Unreality mode

What kind of philosophy and art are called for when reality becomes the precarious thing par excellence?

What has become apparent in the past years is that reality is fiction. There’s no way around it. This proposition has been made many times before—by renowned philosophers, no less—but the truth of it has turned into something fundamentally different. Fiction has become a new type of systematization, a construction more real than the real itself, precisely because it has left reality and its constraints behind. Fictions are not something coming from us; they are emergent phenomena of the virtual spaces we occupy—spaces within which a new systematization of the real takes shape. No longer subjects, we are becoming conduits for such fictions to take place, manifesting in all their unmediated intensity, outside the social bond and beyond meaning-making attempts to anchor them into something concrete. It’s as if no one is satisfied with what exists—not even the world itself. The world is already becoming other to itself, unmasking and unmaking itself at accelerating speed. With each erosion and destabilization, something new is being built, drawn from what was left behind: the unmediated potential of the real. What does this realignment reveal about fiction’s power to set realities in motion? What possibilities does it offer for experimenting with the un/making of reality—and how is belief (in reality and/as fiction) formed, managed, generated, and suspended in this context?

Unreality Mode brings together perspectives exploring the effects and affordances unfolding between psychotic disbelief in reality on the one end and the suspension of disbelief in fiction on the other.

The first volume of this double issue traced this between-zone. The contributors showed how unreality is no longer just a void or illusion but an operational mode in which fictions, glitches, and loops become the very machinery that has hijacked the production of the “Real”. If the definition of a weapon is “that which forces a change in reality”, then the texts collected in Volume I amount to an armory. They follow the procedures—chemical, algorithmic, geopolitical, narrative, epistemic, and psychotic—through which reality is now forced, bent, and rerun.

In Unreality Mode, we are not observers of these processes but components in them: carriers of fictions, nodes in replication pipelines, walkers in constrained squares, thinkers under the spell of circular movements. What is at stake is no longer how to return to some lost reality, but how to inhabit this condition strategically—how to use fictions, glitches, and loops as interfaces for navigating the ongoing remaking of the real. The second volume explores how contemporary art takes up this challenge.