I/We Art: Social Fields and Coming into Being

The mass destruction of the Second World War shattered not just the lived world but our belief in any universal truth or that progress would inevitably lead to a better future. These beliefs ended with the war and started the movement toward a Postmodern world where knowledge is seen as unreliable, where nothing can be known with any certainty. The Matrix (1999) directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski takes this to an extreme, suggesting that the real is totally manufactured. To come into being and see this as a created reality you need to take the "red pill" or live in an illusion by taking the "blue pill". If you take the red pill, you are then released into the actual lived world and the offer of a means to bring about a new social order based on the real. The film signals a link to Jean Baudrillard’s work Simulacra and Simulation 1981. Baudrillard, like the Matrix, argues that we are increasingly living in a simulated world where over time this simulation has no relationship to the real and becomes a simulacrum. Simulation and simulacra can act to mask the real, perverting any basis from which to build meaning. For example in the woodland scene shown here. The wood is a simulation, an image representing the real but through the frame is a simulacra which also represents the real but has been so manipulated that it has little relationship to it.

I/We Art: Social Fields and Reflection

While Agreeing with Baudrillard, I would suggest that the impact of the disconnection from the real at a time of rapid social and economic change does not produce a false reality but a kind of chaos which is better described as endless contradictions. It is the job of social fields to find meaning and resolution to such contradictions, allowing members of the field to know how to act and deal with social tensions, opposition and struggle. In doing so social fields offer a kind of calmness or joy in periods of resolution, but the cycle will continue.

Arguably what this means for the “I” (the self) is a need to continuously adapt in line with the social field as a kind of coming into being again and again in seeking to make sense of the lived world in a way that retains a sense of self. A depiction of this kind of adaptation and coming into being as a continuous process can be seen in The Matrix. However, I/We art does not offer a red or blue pill. In a postmodern AI driven world can we be sure that either is real? What is more important is to better understand what social fields are offering us rather than take a blue, red or any other pill.

This I/We Art project explores this by presenting work associated with key social fields that present global challenges. These are militarism, technological advances, most notably artificial intelligence and climate change. Within these social fields there are norms and values such as masculine or feminist thinking or economic values; which can shape social fields and also how responses, reactions and relationships to those particular fields are constructed and delivered.

The aim I/We Art is to encourage reflection and questioning of these key social fields and how they are responding to global issues. Arguably more importantly, to ask what is being instilled in us by these social fields and how helpful is this to reacting to and addressing these universal threats.

I/We Art: The Red Pill and the Transition from Modernism to Postmodernism