Topic: Immersion

In today’s society it’s really difficult to try and shock people, to make people interested due to the extremely fast paced nature of social media, trends and the overexposure of human nature. It is difficult to find meaning, peace, or terror when specific ideas aren’t a matter of life or death, they’re simply just another thing to like, dislike or 90% of the time, ignore. I find that looking into what it means to become immersed in something and how to successfully enrapture an audience, like in a movie or an advertisement, these days, is through another creation, something new, something ‘never done/seen before’. In other words, something people can still relate to and think they’ve never seen before when in fact this is a tactic used to fool people into thinking that a recycled idea is somehow drastically different to it’s source. I, for lack of a better way of saying it, hate this system so vehemently and I think about it a lot. It sort of fuels my hatred for the system but inadvertently teaches me how to think like a pro about it despite having literally no experience. Well, actually, we could say that this is false, that I in fact have a lot of experience in it. Why? Because it is the artist’s cycle that has plagued our systems from the beginning of time and humanity’s self-consciousness itself. As an artist, we understand this system the best, the constant feed of information and thoughts into the daily lives of everyone, making and changing and transforming the way we feel about certain subjects, categorising us, stagnating fluidity and looking down upon what is ‘abnormal’, what is considered evil, insane or downright foolish. These are the thoughts of an artist, it is our jobs to provoke, depict and to stir up feelings of insanity, emotionlessness, vulnerability, stupidity, intelligence, mocking and the list goes on. The irony in this fact is that almost every artist, scientist, or rather the world-renowned title of a ‘genius’ was called insane, or stupid. We have always progressed as a species due to those who have always dared to create their own worlds outside of the one we live in, and they always give back something to those that are shunned too. It’s human nature to want to push out what isn’t popular, we like to feel like we’re part of an in-group. Those that don’t fit our standards, ideals or opinions may naturally want to be pushed away and by default are given that treatment. We’ve been told ever since we were young to include each other but how can this be perceived as any different? Why would some children want to be with others? To become more ‘normal’, have friends? To see the world in a way that almost everyone else sees it? Become a copy-paste version of others? There’s no adventure in that. The mere idea of how little you might experience in life if you were to only follow others is to me, far more terrifying than what you might have to endure if you choose a life where life leads you instead.