Utopia: Reality.exe a dystopian vision

Art does not exist in isolation; it is a process, a constant confrontation with its own time. Utopia is no exception. Each iteration of the project is not a static statement but a dynamic reconfiguration, an evolving dialogue between aesthetics, philosophy, and lived experience. From the material weight of oil on canvas to the immaterial dimension of synthetic 3D environments, Utopia unfolds as a continuous cycle of destruction and reconstruction, an attempt to trace the shifting contours of meaning itself.

At its core, Utopia engages with power, resistance, and transformation. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence shapes its rhythm, while Hegelian dialectics drive its motion. Christian allegory frames its narratives of suffering and redemption, yet transhumanist speculation threatens to dissolve that framework entirely. The work resonates with Spinoza, Foucault, and Arendt, each iteration emerging as both a self-contained entity and a fragment of a wider trajectory, a map of fractures within reality itself.

Utopia v1.1: The Allegory of Famine, Oil and Depression

The first phase of Utopia was an act of catharsis: an exorcism of an inner void externalized through allegorical oil paintings. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse provided the guiding imagery, with Famine chosen as the emblem of this stage. Here famine is not only physical hunger but also the existential starvation of meaning, a condition that is both personal and systemic.

Nietzsche’s nihilism looms heavily over this phase. The “death of God” signifies not only the collapse of faith but also the disintegration of structures that once sustained meaning itself. Famine embodies the absence of purpose, a hunger that consumes rather than nourishes. Yet it is also a political condition. Hannah Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism suggest that famine, whether literal or metaphorical, can become a mechanism of control, a way of stripping agency from the individual.

This phase introduced Radio, an imaginary childhood companion transformed into an agent of contamination. His yellow gas mask embodies both disease and resistance, a paradox that encapsulates the tension between destruction and renewal.

The choice of oil painting was deliberate. Traditionally a medium of permanence and mastery, oil was repurposed to depict disintegration. Its tactile nature grounded an otherwise dissolving reality, as though the act of painting were an attempt to salvage coherence from entropy.

Utopia v2.1: The Contamination of Reality.exe, The Pestilence

With Utopia v2.1, the boundary between inner and outer worlds collapses.

If v1.1 mourned the collapse of meaning, v2.1 grapples with the proliferation of new meanings, unstable, contested, and fluid. Foucault’s notion of biopolitics resonates here: power is no longer exerted through sheer oppression but through regulation, mutation, and control of bodies, ideas, and environments. Contamination becomes ideological and memetic as much as biological. Baudrillard’s hyperreality infiltrates this stage as well, where truth spreads like a virus and reality itself becomes indistinguishable from simulation.

This was expressed not only conceptually but materially. Real-world objects were “infected” with paint, symbols, and glitches, transformed into artifacts of a world already slipping from our grasp. Radio functions here as both instigator and witness, a trickster navigating the unstable border between order and chaos.

Utopia v3.1: Rewriting and Overwriting Reality.exe, War

Where v2.1 was an infiltration, v3.1 erupts into open conflict. The rewriting of reality becomes an act of war, not only in terms of physical violence but as a fundamental clash of meaning itself. War here is dialectical: the moment when thesis and antithesis collide, forcing synthesis through destruction.

Hegel’s dialectics are central to this stage. Every system, when faced with its contradiction, must collapse or evolve into something new. Spinoza’s concept of conatus the drive of every entity to persist and enhance itself resonates here, where war is not only annihilation but a struggle for transformation.

Artistically, this stage embraced mixed media, distortions, and augmented reality. Fragmented images mirrored the breakdown of ideological stability. Nietzsche’s figure of the Übermensch re-emerges as well, the one who, in the ruins, does not restore the old order but forges new values and creates in the wake of destruction.

Utopia v4.1: The Death of Physicality, A Synthetic Reality.exe

 

In v4.1, Utopia reaches its most radical form: the transcendence of physicality itself. It no longer concerns itself with contamination or conflict within the material world. Instead, it erases the very boundary between the real and the digital, the tangible and the conceptual.

Here transhumanism ceases to be a speculative framework and becomes a guiding principle. If the earlier phases grappled with the crises of meaning in a decaying order, v4.1 envisions what might come after: a post-biological existence. Gibson’s cyberpunk, Giger’s biomechanical visions, and the unsettling ambivalence of technology form the backdrop.

This phase is not bound to traditional mediums. It unfolds within immersive 3D environments where the previous stages persist as artifacts within a constructed digital architecture. At this point Hegelian dialectics strain to their limits: if all can be rewritten, if reality itself is malleable, what remains stable? If Baudrillard’s simulacra have overtaken the real, does anything remain that is not simulation?

Here Utopia raises its ultimate question, not simply the collapse of old structures but the implications of a world where even destruction loses its meaning because the very distinction between creation and collapse has dissolved.

Utopia as a Living System

Utopia is not a fixed statement but an evolving philosophical inquiry, a recursive interrogation of meaning, control, and transformation. It does not seek resolution but thrives in the tension between dissolution and becoming, between what exists and what might emerge. Each phase is both rupture and bridge, a crystallization of thought before it fractures and reforms. Like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, destruction and rebirth are not opposites but moments of the same cycle of becoming.

The project unfolds as a dialectical engine, a system in constant feedback with itself and its environment. Each iteration arises as a thesis that calls forth its own antithesis, their clash generating a new synthesis until that, too, is destabilized. From the famine of nihilism to the pestilence of ideological contagion, from the war of contradiction to the transcendence of the physical, Utopia operates like a palimpsest of fractured realities. Each layer overwrites the last but never fully erases it. They remain as ghosts, as Derrida’s hauntology suggests, shaping the new even as they decay.

This is not a linear progression but a recursive loop, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization, where meaning and structure are endlessly dismantled and recomposed. There is no endpoint, no harmony where contradiction ceases. Utopia remains an open system, a space where meaning is always contested, always reshaped by those who enter it.

Its instability reaches into politics as well. Foucault’s theories of biopolitics find resonance in the contamination phase, where power operates through the regulation of life. Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism and human action inform the work’s engagement with structures of authority and rebellion, where resistance is not reaction but assertion of another possible order.

The audience is not a passive observer but a participant in this cycle, implicated in the very processes of corruption, collapse, and reconstruction. If Baudrillard’s hyperreality suggests that meaning has dissolved into simulation, Utopia is both a symptom of that collapse and a challenge to it. It asks: in a world where reality is a manipulated fiction, how does one navigate, resist, or redefine meaning?

If reality itself is an architecture of control, then Utopia stands as both critique and alternative, a speculative terrain where the boundaries of existence are redrawn. Yet what follows when even these new forms prove unstable? If every act of creation already carries the seeds of its undoing, is the pursuit of permanence an illusion? Spinoza’s conatus suggests otherwise: the drive to persist and transform is itself the point. The striving is what defines us.

In the end, one question remains:
Will we embrace the rewriting, or cling to the ruins of what was?