By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

PARTICULARLY numbing is the realization that most people rely on memes and soundbites from the social media to form their opinions, without watching the context of the issues at source. It requires enormous efforts for those who try to explain, as they also get dragged down into the fracas of convoluted reasoning, cursing and endless name calling.

Compounding this predicament is the fact that social media has become a central arena for propaganda, influencing thought, and with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), influencing behavior.

“I saw this incredible lizard whose skin resembles that of a leopard!”

“That’s an AI-generated image,” I replied, “you have to cross-check with reliable sources to be sure.”

“But, if horticulturists ca engineer plants to flower in the colors desired, it is possible that this lizard exists.”

“Still countercheck with scientific sources, there are many legitimate sites you can look at.”

“If it the mind can conceive this, it is possible it exists.”

It is possible it may exist at a future time, with scientists weighing the commercial value or scientific logic to make it possible, but for now, it is an image generated by AI. True or not, it has blurred the distinction between the real and the unreal.

A reality occurs as a fact, not imagined or supposed, as a lizard. Unreal is when it is imaginary, appearing to be real, like an AI image of a lizard with a leopard’s skin. Surreal is when the images become bizarre and fantastic, and goes beyond the reality and unreality of its existence, often advocating an ideal.

Surrealism began as a literary phenomenon “inspired by widespread Spiritualist organizations, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic procedures, and Marxist political beliefs.” It is “a cultural and creative movement that mixes aspects of the subconscious, dreams, and the irrational to create a new world that differs from the reality we experience.” …. “It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional.”

Surrealist Hieronymus Bosch’s visualization of the macabre, the religious and the worldly is depicted in a triptych oil painting (on oak panels) entitled  “The Garden of Earthly Delights” exploring themes of the mundane, sin and punishment. Salvador Dali, another surrealist, explored “the psychoanalytical concept of unconscious and subconscious desires as inspiration”. Both artists juxtaposed the unexpected and bizarre-looking imagery, and in Bosch particularly, futuristic objects that did not exist during his time.

There are many artists who are able to depict the reality of Philippine politics as they unfold in real time with its unique unreality. I am wishing for a surrealist painting on the current state of Philippine political life in its macabre, flirty and flighty desires, a trip beyond the real and the unreal, in triptych oil painting on acacia panels felled from the road-widening project of Mark Cojuangco along the Manila North Road. A triptych adorned with “semenet”, “yumenet”, “ikaw talaga” ……..!

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