Fabric Of Reality. (A Snapshot )

As we enter the 21st century, Reality is about to replace Freedom as the century’s’ most coveted ideal. Where Freedom starts and where it ends, who deserves his Freedom and under which conditions: this was the subject of our past academic confrontations and most of the social battles.
Today the debate is Reality. What is Real and what is Fiction, how to recognize the difference and how to communicate the knowledge of such a difference.
And also who has the right to diffuse knowledge about Reality? In what way?

We are entities composed, in large part, by information as well as by bones and flesh: to whom belongs this info-slave inside each of us? Day after day, this becomes the reason for legal and illegal battles. Still shaken by the trouble about Freedom, we tend to consider contemporary life as just another fictional
story. Many of us will still look at an Atlas, convinced that they are our only natural environment and then look down at computers and networks as if they were “just tools”.

We forget that everything today is double. Take the blank noise of the city outside of your window; look once at the city and then your fax-machine and there it is, a double void, ready to ring.

If silence has its double, then property has a double too: recently the King of the small island of Tuvalu sold a Canadian company his Internet domain, “Tuvalu. TV” (a country automatically owns it’s .com,.net, .org, .tv, etc even if it has no Internet connection at all). He multiplied the wealth of his country by
selling its alias.

But the International law and the idea of Justice feel strange after our recent war against Serbia. While such an aggression against a European country was in progress, in Littleton, Colorado, two 18 years old boys decided to give a similar lesson to their hostile environment by killing 15 young people, including themselves.

The fact that everybody pretends to be shocked by those killings is evidence about Reality. The adult world, which enjoys a bloody competition inside its tribe, fails to recognize a “legitimate” war between adolescents. (From Judith Rich Harris we know that “children adopt certain behaviors in social venues in
order to win acceptance from their peers).
The press blamed Littleton on Cinema, Music, Internet and the videogames; in short, everything that is a portal to other realities. Public fear, tries to compact a multitude of “states of being” into a unique old-style RealLife, while it openly honors its femons, the spectacles of War and destruction.

Miltos Manetas - 1999, written for F.O.R show at Rebecca
Camhi, Athens, May 1999.