Man in the water!

The Burst of Extinction

"Anyone who has begun to glimpse the magnitude of the world order and its laws easily loses their own small self." —Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of His Childhood, 1910 The subject is doomed to suffer constant paramnesia if they attempt to confront their experience of the world. This sensation has sharpened as the stimuli received daily are amplified. In this way, when everything is possible, there is nothing to hold onto. In 1999, in an atmosphere surrounded by astonishment and phantoms over the turn of the millennium, eXistenZ by David Cronenberg was released, a free-fall exercise through the fabric of reality. Allegra Geller and Ted Pikul immerse themselves in a video game that constantly leads them to question whether their environment is real. The notion, which Baudrillard posits in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), of models of the real that do not originate in reality is repeated throughout the film. This drives the characters to continuously touch the objects around them; this search for sensation and an anchor in the material world leads them to a haptic knowledge that is as tainted as their surrounding visual reality. This wandering through an environment that provides no assurance that their perception and memories are real leads them to a new reality, a final screen where eXistenZ, the name of the game, is actually a creation of tranCendenZ. The subject is doomed to suffer constant paramnesia if they attempt to confront their experience of the world. This sensation has sharpened as the stimuli received daily are amplified. In this way, when everything is possible, there is nothing to hold onto. The subject is doomed to suffer constant paramnesia if they attempt to confront their experience of the world. This sensation has sharpened as the stimuli received daily are amplified. In this way, when everything is possible, there is nothing to hold onto. Text by Eduardo García Nieto Independent curator and educator