Sitting on the deck in the early evenings as the Sun finally begins to set on the horizon, stillness follows after the elongating shadows sweep their way across the wheat fields. As day turns to night I sometimes find that the transition carries a distinctly unsettled feeling that hangs in the air as an unwelcome companion. All is quiet... Too quiet.
Similarly, there is a strange awareness that some describe as a "knowing" that can creep into the conscious mind even when experiencing something for the very first time. Almost as if we can instinctively sense how a story is going to end.
Like a first date or the most recent smart phone update. The shapes and colors may change and the price usually goes up but the product ultimately remains the same.
What we like to call “new” is often just a reintroduction - stripped of context, softened for resale, made safer for consumption. Even what we used to identify as “disruptive” commonly arrives pre-packaged, complete with a return policy, but what feels like a failure of creativity is really just a consequence of modern acceleration.
When culture moves faster than meaning, very little has time to settle. Ideas don’t mature - they circulate and become watered down versions of themselves, processed for optimization and recognition, not for resonance. Familiarity becomes the product. If only they could put our faces on the front of every box...
In the matrix we aren’t offered the true depth of actual experience. We’re given a spreadsheet of reference points from which we get the illusion of choice.
The result is a strange loop: a type of playback where everything feels exceptionally nostalgic, intrinsically tied to a person, place or thing and saturated to such an extent that even on our best days, we will only be able to vaguely remember the largest of details and the challenge of separating facts from fiction will become mandated to a singular focus.
In the event that we happen to lose our minds and memories completely, brands will always be more than happy to fill in the blanks, so long as we let them.
Eventually, we will recognize the shapes, but not the substance and we will allow it because we like the way it makes us feel. Like a puppy at the edge of a green liquid, lapping up coolant. Yes, the action will spell absolute disaster, but the desire for instant gratification cannot resist the sweet taste of the anti-freeze.
Perhaps this explains why transactional exchanges often leave us feeling so emotionally hollow. Despite an object arriving in a perfectly designed box, complete with ribbons and bows the experience is already explained, already validated, and often completely exhausted. In the end, our greatest fantasies are almost always revealed to be wholly empty.
Somewhere along the line we elected to remove the discomfort of the unknown by projecting exaggerated distortions onto an already unrealistic expectation of the future, but this is exactly where FAKE MOON intends to shine it's light…
We will always be interested in the essence of what survives when the references for predisposed manipulations fade. Life by its very nature is an unsolved and unresolved mystery.
When we find ourselves sandwiched between the darkness and the light and the burden of silence proves to be far too great in the vacuum of space, we should first establish as a requirement that our search for both answers and meaning be guided at all times by the increasingly brutal and entirely honest truth.
For just as it is in the end, it was also in the beginning... We already knew.
FAKE MOON
- END OF TRANSMISSION -
