The reasons why these shots by Alina Fedorenko are ravishing

China is a land of rapid evolution and deep changes. Most of the items we use in our everyday life were designed in the Western world but made there, in huge factories, crowded places, chaotic storages. Some Chinese cities are still growing and evolving, and more and more people are getting used to the metropolitan lifestyle, lefting behind traditions, houses, family businesses. As the biggest "factory" of the world, China is an extremely various reality, plenty of houses and products of any type, where traditional families try to cohabit with the buildings of huge corporations, overcrowded slums, skyscrapers, decaying streets, bankrupting simple craftpeople, and the collapse of an old world stuffed with tacky-designed objects.

Alina Fedorenko is a talented, award-winner Ukrainan-German photographer who spent many years travelling. She visited many countries, producing lots of breathtaking pictures, and focusing, in particular, on the poorest areas of the world. She tells us the stories of people who spend their life silently, anonymously, fashioning the mass of products we handle every day, living in shabby and often gloomy places. As she stated, what fascinated her the most about her stay in China was people's struggle to survive without losing their family traditions; that's why she called this work Symbiosis of working and living. A lot of people in Chinese low-income areas (but also in many poor places abroad) run businesses which are also houses, so that you cannot see what's the limit between the two. Of course, Fedorenko's overlook shows you not but one of the many aspects of this country, but this is also, for sure, one the most fascinating.

Another appropriate title for this spellbinding project may have been Items. These pictures are all packed with items of any type, any shape. Partly because of the incredible lack of room, partly because of their retail routine, these families live and grow in small places where everything is surrounded by any kind of trinkets. Baubles, second hand clothes, cheesy posters, old radios, parts of windows and doors, old fashioned religious icons cover every single centimetre of these shops/houses, these private and public temples, in a staggering and chaotic patchwork. You may say it's not a living space, but a space which people happen to live in, an ever-changing architecture of narrow boxes. 

Symbiosis, a work which was variously edited by the author throughout the time (in 2016 it was among the winners of the well-known Photography of the Year Contest) depicts one the many astonishing ways human communities adapt the environment to their needs. Fedorenko managed to capture single moments of everyday life trapped in this unreal multiverse, created by the advance of capitalism, but also by these people's traditional industriosity, which will allow the next generations to find a better living all around the world. 

The stereotype of the Asian family using their shop as an improvised living space is still common in many metropolises, to the point that their inhabitants often deem Chinese communities as an indistinct mass of people who does not waste any time to "enjoy life" in order to save as much money as possible. But I don't think Fedorenko simply confirms this stereotype; I think she mostly shows and reminds us that the material world surrounding us has a great cost in sacrifice, time, space, and simple pleasures we often take for granted. This magnificent work of hers is a potrait of the huge gap between producers and consumers, manifacturers and buyers, in a paradoxal system whose future is so difficult to predict.

The reasons why David Firth is very interesting and you have to watch his stuff

David Firth (born 1983) is a controversial, crazy, versatile, ironic, disquieting British video artist. He is well-known mostly because of Salad Fingers, a weird flash animation YouTube series which he worked on for many years (2004 - 2013), doing almost everything by himself (voices, artworks, animation, music). I am sure many of you remember its miserable and lonely protagonist, who became a  real pop art icon and whose schizophrenic and mysterious attitude won the attention of several youtubers, triggering deep theories about the meaning of his story. But he also made lots of other things, and unfortunately many people ignore that.

Salad Fingers, David Firth's most famous character. It's impossible not to love him. In the interview I talked about below in this post, Firth claims that the idea of the character was born when one of his friend called him "salad fingers" because of the bad way he was playing a guitar. That's all. I know, it's disappointing, but Firth's imaginary world is built in fieri, as a house changing its architecture while it is built.

I have my personal theory about the gloomy and a little gory Salad Fingers plot too, but I am sure this is not the place to discuss about it (maybe at the end of the post). In general, for now, I'll just say I don't think Firth wanted to spend so much time and energies in a work which was just made out of nightmares and visions, and this will be clear if you have a look at the rest of his stuff. I'm getting there.

When anyone watches Salad Fingers for the first time, they are usually taken aback, or, more problably, unsettled. This slim, creepy, melancholic green man with a flair for rusty spoons and tormented by atrocious memories impressed thousands and thousands of viewers. One of the scenes which fascinated me the most when I first watched it is the moment he starts speaking with one of the many personalities living inside his mind, each one embodied by the creepy puppets he puts on his long fingers. Are they real people from the past, or it's just his imagination? Is Salad Fingers living in a nightmare, or the world is actually the wasteland we see in the series? For sure, this sweeter and sadder version of Gollum is one of the most charismatic characters in the web.

Salad Fingers contains many of the most common features of Firth's works (which can be publicly watched on YouTube; I'll write here the date of release of the videos on YouTube, unless their description says differently): minimalist and purposely rough drawings, strange monsters, scenes of mutilation and killing, eerie soundtrack, creepy voices, a bit of dark humour, and a cryptic plot. One of the most fascinating elements of this artist's videos is the fact you don't figure out immediately what they mean - sometimes, you don't figure this out at all. You often have the feeling the author wants to warn you about something horrible, which may be the reason why certain works are so gruesome, but in certain cases it may just be, like the author himself said in a nice interview, just a fruit of his disturbing fantasy. 

 

Firth is extremely versatile: he is an animator, a moviemaker, an actor, a writer; almost everything you see when you watch a video of his was done by him in person, including the dubbing. Even if you don't like his very personal style and disturbing effects, he is definitely one of the most interesting people you can bump into while looking for video artists. He is a musician as well: almost all of his many electronic music records were self-released under several nick names (as Locust Toybox), and his sound evolved a lot throughout the years along with his visual research, as you can understand from his animated creations.

That said, the main reason I wanted to write something about him it's not the fact he became famous with his self-realeased and mostly self-funded projects, even if this is, of course, very interesting, since his oldest videos appeared more than 15 years ago and they are still very popular, and this makes him one of the earliest YouTube VIP. Also, I'd like you not to focus on the weirdness of his characters or in their funny appearance or voices, or on the violent elements of his works: these elements are not mere decorations to catch more followers. I am interested in the political Firth, in the way he uses his obscene, eye-popping imagination to tell us about the contraddictions and horror (especially) of the capital-based society. 

Most of his short creations are a bitter, tongue-in-cheek lunge against the society of stupidity, or, as I called it in one of my previous posts, the society of the spectacle. In certain cases, as in Musical Prediction 2009 (2010) or in the scary Health reminder series (2009 - 2014), his ironic criticisms against the commercial insistence of mass media and, in general, the manipulative action of the economic monopolies are quite clear, and you can grasp Firth's intention notwithstanding his funny creatures and paradoxical dialogues. 

The three Health reminder episodes are an unsettling journey into the world of medicine and mass manipulation. They depict some doctors as parasites trying to dodge the problems of the patients claiming it's all in their mind, all fruit of their imagination, and giving them lots of medicines full of side effects, or persuading them they are ill in order to sell them useless cures. I think this is related to a certain tendence of the medical industry (not of all doctors of course) to focus on the effects instead of the causes, and to minimize people's suffering by telling everyone that well being is something coming from the inside, from your ability of staying positive, instead of blaming the thousands of bad effects of what we eat, we breath and we do every day. These doctors, in my opinion, are also a metaphor of the capitalist invisible power in general, and this metaphor is horribly effective.

A short cartoon about time (2009) is a terrifying glimpse of the greed and cruelty of an economic empire based on rush: the fact we must consider time as an economic source makes most of people narrow-minded and miserable, especially because their rush to get more "time" devour their biological time much faster. Basically, it shows us that we lose our time looking for more time, in a ridiculously overpriced life. I find it terribly staggering, and this dire exactness in describing the human society is what I love the most about Firth. Science (2008) is another ironic and sad fresco of the omnivorous, unsatiable nature of mankind, considering his yearn for conquering everything and everywhere as a part of its destructive dominion.

Sometimes, instead, his videos are purposely obscure, and you can only make conjectures about their meaning (if they were meant to have one). Odd voices, disfigured creatures, surreal situations germinate continuously from Firth's brilliant mind, and he imagined any kind of characters, so that it can be difficult to understand what exactly we are watching. Neverthless, even in this case, you can catch the spirit of the story as a brutal metaphor of our everyday life, a commentary of society, maybe in relation with our stressful conditions of work or the fear caused by the news, the money, the sense of guilt for being not competitive, or not social, or not rich enough (The Latest Model [2006], Dog of Man [2008]).

Even when you have the feeling that certain situations and characters were invented just for fun (The Adventures of Music Mouth [2009] is mostly based on puns, for example), usually the ending leaves you a sense of anguish, persuading you to go deeper and to find out what's always present in all Firth's works. Practicing Pat (2008) and 10 Different Types of Soup (2009, from the Sock series) are good examples in this sense. In general, it's not necessary to analyse every single element of the cartoon, but you just need to get its gist, the big picture, as a mosaic you can appreciate only if beheld from far.

Spoilsbury Toast Boy is the protagonist of another creepy famous Firth's series (2004 - 2005) which includes three episodes and takes its name after him. This quiet child, who lives with his sister and his spooky grandma in a desolated world where humans are enslaved by huge clever beetles, is even more miserable than Salad Fingers, given that, as many other children of this world, he has to suffer every day because of the cockroaches' dictatorship, which forces him to make toasts for their fat master. Maybe I'm just overthinking, but I cannot help assuming that this world is again a metaphor depicting ours, especially when I see the beetles that, after the mysterious boy's grandma's murder, wear elegant suits and, speaking with a well-mannered accent, fix an appointment with him and offer him a business card. This cannot be a coincidence: in Firth's hopeless world, monsters are often businessmen, and they are totally capable to condition the working class' behaviour (in this case, sneaking into their ears). Is it just Firth's world?...

I guess many of the Firth's followers are also passionate about macabre films, but to me his horror tales are expression of a metaphoric kind of monstruosity. Many times, in his works, you see a lonely and troubled protagonist meeting strange creatures or making a specific inquiry. The monsters they bump into frequently use a commercial terminology or have a business person's poise, and Firth's subtle irony underlines the ruthlessness of the Western world by populating the protagonist's travel with such fiends. 

It's the case of the Sock series (2007 - 2012) or the one named after its protagonist, Spoilsbury Toast Boy (2004 - 2005). In particular, I'd write for hours about Sock 4: Sock Lops, where you can see one of the cruellest portrait of the ruling class, who willingly enslaves the poor making them docile apathic creatures and inventing their needs; some kind of salvation is found in solitude and introspection (the protagonist cannot but shrink and shrink untile reaching the true substance of the universal matter). The programmed dumbness of masses is another frequent topic in Firth's unaware sociology.

Seemingly, Firth is growing more and more political, which is great. In a video, he explained that YouTube stopped funding a certain type of disturbing stuff, and that he would like his followers to fund his works from now on, by using Patreon, a famous website used by independent artists. Cream (2017), born thanks to these Patreon's donations, is one of the longest and richest videos of his, and its artwork is much more refined than usual. Again, the satirical commentary and the dark parody of the financial dictatorship is underlined by monstrousity, and again, monstruosity symbolizes the stupidity of the Western metropolitan population. 

Firth's planet is made of flesh, and has the eyes of a monster. Monsters with unexpressive faces and idiotic sights follow the latest news and get scared by everything. Monsters living in beautiful huge palaces devour resources and spread their horror everywhere, forcing people to be hungry,  violent and stupid (as in the Drill Bit Head series [2010 - 2013] a tall skyscraper keeps all the other living buildings unders control, showing no worries even when a "breeze" fills their mind with easy-to-remember lies and silly lines). 

Piracy is one of the main themes of Cream. As soon as people get the possibility of creating something beautiful by themselves, the masters of monopoly condemn their creativity and happiness as despicable acts, claiming that piracy is immoral and dangerous. We don't have miraculous creams healing any disease or fixing our car, of course, but we are surrounded by taboos making our life unhappier and expensive because of the mere existence of money (which should be gradually made useless by governments). For example, I am one of those people who are absolutely convinced that internet should be free for anyone, always.

Stupidity, apathy, hysteria and fear are the main qualities of masses in Firth's works, and, in the case of Cream, they are worsened by few powerful people, scared by the miraculous invention which could solve any problem in the world, making money useless. This video has no mercy, no compromise. A small group of individuals on earth may actually find a solution to many tragedies, but this is just not convenient to their élite. The fact someone tells this in just few minutes of an ostensibly silly cartoon is something really cool. 

Men from up the stairs (2006) is a mysterious creepy glimpse of some kind of office located in a building sorrounded by a crevasse. I am not sure about its meaning, IF it has a meaning. What I am sure about is that it reminds me so badly of Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), the famous short story by H. Melville. Even if Firth didn't know about this story, which talks about a clerk who decides he'd prefer not to leave his office, the similarities are impressive. In general, both works tell you that work is a prison. I guess.

Last, the three episodes of The News Hasn't Happened Yet series (2017 - 2018), three little masterpieces of satire against the world of information. It's not a cartoon, but more like a mixture of many footages edited with various techniques, where almost every person has Firth's face pasted on them. Imaginary TV reports mislead the population, making them paranoid and scared. People's shallowness and journalists' insincerity interact with each other, creating a world of useless news, professionals of fake news and haters of these professionals of fake news. In the society of the spectacle, nothing can be real, nothing can be perceived as a true fact, since the news are not the medium of the message, but the message itself: people listen to it, have a reaction, feel a sense of guilt, are entertained, and then just forget. Rumors about a war fought in a far poor place or of a mortal disease can make them feel alive for a while, before a new distraction comes. 

David Firth's creations are a cruel and ravishing summary of the truth we love keeping secret, of the horror of the financial élite, of the hypocrisy with which we talk about the problems of the world and even of our laziness and apathy. We are monsters in a monstrous system, and this is not just a common expression. I thought it was nice to dedicate him a post, since his uniqueness is not just entertainment to me. He is definitely worth a look, even if maybe you'll have nightmares: it will be a kind of nightmares you need to feel awake. At least you will make interesting considerations about happiness, suffering, modern age slavery, and all the other things which won't improve your serenity.
  

Artistically born when YouTube was still not such a viral thing, Firth stayed on the web for a long while, and I am happy he did not disappeared. I hope that in the future (we could say, when most people born in the 90s will be parents), he will be considered as an icon of pop culture, one of the most effective dark comedian of the era of dumb information, and one of the main mavericks of video art. So please, if you like him, support him on Patreon. Let's support this kind of disturbing serious works, in general. 

Oh right: my theory about Salad Fingers. I am persuaded, as many of his fans, that Salad Fingers is a former soldier, tormented by horrible memories and trapped in a schyzophrenic dialogue with the personalities living inside him, and that he is now an old man blabbering in his solitude. What I think about the final episode, which shows you a macabre meeting between the protagonist and some former members of his platoon, is that he's being introduced to the modern society as a valiant veteran, whose life can be a good example to everyone. 

The huge pole popping out of the ground, which his fingers cannot "get any information from", is probably the reality of the next generations, a reality which the former soldier, because of his traumas, cannot understand (he is confused by a world rejecting him). When the pole comes down, showing him the present he was yearning for (a horrible hat which looks made out of pieces of skin knitted with each other), he is once more persuaded that he counts something, while the platoon fighters, disfigured and traumatized by their past experiences, join a macabre feast - of course, they may be in Salad Fingers' imagination themselves, since they look identical to him. 

Once again, here you can realize the struggle of the individual against the social recognition: totally isolated in his own memories, he is given a reward for the horrible things he did, but he cannot even remember who he is, pranked by a greedy nationalist system. If my theory was true, Salad Fingers would surely be one of the saddest characters ever invented. 

But enough making theories. Just enjoy this author.

The reasons why you should get acquainted with Jolita Česonytė's paintings

The Lithuanian artist Jolita Česonytė's paintings are a delicate, enchanting journey through the relationship between people and nature, reality and dream, with an ironic and imaginative look at  everyday life. Her colours, mostly various and rich in shades, are an elegant dress to human figures surrounded by shapes and animals, which sometimes converse with each other in a symmetrical harmony. Whenever the picture turns chaotic and fragmented, the main human face of the painting starts blending with several elements around it, either plants or animals or objects, generating a fairy-tale world of symbols and glazes.

Dovana (2016)

Gera žinia (2017)

The uniformity and plainness of this painter's colours are ostensible: only when you observe them from closer and focus on the individual elements floating in a sea of shades you can notice countless lines, streaks and circles which make the entire picture alive, vibrant, dynamic. The presence of multiple layers of colours mixing into each other gives you the feeling of a musical relationship between the subject and the reality, of a continuous exchange occurring between us and the nature. A good caption for her pictures may be a famous poet's line: "Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself" (William Blake, The Book of Thel). 

Sparnai (2016)

Aukštyn (2017)

In her paintings human figures are predominant and have almost no facial expression. Every element is somehow an appendage to the protagonist's perception. People usually occupy most of the space, and the numerous shades, patches and streaks decorating their heads evoke a deep psychological complexity, sometimes eerie or disturbing. The entire human body is very rarily shown: what Česonytė is interested in the most is the head, the mind. Each painting is a significant fragment of the mystery linking our mind to reality, and for this reason making reality so difficult as well as exciting to live in. 

Sesės (2014)

Pietų vėjas (2017)

Even when colours are cheerful and shiny, there's always a certain sense of melancholy and confusion on these people's large faces, whose standard, statue-like features (flat and long nose, little almond-shapes eyes, very thin lips,  to some degree similar to the portraits by Amedeo Modigliani) make them resemble masks, floating and maybe trapped in a maze of sensations. You can say they didn't choose what to experience, since they often look alone and mute, lost in their own unicity, their own mind-box, but at the same time curious and dazzled, like fascinated by a never-ending music. When more than a person is present, they mirror each other in an enigmatic and reciprocal appropriation of identity, sometimes through the rituals of everyday life: a cup, a cat, a piece of furniture may be an ironic reminder of coupledom and material responsibilities. 

Ritualas (2016)

Kvarrrrtetas (2016)

I think the main elements this artist's works are made of are water and air. They are fluid, ever changing, ethereal, and their colours are more often cold than warm. There is always a breeze, a current waving the colours and dragging them away. There's no background, no perspective, just a fancy texture playing with the characters, which reminds me of Chagall's enchanted world. The most common animals interacting with the artist's lonely characters, sometimes even being part of their bodies, are birds and fish: from the air and from the water they come and speak the fluid language of nature as a consolation to humans' solitude and limited senses. I see a dreamy desire of freedom and totality in this dialogue, as well as in her paintings related to playing music and singing. 

Dainavimo pamokos (2017)

Melodija vakarui (2016)

Music, in fact, may be the third element in Jolita's art, whose beautiful notes I was eager to make you listen. Together with the relationship with nature, music is a fundamental part of the painter's cupio dissolvi, whose yearning for a melody of freedom has given us these ravishing pictures. 

Pabire karoliai (2016)

Jūros link (2016)

The reasons why Flou is, somehow, the game of life

Flou is a mobile videogame I recently tried, and it's cool. Most of the games Androids teem with, as you know, are just an easy way to kill the time, fiddling with your thumb until the bus comes. I cannot say Flou is an exception, and any common zombie living a city life can discover how standard its type of entertainment is. But there's something... unsettling about this little nice work. 

The game was released juts few days ago. In Flou, you go from here to there, endlessly, relentlessly, tapping on the screen where you want the ball (the main feature in the game) to move toward. The ball doesn't move very fast, so you have to be very quick to decide your next move. Your only goal is to move the ball through an empty space delimited by long lines moving from left to right, and viceversa; that means the ball will go leftward and rightward, up and down, continuously, in order to move to the right direction and not to touch the lines. 

The fact is: you cannot die. If you touch a line, your score goes back to zero, and that's it. The ball just keeps floating in an endless space, and you can just hope your next score will be better; until the bus arrives. The monotony of the lines movement just goes on and on, and you keep an eye on your score at the top of the screen while trying not to reset it. Every line you pass through, one point.  The game doesn't even stop when you fail, but it keeps going in the same costant rhythm.

Now, the reason I'm sharing this very basic experience is that this game reminds me so much of human life. We go to and fro, we try to achieve some results, we move in an endless and aimless universe, and we wait for us to be too tired to go on. The dark background this ball moves above, trying not to be tricked by the obstacles, is like the infinity we rarely think about, but waiting for us all. There's something hypnotic in Flou, and I am sure that, if you try it, you'll notice that this game has disturbing similarities with the human condition. 

From here to there, until the end comes. And we can just try to increase our score before the next mistake or accident. It was just a feeling I wanted to share. I hope whoever read this is realizing the score they got so far matches their expectations and goals, and that their reset point is far away. But, isn't ironic that while we watch the screen and undergo challenges, we turn into the games we're entertained by? I guess we just forgot the very moment we started existing in a huge videogame, dragged from here to there by the huge finger of fate; or better, of capital. 

Flou is the game of life. It has no exit.

The reasons why nihilist memes are so popular

I'm sure many thoughtful people have already told you that we're surrounded by pictures; there are probably too many pictures. Pictures of any kind and source claim their dominion on information. Words are probably too many as well, too "flickering", and perhaps we don't focus on them enough - also because of the fact they don't focus on us themselves. But pictures are immediate, often staggeringly immediate; most of the times, probably, people improvise as photographers because an overwhelming information culture leads them to share their visual impressions at any cost, in a narcissist (a little onanist) struggle to feel special. 

As a lover of literature, I am frequently bored by words myself, especially by novels, because narration does nothing but repeating the standard, predictable structure of everyday life and language - at least, most of the novels whose covers are in the windows of the bookshops. No, I don't think I'm picky; I just think putting words on a page with a correct syntax does not mean being a writer. The way we surround ourselves with words shows so clearly the unsuitableness of our language; we repeat the same language structures all the time, even in a creative context, because we need to make reality, to some extent, still recognizable.

Guy Debord (1931-1994), in his famous work The Society of the Spectacle (1967), talked about mass society's need of being fed with pictures in order to be kept awake for the "spectacle", a non-life created by capitalism to be in charge of workers' desires and needs. Spectacle, which means the industry of advertisements, entertainment, information etc, somehow took over the ancient role of the Church in giving people a vision of an inconceivable world of possibilities (what you can buy, the place you can go on holiday, the new technological devices, the virtues and enterprises of leaders and so on). Among the many spectacular features, he also talks about the central role of picture: "Where the real world turns into simple pictures, simple pictures become real beings, and effective motivations to a hypnotic behaviour" (18; translation is mine). 

But this post is not meant to be whiny and nostalgic, not at all. Fluid, ever changing, less and less definable, society is not very likely to be described by words, that's all. This is not to be necessarily considered a drawback of our frantic life, but a matter of fact; an interesting matter indeed, because our life goes much faster than our verbs and adjectives, for the first time in human history. The social media empire (even if it still has way too many emperors fighting for the throne) replaced, for the most part, not just our judgment, but our expressiveness. 

That's why, I think, memes (I am talking about Internet memes), among the most recent forms of communication, are the most likely to become viral: the social channel, the combination of picture and word, creates an immediate ironical message, mostly funny, which can be shared straight away. The phenomenon of meme should be analysed in light of the fact that most of the times we need something to be "viral" before deeming it worthy of our attention; and yes, I think this is partly a pity, because we focus more and more on stupid things, which are, that's another matter of fact, the most popular.

I guess you've already seen this painting in some articles or books about mass society; so, I don't have much to write. The fact is that Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888) by James Ensor (1860-1949) always looked like one of the best sociopathic pictures ever to me; is it just me, or there's something monstrous in this crowd? All those soldiers in rows, all those grotesque masks not very interested by the arrival of the Messiah, all those people trying to have a good time in such a suffocating place made me think that the painter was unbearably tired of masses; given the script on the top, I'd say this work may be called Social Network.

Many memes are about a specific category of things or people (Game of Thrones, Donald Trump, football), and sometimes they cannot be understood by every person; Facebook pages, of course, are often created just to share memes, and Facebook memes pages are probably the most popular at all. In particular, there's a type of memes I am, I confess, really into, which lately became very fashionable; its appeal is probably the main thing convincing me not to leave the social media world. I'm talking about nihilist memes.

From the Nihilist Memes II Facebook page. This is an example of the cynism I and many other normal working people probably cannot live without. This popular page often talks about children's destiny, since children's happiness and possibilities in a brand new world is exactly what helps most of people not to think about the nothingness of the universe. We make children for ourselves, and nihilism comes more from acceptance than resistance; life itself, having goals, procreating etc. are an act of resistance. 

I am sure nobody expected memes to become so popular as a reaction to the bitterness of life; starting more than ten years ago, cynical, sarcastic, often exaggerated memes about the emptiness of the universe, the urban life paranoia and various inner wrestlings spread through the Internet via every social media, probably starting from 9GAG and 4chan, and the birth of a Facebook page called just Nihilist Memes in 2014 made them even more various and sophisticated. I really enjoy the irony these memes express, especially about the way nihilists (but they often use this word as a synonym of depressed people) have to deal with the rest of the world. An exorcizing wit considers death to be the main reason of strong human passions, including, of course, the instinct to reproduce. 

Death is often seen as a liberation, and the tragic irony about the very few probabilities we have to pursue "real" goals (nothing is real, because we cannot but delay temporarily our appointment with death) is often, and willingly, excessive. The end of philosophy as a systematic study of reality is shown through the means of sarcasm about past philosophers' failing definitions and studies, or through pictures of Nietzsche, the great destroyer of illusions.

Now, dark humour is not a new thing, that's for sure, but I think there's something a little disturbing in the way we, as inhabitants of the globalized boredom, repeat to ourselves that everyone and everything dies; disturbing, mostly because very often, instead of living, we just attend life (as you are expected to do in a society of spectacle), and wait for things to pass on the screen in order to get some laugh or distraction out of our ridiculous human tragedy. 

Our common conception about death being usually impersonal and scary, we have to be ironic at any cost, especially through popular video games, films or cartoon pictures, that is, recognizable and somehow appeasing pop culture fragments. Even Super Mario can remind us we are nothing and will always be nothing; Spongebob's large smile is often used by these memes as a maniacal laughing about horrible contradictions of life; Rick and Morty's famous character Mister Meeseeks became a paradigm of an urging will to die, in order to end the incessant existential suffering. As I've heard once in a 2008 film by Paolo Sorrentino, irony is a medicine you get not to die, and "all medicines you get not to die are atrocious". 

As I said, many times I enjoy nihilist memes, and I really appreciate the fact that the art of memes managed to make us laugh about topics people are usually scared of. But I also think that the astonishing popularity of bitter existentialist problems depicted by funny pictures can lead people, as usual for most of Internet features, to overlook life itself. By striving to find a distraction, something to focus our sight on while we drag ourselves to work and back home, somehow we overlook life, we miss its depth and its complicated beauty, we get to pessimistic conclusions without really staring into it; short story short, being a nihilist became far too easy, and everyone can be ironic about depression without even imagining what depression is. 

Memes can be misleading, and I often notice that people feed on memes in a worrying escapism. Irony does represent a way not to  succumb to sadness, of course, but maybe we have learned this art so well that we forgot how to appreciate the real life (I mean, outside the spectacle) in the serene awareness that it is just a transitory state of matter. I have the feeling we spend more time complaining about the void than living according to it, which means we shouldn't embrace the emptiness of life without seeing the powerful, contradictory mystery of life itself - we never see dead people but in fiction or in the news, for example, and we're aghast, mystified every time someone tells us they're unsettled by this economy-based existence; we don't know how to deal with real problems, but we always talk about anxiety, fear and suffering. Anxiety is definitely one of the most common keywords in memes. Everyone needs to talk about anxiety, mostly due to trivial problems. Nobody can afford to be considered normal; everyone wants to show off as a troubled person.

Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most frequent "victims" of nihilist memes, given his considerations about life's meaninglessness. His famous phrase "Hell is other people" is relentlessly quoted, I'd say pathetically, not just by memes but also in social accounts of people who are eager to look clever. Sartre's Nausea (1938), a canonical existentialist work, is all built around the pain triggered by the awareness of being alive - life as a thinking about life, generating indecision, lack of goals, open questions. The absolute scepticism and disgust of the protagonist Roquentin, feelings he has towards roughly everyone and everything, accompany him constantly through his aimless wandering in the town. This is probably the main work inspiring memes authors, whose work, I think, is often due to frustration.

I am not the one who talks about hunger in the Third World in order to minimize depression and psychic diseases, but maybe memes are too often a way to wallow and not to think about how big problems-free our little First World place is, at least for now. We can realize the void, and this gives us the power to overcome any poisonous illusion, religion, blindness; even existentialist pain can be a nice reason to visit more places, finish reading War and Peace, maybe help people who cannot afford to think about deep things.

The fact is, depression is not nihilism. Given the fact that suicidal tendencies became so popular, maybe we should reconsider the nature of our feelings; are we truly sad, or are we just looking for attention? Are we really pessimistic, or do we just want to look interesting? The fact that nihilism became something so easy to share maybe made nihilism itself an impersonal attitude, a fake approach to life. A depressed person, on the other hand, wouldn't need irony, and maybe there are no proper reasons to make so many jokes about suicide. 

As explained in Guy Debord's masterpiece, The society of spectacle (1967), the more unsatisfying life grows, the more powerful spectacle becomes; so, what I find eerie about the rise of nihilist jokes in the past decade is the fact that we keep staring at a screen which tells us life is bad because we are put in front of a screen (Black Mirror is a perfect example in this sense). Basically, since we cannot get satisfaction out of an economic system which puts us at the edge of existence, we cannot but laugh at ourselves bitterly through the means given us by that system itself. 

We struggle for new expressions for our unsatisfaction, because this unsatisfaction is the only thing making us feel alive. We are so accustomed to the fact life is competition and harshness and money-based ideas that we mostly give up looking for a balance outside the home walls; it's exactly the same paradox making Netflix and videogames almost pathologically necessary for so many people (Debord [217-219] talks about this obsessive need of fiction as a schizophrenic reaction to the fear of being absolutely unnecessary].

We hardly experience death as a collective feeling, but we strive to see death in memes and fictions; we hardly find the will or the time to read philosophy books, but we have to put Kierkegaard and Sartre in a funny picture. The utterly ahistorical social context we struggle for money in persuades us to look at history as something ridiculous; only this context could generate this type of dark humour, and an ahistorical nihilism we can use to justify our fear of life. Augmented reality is probably the best way to make nihilism unauthentic: our impressions and feelings are so artificial that somehow even our fear is. 

Stalker (1979), the famous work by A. Tarkovsky, is about nihilism, but not exactly from an existentialist (ahistorical) point of view; the dialogues between the three protagonists, often cryptic and symbolic, often refer to the lack of goals and clear desires of modern humanity. The journey to the Room, an enigmatic place where one is supposed to obtain what they desire the most, turns out useless, because apparently nobody is able to desire something clear anymore, and history itself, as the "Professor" explains in a beautiful monologue, has no direction anymore, no past nor future, but a chaotic blend of the two, so that nobody knows what is worthy of struggling. I mentioned this film because somehow it explains the "nihilist" boredom generating so many memes throughout the Internet; if you didn't watch it yet, you need to know it can be soporificly slow. Seriously.

Memes are not a bad thing, neither a good one. They're an interesting cultural phenomenon, and I like talking about it as such. As you maybe already know, this word, derived from a 1976 Richard Dawknig's famous book, means "something which can be imitated, replicated" (Greek "mimema"); there couldn't be a better definition for our disquieting misconceptions about culture. Being entertainment a mean of survival in an urban life which makes us feel meaningless, knackered and inadequate (the struggle to survive never stopped, just changed its selection methods), I totally understand why we need pictures to be countless, immediate, simple and possibly funny; I just hope that this never-ending hunger of shallow information will not persuade us to overlook words and pictures that maybe are still worth something more than a joke. 

We are turning into memes; our life is a meme, where we repeat and do and joke about a standard stock of situations. A countless horde of "When you..." memes makes people laugh at and share utterly banal feelings and situations anyone could feel mirrored in. We need to clap our hands to ourselves, continuously. We don't separate our judgment from the media surrounding us, and we feel we should live somehow, but we don't remember how.

That's why, all my aforementioned fears notwithstanding, I decided that nihilist memes are probably the most interesting, or better, the least shallow memes you can find. At the end of the day, without pretending we are in charge of our lives, we managed to create something funny about our tiredness: there are no more illusions to fiddle with, and our mortality is nothing staggering anymore. The "system", that is, the production process, has already won and always will, so we find no reasons not to make light of our parcellized life, whose goals cannot be but money-oriented. 

The main drawback of all of this, as I said, is that everyone can play depressed, philosopher, deep, and every time you would like to say something more than "life sucks", you have the feeling someone is already making a meme about you; you are old, you are boring. By "memezing" the emptiness of life, we make it less and less philosophical, in the sense that we struggle less and less to enjoy it.

The reasons why sci-fi films are going to be the only interesting films left

Blade Runner (1982) shows you perfectly how deeply, and how quickly, our views about future changed. If they're really going to release a second episode, I guess we'll see a totally different ensemble of futuristic elements, including, hopefully, monitors with a better resolution.

I already know you'll disagree. Many of you are just thinking that several genres still have a lot of things to show in terms of style and innovation, that you were so moved or so amused by that comedy or that tragic story, that it depends on one's taste and perspective, that that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio made you cry, that you felt your bowels twisting with rage during all the bloody tortures in 12 years a slave etc. etc.
 

So, first of all: what does "interesting" mean in this post? It means realistic. And what do I mean when I say realistic? I mean weighty, rich and problematic in terms of study of reality, of scientific analysis; this doesn't have anything to do with amusement, special effects, emotion, actors' skills, Michael Fassbender's coolness and so on. Depicting reality is the very essence of art, and an artist is not necessarily an entertainer, and vice-versa. Moreover, art is not just emotion. In the aristotelian sense, art is imitation of life, and the fact our view of life is always limited and keeps changing through the history doesn’t mean art can afford to stop analyzing it.

Eva Green played in Womb (2010), and this is the main reason why you must watch it, regardless of anything else. Apart from this, I really loved this "sci-fi" film (more precisely: a dramatic film with one single important futuristic element) because of its minimalist frames, its essential soundtrack, its wonderful script. No exaggeration, no pathos, no standard Hollywood stuff (this film is German/French/Hungarian: phew): a ravishing dramatic picture where photography and dialogues are perfectly balanced. It is one of the best movies I know about genetics. I think you should watch it because it faces a matter which is growing more and more present in human life: clonation; namely, the possibility to live again after life. As claimed by the director himself, Benedek Fliegauf, this work tries also to explain that "free will", in our time, is a great deal overrated in comparison with the inheritance of genes. Why do people always feel free?... Anyway, Eva Green.

Example: I LOVE Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), really; I mean, I could say it was epic, majestic, awe-inspiring etc., BUT it was not problematic: it didn't tell me anything about my reality, my world, the modern human's philosophical point of view etc. Reality keeps changing, and works of art show us the flowing of changing. 

Second example: The Revenant (2015), the revelation, greatest film of that year, DiCaprio's best etc: personally, I couldn't stand that film, since, well, watching an almost three hours long picture with a man suffering, starving, stumbling, falling from mortal heights and miraculously rising up again, surviving just with his mind steadiness instead of (logically) dying for septicaemia and persuading a virtual bear not to kill him even after shooting it is not a very fulfilling experience (no, I'm sorry: the fact it was semi-autobiographical does NOT make it more special, and stop with the “woow, a true story” effect); BUT: this doesn't mean I cannot admire the actor's skill, the special effects, the soundtrack, the make up and all the technical elements which made this film a "nice thing to watch spending few hours of your life", but NOT what I call a work of art.

Mad Max: Fury Road: probably the coolest film of 2015. But coolness is not everything, right?

So. Why sci-fi? Of course this genre changed a lot since its origins, and as you know genres grow more and more difficult to define: sometimes sci-fi means metal, hard silvery surfaces, laserguns, white aseptic rooms, but sometimes it just means a dramatic plot developing around one single futuristic element (The Astronaut's Wife [1999], Womb [2010]). Aliens are not that scaring anymore, and abductions are, at most, a cheesy horror happening (have you ever seen Extraterrestrial [2014]?) or a curious linguistic exchange (Arrival [2016]). 

We cannot imagine things, obviously, by using the same fantasy as once: maybe you forgot, but Blade Runner (1982) was set in 2019; 2019, got it? Basically, according to Scott's cult masterwork, we are already using both perfect humanoid robots and monitors with a very bad resolution. Nowadays, instead, we (well, most of us) cannot even imagine what's going to be invented in the next two years, and our predictions about future society cannot be but murky (and often worrying).

And all of this notwithstanding, the chief philosophical and social problems of our time (starting from 2000, more or less) are faced and depicted especially by sci-fi; I very rarely found the same “weight” in other cases (and of course I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy any other films at all): sci-fi is pretty much the only genre which still “dares”, from time to time. I think this also happens because we said basically everything about all the rest, and cinema (as already happened to literature long time ago) is growing old.   

“Late capitalism”, as someone defined this era, should be portrayed by expressing its decayment, but it’s quite easy to notice that most of the recently released films are just… pathos-oriented. Everything is pathos, and people comment like this: "Oh nice... but a little sad!" So, when I say sci-fi, I mean, in general, films with at least one sci-fi element: the film itself can be either a romantic story, or a post-apocalypse story, or a space journey, etc. It's impossible to be more precise.

Cosmopolis (2012) is one of the rare not-exactly-sci-fi films dealing with decay of capitalism. Cronenberg's last film, Maps to the stars (2014), is another beautiful portrait of the "tiredness" of the rich class, stuck in its contradictions, and the relationship between the entertainment industry and the Western society. Cronenberg, where are you? We need your disturbing talent!

The fact is that sci-fi still shows us aspects of reality which are worthy of a deep discussion - namely, which are problematic. They lead us to some kind of reflection about the development of human society, our main fears, our uncertain and scared perspective about the weakness of global economy, and they do so way more effectively than other genres. I believe that these films (beware: I'm not talking about ALL the films with this tag) may be the only films left which make us think, not just feel. There are very few exceptions lately.

In particular, our relationship with technology, space exploration and artificial intelligence still generates works which I wouldn't define just entertainment, regardless of their actors' popularity, their budget etc. Our way to imagine the future, of course, keeps changing, but since the human race seems to be particularly tired in this period, I'd say that sci-fi tries to imagine all the possibilities (and the complications) that humans could pass through this decay by becoming something more than human.

British The Machine is an interesting sci-fi work about the possibility of recreating someone's appearance by means of engineering reconstruction, but also, and most of all, about the superiority of a robot mind which can absorb and quickly assimilate, once come to life, any kind of information, exactly like a child. The ending lets you understand this curious, innocent female android will be the first individual of the new (hopefully) peaceful race ruling the Earth.

Probably, we're still not ready to transcend our physical form; we still have too many problems to fix: first of all, I guess, the death of our planet. But everything in our habits shows us that we cannot just be happy to focus on a career and keep saving money until death; not anymore. We can be many things, many people, in many places. Our synapses expand in all directions. We strive for a virtual life, because ours looks more and more narrow. We grew up in a technology-based society, and we must deal with it; art must deal with it. 

I’m a little tired of hearing art being defined as “feelings”, honestly. Genetic augmentations, artificial intelligence, supercomputers are for sure more "interesting" (I won't use inverted commas anymore) than tear-jerking musicals set in a modern Los Angeles or battles against orcs for the reign of Azeroth (although battles against orcs are one of the thing I'm eager to watch after a standard working day).

I won't talk about Gattaca (1997), a sci-fi masterpiece about future of eugenetics in a competition-based society, for two reasons only: first, I'm trying to focus on more recent works; second, it would be too difficult to me to stop writing, and I'd probably need an entire new post. But please watch it. You must.

I want to make some examples of recent films that impressed me in terms of realism - according to the meaning I explained above. Let's begin from the best one: Ex Machina (2015). Finally, a beautiful dialectic fresco about the deep contrast between free will and predestination, humanity and machines, reasons and feelings. Apart from its brilliant visual effects, personally I don't know any better film about problems and doubts raised by modern conceptions about androids. Basically, you cannot guess, until the end, whether that beautiful female android has got human feelings or not; the spectator is led to think, not just to feel, and this is the main reason, of course, why this film is on the list. 

I think this film definitely deserves a place in the list of the best pictures about robots ever made; you must wait until the end in order to get what is the difference between human and artificial intelligence; which is dialectically explained. Art itself, painting in particular, is mentioned in the film, connecting spontaneity and artificial program in an exquisite dialogue.

Ex machina speculates through and through, as well, about the idea of spontaneity, which is the root of human unpredictability and of human art too. Just because we think about a painting to create by means of a mathematical construction, we’ll never be able to create an original painting; machines cannot create, just calculate, but their calculus may disguise itself terribly well as spontaneity (Chappie [2015] is a similar philosophical attempt, but it hideously degenerates into banal gunfire battles and cheesy humour). The astonishing ending is an eerie, unsettling outlook on the countless possibilities of future robots’ will, both in terms of appearance and attitudes.

Another recent nice (and tasting nostalgically “old-fashioned”, also in the soundtrack) film about robots is The Machine (2013). Well, it is not as deep as the one above, because there are way too many bullets, but I think it is worth a look, because the love story is gradually (fortunately) blended by the birth of the unequalled superiority of the mechanical “race”.

Her (2013) is about (romantic) relationships with machines, too. It is dreamy, sometimes unreal, suspended on many questions about our blurred-by-routine identity and desires, and it makes you feel like you just resurfaced from a long apnoea. I know, it is kind of a love story, but deals with a not yet existing technology, so… sci-fi, somehow. Actually, having sex with androids will be much easier than discussing about anything with an AI, I guess, because programming such a complex robot mind is still a dream. 

Ok, I confess: Her moved me to tears. This doesn't mean I wasn't intellectually stimulated... However, an other important element of this film is the solitude and affective isolation caused by a working-based lifestyle. Well, the Western one. Isn't this the reason why we always feel like messaging someone?...

But this film shows you how deeply human feelings are affected by the temptation of an “abstract” relationship - namely, the ones we pass through without touching nor seeing anyone. Technology already created long-distance love stories, and they will grow probably more and more important in our life, since the mind of modern human beings cannot really remain in the same place for long time. We can love many people or virtual people, in many ways, from many places, and I think this film shows you exactly how difficult is going to be for us to feel just humans with bodily limits - and the worst of these limits, probably, is the need of being considered unique. Watch it; don’t worry,  it’s not just romance.

Of course I must not omit Transcendence (2014), and I guess it pretty much explains why by itself. I should add that yes, maybe some aspects of the technology shown in the film are a little exaggerate, but the idea (the art) focuses on the fact that the essence of humanity, at the end of the day, is establishing strong ties with other people. The protagonist achieved the (maybe) last stage of intelligence, that is a spiritual/digital flux of data influencing reality without any bodily restrictions, and, by doing so, nothing was left to him but the interaction with the woman who knew him the best. 

Transcendence, of course, is much more than a man vs. machine film. The protagonist, by transfering his personality to a digital system, becomes not just immortal, but almighty, managing to control, heal, improve every living being he's interested in with advanced nanomachines. Basically, he can enhance other people's humanity... and still love, wow!

The very core of the film is showing us, of course, what are the perspectives of science about death. Again, the personality backup which allows the protagonist’s life not to end (well, to end just physically) is still a dream; I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to reconstruct someone’s personality by using megabytes, but this film, for sure, depicts majestically our yearning for a more and more abstract existence - because our future is abstraction, deal with it.

Something similar had been shown by, among many others, eXistenZ (1999), Cronenberg’s famous masterwork which focused more, anyway,  on the sublimation of humanity by games and virtual achievements, and about which I could write for hours. So, I’d better stop now.

I must absolutely add The Congress (2013), an Israeli animation/sci-fi story with a hint of delicious retro design style. This film is an amazing journey in a dystopian world (well, just a large area of a world) where people use a special drug in order to evade reality, suppress sorrow and create their own personal crazed perception. Yes, I know: Huxley - although in this moment I’m also recollecting, while talking about recent stuff, We happy few (2016), a fascinating, dystopian video game; but the difference is that The Congress people can do and become anything by affecting their brain like that, from riding a raging bull to turn into Jessica Rabbit.

The artwork of The Congress, directed by Ari Folman (don't miss his previous animated war film Waltz With Bashir [2008]), is breathtaking. Many of the fancy buildings decorating the landscapes of the animated zone are inspired by H. Bosch's paintings; its inhabitants decided to appear like famous actors, comic characters, mythological heroes etc., so that in their enhanced reality nothing can really make the difference. Oh, Enhanced Reality is also the name of one of Fear Factory's songs.

The protagonist, Robin Wright, playing as herself, not able to keep working since cinema industry can use digitally, and at will, the actors’ appearance, chooses to try this drug in order to find her lost son, who suffers for a syndrome destroying his senses; this lets the animation part begin, putting an end to the “real” Wright's performance. Thanks to the special substance provided by a huge corporation, nobody in the animated zone remembers about the “normal” perceivable reality, which is slowly decaying. Tastes, colors, bodies, smells, everything is an artificial stimulus, with no limits to variations.

This film is delicate and unsettling, extremely creative, aesthetically crazy, with long silent moments, and focuses on the uniqueness and rarity of strong feelings saving human life from boredom and nothingness. Where everyone looks like someone else, only people loving you remember who you are. More than that (and here is the core), The Congress tells us our reality is more and more made of cerebral stimulus and less and less of material objects. Appearance and personal experience will be just a matter of fantasy. We are our brain, and science keeps trying influencing its electric activity in order to gain an enhanced reality. We will be able to live, basically, without moving. Of course you may think about Brazil (1985), Matrix (1999), Wall-E (2008), Surrogates (2009), and many other deep works, all of them converging to the same fear/attraction towards cerebral life. In general, The Congress is one of the best animation movies I’ve ever seen.

Zero Theorem (2013) is disturbing, grotesque, melancholic: of course, because it is directed by Terry Gilliam (Brazil [1985], 12 Monkeys [1995], The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus [2009]). I have to confess I'm not crazy about Gilliam's morbidity, but I found this film tremendously "interesting", since the protagonist, stuck on a chair, working relentlessly with his computer and recollecting some sweet memories from time to time, struggles desperately against the impending Nothing. Doesn't this depict our actual condition? Doesn't this concern all of us?... Yes, that's art.

Obviously I could make some more (not many) examples. There are, and there will always be, many ways to talk about the human condition by means of cinema; but, as already said, I think nowadays sci-fi is the best instrument to achieve this goal - and that’s nobody’s fault, it's just a fact. Apart from the reasons I mentioned above, I think this is also due to the fact that society changes faster and faster, and that technological/scientific settings are the only ones which can keep pace with this frantic development. 

Many of these settings, obviously, are quite banal or not very detailed (In time [2011], Elysium [2013], Divergent [2014]... way too many others), and of course I didn’t say sci-fi proved to be immune to degeneration, commonplaces etc. But I think (I hope) that the films I mentioned have good possibilities to become classics - at least, to live for long in our memories as good examples to cite while we'll be talking about art in the early 2000s'.