"What Orwell feared was those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, because there would be no one who would want to read it. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and selfishness. Orwell feared that the truth would be withheld from us. Huxley feared that truth would drown in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture. As Huxley noted in Brave New World Revisited, "the advocates of civil liberties and the rationalists who are always on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." This was written by Neil Postman in his essay Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business in which he wondered if, by the vagaries of fate, the world was not going to succumb to a totalitarian regime like that in 1984 but to a regime of the banal, the inconsequential and superficial amusement as in Brave New World. Following in the wake of Aldous Huxley, Postman wondered "what we laugh at and why we have ceased to think." The sociologist and cultural critic was not wrong to raise the possibility that it was Huxley who, unfortunately, was right. What are we laughing about? what is happening? what is so funny, shareable and photographable, likeable and commentable in a scenario such as the one we find ourselves in? Since a few decades ago, under the influence of radio, television and, later and categorically, the Internet and social networks, we are entertained as much as we want to be. And even when we don't want to be. Everything that is a social, ethical or moral obligation has to have an endorphin release; education has to be entertaining, work too, politics will be 1-minute emotional pills, global urgencies, information, food, sustainability, social protests, religion, spirituality, travel, cultures, everything has to be, if not fun, easy to consume. Easy to understand; experiential, engaging and connecting with us. Easy to swallow with a little sugar, as the exploited and tremendously entertaining Poppins sang, who taught us to clean and to pick up, rejoicing in rhythmic joy; a nice example of Huxleyan theory applied. Much ado about nothing; much light and little knowledge. Reality will be gamified or it won't be. We are entertained... and confused. We have all the information at our fingertips but, with so much on offer, many of us stand still in front of the screens like hares in the middle of the road when a truck approaches at full speed. What is reality is mixed with the image, with the appearance, with what we show that is reality in a tacit pact of a new language: the one that mixes the analogical with the digital. It seems silly to us to see someone taking a selfie in the middle of the street and repeating it up to 100 times to reach the optimum and which will later be edited, but not to show this photo to an anonymous audience or to show our appreciation for it. What exists is, and is not. The problems are and are not. We can do something about them... or not. Recreative Doom is an arcade in which the great urgencies of humanity become children's games. Our society is made up of many individualities that, in general, do not interact for the common benefit, but for the needs that our own narratives demand of us, stories that keep us entertained with recurring concerns and that lead us to invent ways to mitigate them through pottery or running a mountain ultra trail but that, unfortunately, make us disconnect from the magnitude of the world's problems. Recreative Doom exposes what reality does to us: we entertain ourselves, but with what? Octavi Serra has created this place to think about these issues, or others, because he is not an artist who likes to affirm but, rather, to ask questions. This artist, designer and photographer from Girona focuses on capturing the ironies and frustrations of modern life through optical illusions, waste products and the commonplace. His work proposes a dissatisfied response to the current landscape; Serra builds conceptual installations that mock culture and question the status quo creating surprise, but also concern. Octavi has been developing his artistic work for more than 10 years; he has been published in the world's leading design and art media and exhibited in several countries, as well as at the Venice Biennale. He has received awards (Laus, Contemporáneos, DME Awards and KREAS.) and now leads the artistic project The Posttraumatic, a diary about post-truth. This exhibition is his second solo show and is part of the emerging art festival Art Nou in Barcelona. The House of Chappaz gallery has been the place chosen to recreate us in a present and a future that awaits us... Text by Ane Guerra Photos by Roberto Ruiz