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Lot Essay
“Psychosomatic symptoms embalm us in illusions We simulate ourselves and embrace our own delusions.” excerpt from Arcadia, 2021
Culminating at a unique point in art history, three independent disciplines – poetry, graphic art, music – are combined to create an unprecedented fine art non-fungible token (NFT). Award-winning artist Andrés Reisinger, Grammy-winning musician RAC and internationally-bestselling poet Arch Hades have collaborated to create ‘Arcadia’ – a narrated, graphic film that journeys through our collective 21st century existential crisis.
Written as a traditional, narrative poem, then illuminated through digital art and elevated with electronic music – Arcadia is allegorical, linking literary art with a visual sermon. Didactic without preaching, it alludes to the iconoclastic philosophy of existentialism – the philosophy that draws all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism, that holds freedom and responsibility as the supreme values, and authenticity as the primary virtue; encouraging an inhabited way of life that creates a new definition of existence as choice, action, and self-assertion. Arcadia is a celebration of hybridity, loaded with political, social, historical, and cultural metaphors, that are cleverly illustrated by objects from Reisinger’s imagination.
The story of Arcadia explores the anguish of our modern loneliness, alienation, status anxiety, depression – all brought on by our pervasive consumerist phantasmagoria of a culture – and then urges us to overcome this nihilism by refining our individuality in solitude and nature, before adopting a mood of rebellion and questioning that seeks to bring about change in society, while on an individual level encourages us to bring meaning to our struggle by embracing passion, self-ownership, beauty and art.
The text of Arcadia is comprised of five chapters, each predominantly paying tribute to a particular philosopher, while also referencing dozens of poets, artists, authors, and thinkers that have shaped the modern mind.
The first chapter ‘Welcome to the Current’ pays tribute to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Massage’ – in which the philosopher examines how mass media and communication has permanently changed society, humanity, and how the two interact. Instant gratification and compulsion characterise our 21C lives in the hyperreal world, where many significant life experiences are now virtual, leaving us hollow. The ‘Current’ is a metaphor for how our relationship with the internet has heralded an unprecedented broadening of horizons and exposure to the experience of millions of others that coincides with a private alienation of a similar proportion. Our addiction to social media and junk-food entertainment has caused the loss of the emotional dynamic that would otherwise govern an outward-directed, cognitively creative life.
“I want to break free of this labyrinth, switch off all these screens Escape this simulacrum, which makes man into machine.” excerpt from Arcadia, 2021
Much of modern life has been reduced to a shallow, repetitive, fast-paced torrent of mass information, that we no longer have the capacity to fully mentally process. Our social spaces are spammed with misinformation masquerading as insight. We are pressured to consume and participate in the running commentary, to constantly share our private thoughts and experiences in public. It’s constant and exhausting. It gives us anxiety, while also overwhelming and sedating us.
The second chapter ‘Simulacrum’ is inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacrum and Simulation’ – in which the philosopher laments how we have distorted our reality by producing and participating in a fake version of ourselves and our world. Hardly anything remains original or authentic in a system where anything can be replicated, and mass produced.
We are reduced to expressing ourselves through consumption and branding (not creativity, individuality, and original thought). Our quest for productivity has exhausted and isolated us, and in this state, it is easiest to sell convenience to us. In our daze, we are no longer projects of genuine selfhood, but an amalgam of the stories we buy into. Yet we yearn for authenticity.
The third chapter ‘House of Cards’ is an ode to Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, the architects of modern existentialism. Narration switches to first person to mirror works such as ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, ‘Twilight of the Idols’, quoting metaphysical fundamentals such as ‘we are condemned with freedom’ and exploring their consequences. Starting with an adaptation of ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Shelley, the film hypothesises how consumerism has become our new religion and daily occupation, without it being some grand conspiracy, intended to hide some big truth, but merely, a filler for the gap of meaning and habit left by traditional religions, after they were symbolically expelled in the 19C. We are still on our quest for meaning and purpose in a vast and indifferent universe, we are just distracted.
The fourth chapter ‘Silence’ combines existentialism with Albert Camus’ philosophy of absurdism. The narrator accepts the absurdity of conflict between the human tendency to seek out inherent value and meaning in life; and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, irrational universe, by encouraging us to embrace creation of our own meaning, that can fulfil us in our own ways. To find our true authentic desires, we must first break free of the ‘Current’.
Modern society abounds in fantasy objects of the simulacrum, offering surrogate fulfilment to our true desires, thereby distorting our needs into transactions. Too often, instead of being asked what we desire, we are told what to desire, before being given a price.
We must detox by embracing solitude in a state of arcadia. We become our genuine selves when we are no longer defined by others. This is when ‘Arcadia’ calls to a return to nature, so we can witness the universal significance of natural beauty. A world that makes room for such things as the sublime makes room for us. Nature effortlessly demonstrates that the world contains magnitudes other than us, which are just as interesting as us. It shrinks our egos so easily and effectively, reminding us how vanishingly insignificant we really are. This widening of perspective prompts self-reflection onto ourselves, what kind of society we inhabit, and hopefully, where our collective choices are leading us to.
The final chapter ‘Chorus’ is an ode to Art and Beauty that pays tribute to Roger Scruton, Alain de Botton, Robert Frost, William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde and Voltaire among others – referring to the collective of artists, poets and thinkers as the ‘chorus’ – which shows us how to overcome nihilism and sublimate our sorrows by bringing beauty to the struggle.
“This widening of perspective prompts self-reflection onto ourselves, what kind of society we inhabit, and hopefully, where our collective choices are leading us to.” Arch Hades
In the void left by organised religions, Art is left to compete against consumerism and entertainment as the apex of our ideals. That is why Art matters. Without the conscious pursuit of Beauty, we risk being reduced to existing in a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which the worthwhileness of human life is no longer clearly perceivable.
Art answers the riddle of being: it tells us why we exist by imbuing our lives with a sense of belonging and purpose. Through creativity, we self-express and become more of what we are, regardless of if we do it well, because beauty is in the hard work itself and the sense of purpose we feel when doing it.
In the highest form of Beauty life becomes its own justification, redeemed from contingency by the logic which connects the end of things with their beginning. The highest form of Beauty, as exemplified in supreme artistic achievements, is one of the greatest of life’s gifts to us. It is the true ground of the value of art, for it is what art, and only art, can give.
-Arch Hades, poet and artist
This work will be minted in October 2021 by Aorist, a next-generation cultural institution supporting a sustainable non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace for artists at the edge of art and technology. Powered by Algorand, a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that supports smart contracts to ensure a seamless collecting experience, Aorist aims to offset emissions and achieve carbon negativity through the partnership with ClimateTrade.
Culminating at a unique point in art history, three independent disciplines – poetry, graphic art, music – are combined to create an unprecedented fine art non-fungible token (NFT). Award-winning artist Andrés Reisinger, Grammy-winning musician RAC and internationally-bestselling poet Arch Hades have collaborated to create ‘Arcadia’ – a narrated, graphic film that journeys through our collective 21st century existential crisis.
Written as a traditional, narrative poem, then illuminated through digital art and elevated with electronic music – Arcadia is allegorical, linking literary art with a visual sermon. Didactic without preaching, it alludes to the iconoclastic philosophy of existentialism – the philosophy that draws all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism, that holds freedom and responsibility as the supreme values, and authenticity as the primary virtue; encouraging an inhabited way of life that creates a new definition of existence as choice, action, and self-assertion. Arcadia is a celebration of hybridity, loaded with political, social, historical, and cultural metaphors, that are cleverly illustrated by objects from Reisinger’s imagination.
The story of Arcadia explores the anguish of our modern loneliness, alienation, status anxiety, depression – all brought on by our pervasive consumerist phantasmagoria of a culture – and then urges us to overcome this nihilism by refining our individuality in solitude and nature, before adopting a mood of rebellion and questioning that seeks to bring about change in society, while on an individual level encourages us to bring meaning to our struggle by embracing passion, self-ownership, beauty and art.
The text of Arcadia is comprised of five chapters, each predominantly paying tribute to a particular philosopher, while also referencing dozens of poets, artists, authors, and thinkers that have shaped the modern mind.
The first chapter ‘Welcome to the Current’ pays tribute to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Massage’ – in which the philosopher examines how mass media and communication has permanently changed society, humanity, and how the two interact. Instant gratification and compulsion characterise our 21C lives in the hyperreal world, where many significant life experiences are now virtual, leaving us hollow. The ‘Current’ is a metaphor for how our relationship with the internet has heralded an unprecedented broadening of horizons and exposure to the experience of millions of others that coincides with a private alienation of a similar proportion. Our addiction to social media and junk-food entertainment has caused the loss of the emotional dynamic that would otherwise govern an outward-directed, cognitively creative life.
“I want to break free of this labyrinth, switch off all these screens Escape this simulacrum, which makes man into machine.” excerpt from Arcadia, 2021
Much of modern life has been reduced to a shallow, repetitive, fast-paced torrent of mass information, that we no longer have the capacity to fully mentally process. Our social spaces are spammed with misinformation masquerading as insight. We are pressured to consume and participate in the running commentary, to constantly share our private thoughts and experiences in public. It’s constant and exhausting. It gives us anxiety, while also overwhelming and sedating us.
The second chapter ‘Simulacrum’ is inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacrum and Simulation’ – in which the philosopher laments how we have distorted our reality by producing and participating in a fake version of ourselves and our world. Hardly anything remains original or authentic in a system where anything can be replicated, and mass produced.
We are reduced to expressing ourselves through consumption and branding (not creativity, individuality, and original thought). Our quest for productivity has exhausted and isolated us, and in this state, it is easiest to sell convenience to us. In our daze, we are no longer projects of genuine selfhood, but an amalgam of the stories we buy into. Yet we yearn for authenticity.
The third chapter ‘House of Cards’ is an ode to Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, the architects of modern existentialism. Narration switches to first person to mirror works such as ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, ‘Twilight of the Idols’, quoting metaphysical fundamentals such as ‘we are condemned with freedom’ and exploring their consequences. Starting with an adaptation of ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Shelley, the film hypothesises how consumerism has become our new religion and daily occupation, without it being some grand conspiracy, intended to hide some big truth, but merely, a filler for the gap of meaning and habit left by traditional religions, after they were symbolically expelled in the 19C. We are still on our quest for meaning and purpose in a vast and indifferent universe, we are just distracted.
The fourth chapter ‘Silence’ combines existentialism with Albert Camus’ philosophy of absurdism. The narrator accepts the absurdity of conflict between the human tendency to seek out inherent value and meaning in life; and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, irrational universe, by encouraging us to embrace creation of our own meaning, that can fulfil us in our own ways. To find our true authentic desires, we must first break free of the ‘Current’.
Modern society abounds in fantasy objects of the simulacrum, offering surrogate fulfilment to our true desires, thereby distorting our needs into transactions. Too often, instead of being asked what we desire, we are told what to desire, before being given a price.
We must detox by embracing solitude in a state of arcadia. We become our genuine selves when we are no longer defined by others. This is when ‘Arcadia’ calls to a return to nature, so we can witness the universal significance of natural beauty. A world that makes room for such things as the sublime makes room for us. Nature effortlessly demonstrates that the world contains magnitudes other than us, which are just as interesting as us. It shrinks our egos so easily and effectively, reminding us how vanishingly insignificant we really are. This widening of perspective prompts self-reflection onto ourselves, what kind of society we inhabit, and hopefully, where our collective choices are leading us to.
The final chapter ‘Chorus’ is an ode to Art and Beauty that pays tribute to Roger Scruton, Alain de Botton, Robert Frost, William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde and Voltaire among others – referring to the collective of artists, poets and thinkers as the ‘chorus’ – which shows us how to overcome nihilism and sublimate our sorrows by bringing beauty to the struggle.
“This widening of perspective prompts self-reflection onto ourselves, what kind of society we inhabit, and hopefully, where our collective choices are leading us to.” Arch Hades
In the void left by organised religions, Art is left to compete against consumerism and entertainment as the apex of our ideals. That is why Art matters. Without the conscious pursuit of Beauty, we risk being reduced to existing in a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which the worthwhileness of human life is no longer clearly perceivable.
Art answers the riddle of being: it tells us why we exist by imbuing our lives with a sense of belonging and purpose. Through creativity, we self-express and become more of what we are, regardless of if we do it well, because beauty is in the hard work itself and the sense of purpose we feel when doing it.
In the highest form of Beauty life becomes its own justification, redeemed from contingency by the logic which connects the end of things with their beginning. The highest form of Beauty, as exemplified in supreme artistic achievements, is one of the greatest of life’s gifts to us. It is the true ground of the value of art, for it is what art, and only art, can give.
-Arch Hades, poet and artist
This work will be minted in October 2021 by Aorist, a next-generation cultural institution supporting a sustainable non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace for artists at the edge of art and technology. Powered by Algorand, a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that supports smart contracts to ensure a seamless collecting experience, Aorist aims to offset emissions and achieve carbon negativity through the partnership with ClimateTrade.