19 April , 2021

Sometimes, reality drifts away as if it never existed. It sinks somewhere deeper, until you finally forget about it. Even if someone tries to remember, reality dissolves like a dream. Like a moment when the world of darkness slowly fades into light, a dream into a dream, or when, in a cacaphonic madness, you sail away to an island, separating yourself from everything you know (1). An intangible imaginary that travels continuously into the unknown and finally leaves you standing in an oasis of illusion.

For a while, I avoided the word illusion. I tried my damnedest to give up that which links reality with magic. After all, magic is like an anti-reality outlet, the theistic fictions of the devil, turning facts into a parallel world. Eventually, this canonical avoidance, which itself became magic, cut me in half and, realising that magic was merely the art of physical science, I decided to delve deeper. To know reality, I have to accept whatever it gives me.

Indeed, in my thoughts and words, I often confuse the concepts of reality and reality, trying to level them or separate them. However, for the time being, I am placing reality and reality on the same horizon, creating a convenient line for further research, but I feel obliged to warn that reality and reality can be treated as one or as ontological entities with different conceptual models (2), but I will discuss this later. Like everything else, concepts can deceive, so they should be relied upon in a limited way, keeping in mind what we are dealing with. After all, I, myself, am perhaps only an illusion of appearance?

Appearances

The world is a spectacle that turns you into a nihilist if you try to get close. And in the end, it seems to me that this nihilism mixes with a formless faith, turning into shadows painted in pastel. So white that they are blinding.

Reality, derived from the Latin word realis, meaning thingness, certainty (3), suggests a perception that we must follow: reality is everything that is thing. On the other hand, philosophical approaches can vary, and the theory of disembodied reality is becoming increasingly relevant in the humanities in terms of the perception of reality. However, at this early stage of design research, it is important for me to feel and understand a sensory and cognitive reality - one that can be felt or perceived. So in order to experience reality in a primordial way, the key is not to lose the movement. In other words, movement creates reality, appearance or, if you like, reality (4). Movement as a process is all that I am capable of imagining. Even imagining itself catches me as a process, eventually turning into a thought or a sentence. Everything, even that which seems to be static, is ultimately a process/movement/motion/motion (5). When we move, both anatomically and psychologically, we process things that we call perceptions/perception. The perception of reality is always subjective, because perception itself is such and we do not know any other reality. We cannot speak or even imagine an object-object relationship. Even if we tried, we would only end up perceiving the relationship between ourselves and those objects. Ultimately, we are unable to perceive even one object holistically. Any object is always more than we can imagine (6). As a simple example, we can imagine a chair. Looking at it, touching it, sitting in it, we can only perceive as much as our perception allows, but ultimately we cannot feel, see or perceive what is inside it, its splinters or the overall picture. We perceive fragments. What reality gives us, taken from the whole.

However, the limited human perception gives us a lot and even that we are not able to comprehend. I am particularly interested in the dream-being episode. After a dream, sometimes we seem to carry something very important with us, but as soon as we wake up, we realise that we have only a feeling left in our hands. But does that really make this reality any less real? It is for this reason that, in reflecting on the subjectivity of reality, I want to open the door to the illusion. If we accept the visual as one of the most important proofs of reality, however limited it may be, the visual can create a feeling, an experience and, ultimately, the reality we live in. After all, it may very well be that it is all there is. And the world does not really exist.

1. Joseph Campbell. Šizofrenija: vidinė kelionė, 2007. Metafora apibūdinanti realybės ir nerealybės atsiskyrimą per suvokimo prizmę. It šizofreniško asmens sąmonė atsiskiria nuo pasąmonės. Panirimas į save. Panaši alegorija naudojama ir Robert Eggers filme Švyturys.

2. Rūta Šerpytytė. Nihilizmas ir tikrovė: spekuliatyvus realizmas - nihilizmo banalizavimas?, 2012

3. Lietuvių kalbos žodynas

4. Liedeke Plate; Anneke Smelik, Routledge research in cultural and media studies, Performing memory in art and popular culture-Routledge, 2013

5. Kristupas Sabolius, Įnirtingas miegas

6. Kristupas Sbolius, Apie tikrovę,2020. Spekuliatyvaus realizmo OOO teorija apie daiktų būtį, atsisakant egocentrizmo.