are see is an illusion. (1)
OVNI disReality aims to reflect upon different phenomena of the critique of reality, their
repercussions and the horizons that they illuminate, or recall.
Extremely heterogeneous traditions and forms of experience radically question not only the concept
of reality, but the very experience of the real.
Some of the most radical questionings of reality arise from the culture of images, when the real
world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings. (2) Others are a result of
simulation mechanisms: as soon as the copy ceases to be a pale reflection of the original image and
begins to erode it in its entirety, then the original becomes nothing more than one copy among
many, and not necessarily the one with the greatest verisimilitude. The extreme condensation of
these phenomena springs from digital technology: video games, simulation, virtual images,
expanded reality, mutating into fields as diverse as leisure, military training, communication,
industrial processes, personal relationships, the administration of pleasure... becoming the psychic
and emotional habitat of a large part of the population. A fictional whole.
Nevertheless, this virtual reality in turn generates a reified, totally physical reality, like that which
we now see on a grand scale in cities like Dubai, and in so many other instances of our everyday
life. Realities emanating directly from virtual environments, which also condense around social and
work relationships, and the spaces and non-places that they generate. Virtual metaphysics thus
seems to turn back to the physical, in a feedback dynamic. The evanescent and inapprehensible
post-modern reality once again coagulates into cumbersome, real structures of power and
exploitation, but this time they are suspended in the digital cloud, and their presence is therefore
more volatile and harder to confront. In China, for example, there are hundreds of thousands of
illegal workshops in which workers play online videogames for twelve hours a day, to win and
accumulate virtual assets that are then exported to the rest of the world, and virtual currency that is
traded against real currencies. In the fictional all that emerges, realities merge like layers in the
dreams of an ever-deepening sleep.
The sleep of our era is not a good sleep that provides rest. It is an anxious sleep that leaves you
feeling even more worn out (...) There is a narcosis that begs for an even deeper narcosis. Those
who, by luck or misfortune, awaken from the prescribed sleep, come into this world like lost
children. (3)
A sleep that turns everything it touches into images. A sleep based on image as a veil, as as a social
instrument of blindness. Sure enough, a veil of mass produced images spreads out, covering the
entire field of vision, like a master film, a screen-world with a flexible, ever-changing reality that
clings to the skin of objects, people and landscapes. Not like a patchwork of handcrafted images,
personal visions, dreams, imaginations or ruins of former imaginaries... sprinkled with gaps,
inaccuracies that invite vision and imagination. Rather, a visible all, fuelled by the realities it
conceals.
Thus we find a kind of questioning of reality that is directly political: the observation of the
expansion of a dominant reality that threatens the fabric of other realities; that threatens to erase
(Tiqqun)