Our sense of reality is personal. Spinning continuously in our endless loops of production, we start to wonder whether our model of the world makes any sense. Constantly tired or over-worked, our existence seems to accommodate a kind of world-making that it is not merely our own. However, our perception of the world and of reality cannot be separated from our own individuality. Husserl’s concept of the life-world considers that our perceptions about the world are inseparable from everything we have experienced throughout our lives. Therefore, the lifeworld is encompassed by subjective and objective characteristics. The crumbs left on our subconscious by our perceptions and experiences of this world, are a stark reminder that lifeworlds are objective in the sense that they reflect intersubjective realities.
As new technologies follow each other to replace the previous ones, we have found ourselves partaking in new electronic worlds. From technical images, electronic photographic creations and videos to VR and AR technologies, everything is becoming synthetic. It is critical thus to consider the important distinction between the “artificial” and the “synthetic” as analysed by Herbert Simon. The artificial is a creation simply resembling of the original. Instead, the synthetic is the purposeful creation that is genuine and meaningful. Synthetic experiences are genuine and intelligent.
As a new cognition of the synthetic and a synthetic cognition open up new possibilities for considering our relationship with the world, this exhibition focuses on synthetic freedoms, produced through a process of synthesis, a unique mixture of parts that compose a unified whole, rather than artificial, mere copies of the authentic experience characterised by their resemblance to the physical. The synthetically created worlds are not mere simulations of the actual world or fictions, deemed as fake, but rather forms of temporal ecstasis. The exhibition places great emphasis on the difference between the ‘synthetic’ and the ‘artificial’ terms that at times are used interchangeably, as these notions are set apart through considerations of what is ‘unnatural’ or ‘manufactured’ phenomena.
Synthetic worlds are the culmination of concentrations of data, computations, sums of dots and positionings. Hybrids. Yet, this is true for the ‘actual’ worlds we are living in, as they are also computed by nature and our nervous systems. There’s a different kind of technology in our physical reality that calculates everything on the basis of punctuated stimuli. This is what we perceive as actual.
The exhibition argues that these synthetic worlds are as actual as the ‘actual’ world and the ‘actually’ perceived world is as fictional and synthesized as the synthetic worlds. Bringing forward the differences between the ‘real’ that focuses on authenticity and on ‘Actual’ that focuses on present reality over alternatives. Navigating these worlds feels similar to navigating the actual world, we build (new) perceptions and experience and create memories. We experience and live them as fully as possible using our cognition and therefore creating a new sense of world making through them. We remember them, we remember how we felt, who and what we encountered. This sense of synthetic freedom and the reality that it forms offer new ways to critique societal structures and delve into constructed narratives. Exploring ways of othering and synthetic worlds, the main focus of the exhibition is synthetic freedom and narratives of embodied memory.
The exhibition, framing synthetic reality as a valid, embodied experience draws intriguing parallels to how we perceive and assign meaning in both natural and artificial environments. The exhibition offers alternative ways of exploring contemporary life through a philosophical and technological lens.
Shedding a new light on how synthetic realities are quickly becoming more prevalent and relevant in our lives, from virtual spaces and digital identities to laboratory-created materials, the exhibition offers new ways of experiencing them without merely deeming them as imitations of the real. The exhibition’s subject is critical at these unprecedented times of increasing presence of synthetic environments in technology, media, and personal narratives, making it timely and highly relevant to contemporary society.
Considering how we dissect our actual experience of the world and this sense of synthetic freedom within over-lapping planes of reality, the exhibition aims at diversifying the perceptions of such worlds. The artists also consider these synthetic visual and virtual languages rom video games to VR/AR/ technologies of their own logic in the context of art production too.
Through diverse readings of technological determinism, social constructivism and posthumanism along the exhibition considers the dualities of (synthetic) never. It becomes a contrast to Heidegger’s recasting of casts Husserl’s epistemological conception of synthesis in terms of ontology and treatment as an act of interpretation the Aristotelian conception of synthesis as part of the hermeneutic understanding of letting something be seen as something and establishes that synthetic worlds are themselves actualities. A clear reminder that these synthetic worlds are not very different kinds of order, but as chaotic and calculated as our actual world, maybe at times smoother, pliable and virtual. Functioning in a similar manner, endlessly reshaping itself in an informatic feedback loop that transverses our culture. The blurriness of these worlds resembles the malleability of our outward expression. In doing so, it emphasizes the common essence that transcends our physical cultural borders and societal constructs. These overlapping planes of different realities remind us that we are far beyond our physical bodies, experiences and perceptions, we are a kaleidoscope of synthetic experiences, emotions and connections that transcend the surface.