“Reality” awaits to be explored from the flickering pendulum of consciousness with the support of reason. As dwellers of the modern world, we perceive and anchor ourselves within a largely urban construct. Moral systems, ecological outlooks as well as other values are grounded within the city guide our inner “reality” making. The visage of the city osculates, is deconstructed and reconstructed within our gaze. By paraphrasing and understanding our surroundings through this osculatory turbulence, our perception functions in two simultaneous states: absorption and deferral. Normative socialized perception is that of captivation and anesthetization, while the absorption/deferral approach allows cognition and experience at the margin of consciousness.

In the context of the modern city, FACT AND FICTION is about weighing reality and urban illusions. These illusions, composed by regimes, moral norms, and ideologies are put under pressure by future technologies. Combining digital media, image/technology-based installations and innovative materials, “Other absorption, other spectacle” plays a mixtape of methodologies to perceive the city. At this moment, in the best of times and the worst of times, we invite you to join us, floating above the city and looking down at this reality which simultaneously nurtures and exploits our consciousness.

The city is the cultural medium of our cognition and daily life, Sam Ghantous expands the form of the city into that of ideology. By empowering the audience to build the city from smartphones, Architecture in the Afternet seeks a way out the status quo where city has become the product of authority. Chando Ao focuses on one precise problem of urbanization, waste of resources and pollution. He does so in a candid manner with Ao Water, a piece that may alter people’s reliance on plastic vessels and products with the application of alternative materials. Meanwhile, Ao Hydrophobilizer challenges and recodes the common act of using a hand-sanitizing. Participants wash their hands with water and an aerogel dispenser. Bjorn Sparrman’s series Dressage makes physical ‘stable’ concepts, concepts by which we understand ourselves within space, and guide the human enterprise. Yet these soft undulating structures, grids, do not perform as expected, but emerge vibratory, hypnotic, sublime. When the discrepancy between reality and beliefs mirror urban fact and fiction, we can't help but ask, where should we go as individuals as well as collective? David OReilly’s video game Everything brings the notion of city to a higher and wider level, where all players are liberated from human body and enabled to see the world as other species and form an entire ecological system by themselves.
"Our perceptual and sensory experience depends less on the nature of an external stimulus than on the composition and functioning of our sensory apparatus" (Crary, 1999). With the development of technology, people increasingly depends on subjective vision as fact becoming fierce. In this show, artists utilize modern technology, based on city and city notion to reconfigure our subjective vision.