Utopia: Reality.exe a dystopian vision

Art does not exist in isolation; it is a process, an ongoing confrontation with its own time. "Utopia" is no exception. Each iteration of this project is not merely a static statement but a dynamic reconfiguration, an ever-evolving dialogue between aesthetics, philosophy, and personal experience. From the material presence of oil on canvas to the intangibility of 3D synthetic environments, Utopia unfolds as a continuous cycle of destruction and reconstruction, an effort to map the shifting contours of meaning itself.

At its core, Utopia interrogates power, resistance, and transformation. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence haunts its structure, while Hegelian dialectics dictate its motion. Christian allegory offers a framework of suffering and redemption, yet transhumanist speculation threatens to dissolve this paradigm entirely. The work echoes the inquiries of Spinoza, Foucault, and Arendt, each version emerging as both a self-contained entity and an integral moment within a broader trajectory—a map of fractures within reality itself.

Utopia v1.1 – The allegory of Famine oil & depression

This first phase of Utopia was an act of catharsis, an exorcism of an internal void externalized through allegorical oil paintings. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse provided the guiding imagery, with Famine chosen as the embodiment of this stage—not merely as physical hunger but as the existential starvation of meaning, a state of lack that is both personal and systemic.

Nietzsche’s nihilism looms over this phase; the "death of God" is not merely the loss of religious faith but the collapse of structures that once sustained meaning itself. In this emptiness, Famine becomes the absence of a sustaining purpose, a hunger that consumes rather than nourishes. But it is also a political condition—Hannah Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism suggest that famine, whether literal or metaphorical, can be a mechanism of control, a means of stripping agency from the individual.

The aesthetic choice of oil painting was deliberate—a medium historically associated with permanence and mastery, now repurposed to depict disintegration. The tactile nature of oil was a way to ground an otherwise dissolving reality, as if the act of painting itself were an attempt to salvage coherence from entropy.

Utopia v2.1 – The contamination of Reality.exe the Pestilence

With Utopia v2.1, the boundaries between internal and external collapse. This phase introduced Radio, a childhood imaginary friend transformed into an agent of contamination. His yellow gas mask is both a symbol of disease and a form of resistance, a paradox encapsulating the interplay between destruction and renewal.

If v1.1 mourned the void left by the collapse of meaning, v2.1 engages with the proliferation of new meanings—contested, fluid, unstable. Here, Foucault’s notion of biopolitics is particularly relevant: power is no longer merely imposed through direct oppression but operates through the regulation and mutation of bodies, ideas, and environments. Contamination is not solely biological; it is ideological, memetic. Baudrillard’s hyperreality also infiltrates this phase—truth is rewritten and spread like a virus, reality itself rendered indistinguishable from simulation.

This was not only represented conceptually but materially: objects from the real world were "infected," marked with paint, symbols, and glitches, transformed into artifacts of a world no longer quite our own. Radio, in this sense, functions as both instigator and witness, a trickster navigating the porous boundary between order and chaos.

Utopia v3.1 – Rewriting & overwriting Reality.exe now is War

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

Hegel’s dialectics provide the key to understanding this stage. Every system, when met with its contradiction, must either collapse or evolve into something new. Spinoza’s concept of conatus—the drive of every entity to persist and enhance itself—resonates here, as war is not simply annihilation but a struggle for transformation.

Artistically, this phase embraced mixed media interventions, distortions, augmented reality. The fragmentation of images mirrored the fragmentation of ideological stability. Nietzsche’s Übermensch also re-emerges—the figure who, in the aftermath of destruction, does not seek to restore the old order but to forge new values, to transgress imposed boundaries and create in the wake of ruin.

Utopia v4.1 – The Death of physicality a synthetic Reality.exe

Now, Utopia approaches its most radical iteration—the transcendence of physicality itself. No longer concerned with contamination or conflict within the material world, this phase erases the very distinction between the real and the digital, the physical and the conceptual.

Transhumanism becomes not just a speculative idea but a guiding principle. If prior phases interrogated the crises of meaning in a decaying system, v4.1 envisions what comes after—the creation of a post-biological existence. William Gibson’s cyberpunk aesthetics, H.R. Giger’s biomechanical horror, the disquieting ambivalence of technology—these all form the visual and thematic backdrop of this phase.

Unlike its predecessors, Utopia v4.1 is not bound to traditional mediums. Instead, it unfolds within immersive 3D environments, spaces where the previous phases coexist as artifacts within a constructed digital architecture. Here, Hegel’s dialectics stretch to their limits: if all is rewritten, if reality itself is malleable, what remains stable? If Baudrillard’s simulacra have overtaken the real, does anything remain that is not simulation?

This is the final question Utopia raises—not merely the dissolution of past structures, but the implications of a world in which even the act of destruction is irrelevant because the distinction between creation and collapse has itself eroded.

Utopia as a Living System

Utopia is not a fixed statement; it is 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 is and what could be. Each phase is both a rupture and a bridge, a momentary crystallization of thought before it fractures and reforms, much like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence—where destruction and rebirth are not separate but part of the same cycle of becoming.

The project unfolds as a dialectical engine, a system in perpetual feedback with itself and its surroundings. Hegelian dialectics provide a framework: every iteration of Utopia is a thesis that invites its own antithesis, colliding in a struggle that yields a new synthesis—until that, too, is questioned and undone. From the famine of nihilism to the pestilence of ideological contamination, from the war of contradiction to the transcendence of physicality, Utopia operates like a palimpsest of fractured realities. Each layer overwrites the last, yet none fully erase their predecessors; they persist as ghosts, much like Derrida’s hauntology, where past structures linger within the new, reshaping perception even as they decay.

But this is not a linear evolution. Instead, Utopia embraces a recursive loop, one that echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization—where meaning and structure are continuously deconstructed and reassembled in unexpected configurations. There is no stable endpoint where contradiction ceases and harmony prevails. Instead, Utopia remains an open system, a space of negotiation where meaning is always in flux, contested and reshaped by those who engage with it.

This instability extends beyond philosophy and into politics, where Utopia interacts with power, discipline, and resistance. Michel Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and control find resonance in Utopia’s contamination phase, where ideological forces shape and regulate the body and the mind. Likewise, Hannah Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism and the nature of action inform Utopia’s engagement with structures of authority and rebellion—where resistance is not merely a reaction but an assertion of an alternative order.

The audience is not a passive observer but an agent within this cycle, implicated in the very process of corruption, collapse, and reassembly. If Baudrillard’s simulacrum suggests that meaning has collapsed into hyperreality, then Utopia is both an artifact of that collapse and a challenge to it. It asks: in a world where reality is no longer a fixed construct but a manipulated fiction, how does one navigate, resist, or redefine meaning?

If reality itself is an architecture of control, Utopia stands as both a critique and an alternative—a speculative terrain where the boundaries of existence are redrawn. But what follows when even these new structures prove unstable? If each act of creation carries within it the seeds of its own undoing, does that make the pursuit of a final form an illusion? Spinoza’s conatus—the drive of all things to persist and enhance their existence—suggests that perhaps the point is not finality but the force that propels us forward. The striving itself is what defines us.

In the end, the question remains:
Are we willing to embrace the rewriting, or will we cling to the ruins of what was?