Capturing the essence of reality

Time to write down some of my thoughts of the past few days!

Initially we thought that visitors entering the box could also show us photos of how the outside world looks like. But then we realized that this wouldn’t make any sense: after all, somebody could just take a 360 panoramic shot of the desert outside, hand us their phone, and come back a few hours later so we’d have time to copy all of it.

Instead of photos we’ll need to TOTALLY rely on storytelling. And that’s beautiful, because everyone has another image of reality and personal story encapsulated in his/her mind: we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Stories have for ages been told around a fire. Fire is magical and ever changing. Can we really capture the magic of that fire by taking hundreds of photographs of its many shapes and forms?

Nowadays people want to capture each and every moment. But can we truly capture the Essence of Reality?

In the initial stages of the Solipmission project I thought that a big question would be: are we at Burning Man, or are we not? But now I feel that actually we might be more at Burning Man now than ever before. It feels that, however weird this may sound, we are stripping the essence of Burning Man to its core essence, without being distracted by the outside Reality.

Do we really need to visually view and capture Reality in order to capture its true essence?

If instead of visiting all the touristy sights of Berlin someone would go straight from the airport to the infamous techno bunker of Berghain and then would return 24 hours later to the airport hardly seeing any daylight, does that mean he/she has not visited Berlin or visited it in some lesser way?

Is it so that a moment does not exist unless it’s captured by a Tweet or a photo on Instagram? Just like the age-old philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The black box is nothing and everything at the same time: it’s a blank canvas, a Tabula Rasa, and an empty desert. A vessel to be filled with stories and imagination. Like the black box of an airplane the Solipmission will record the essence of Burning Man.

Lewis Carroll once said: “Imagination is our only weapon in the war against reality.” But isn’t Imagination as real as Reality? We can use our imagination to imagine reality into existence.