Do you think fiction is a reflection of society? Do you think society is devoid of stories that excite? Do you think fiction can romantize or sweeten reality?
We do not seek to give answers, but to invite people to ask more questions about what they make them see, Cause critical thinking and generate consciousness.
In Real Life It is a sand project, which was born in early 2024, in which we are looking for Understand how the media configure the reality in which we live To understand how we have got here. And, together with Lab cellwe analyze and talk about how entertainment fiction can modulate our way of interpreting what surrounds us.
We live in an era where the real is filtered, narrated and consumed as if it were fiction. The screens are not only telling us stories, they also redefine the way we perceive life, and they not only entertain us. They teach us how to live, what to feel and what to think. The logic of fiction has infiltrated everyday life, turning real events into narrative content.
For centuries, fiction was an escape. Stories that started from universal truths to create parallel worlds. But, as he warns Eduardo Subrats In virtual cultures, it is not fiction that is inspired by reality, but it is reality that seems designed to fit into fiction molds.
Surrealism, along with movements such as futurism or dadaism, broke with the traditional ways of representing the world, opening an aesthetic of chaos and the fragmentation that still accompanies us. As Marinetti wrote in the futuristic manifesto (1909): “To all living men on Earth!” He came to say that art should be a cry that embraced the vertigo of progress and chaos of modernity. A free thought where the dream, the absurd and the irrational become legitimate forms of knowing and representing the world.
Subirats also identifies two historical processes that shaped our current perception. First, the Modern urbanismwhich made the city a productive and dehumanized environment. That image of oppressive, decadent and hostile city became a persistent symbol in cinema and literaturefeeding the idea of the metropolis as a apocalyptic scenario. And second, the Mass use of the media during Nazismwith Goebbels at the head, to generate a “global political culture” based on the Emotional manipulation of the masses. Today, this narrative construction capacity does not belong to a single regime, but to digital platforms, media algorithms and conglomerates that mold, amplify and direct our perceptions.
The cinema, since its inception with Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902), captured that tension between the real and the imagined. The science fiction of authors such as George Wells or Aldous Huxley helped us project possible futures, but also to warn about the dangers of progress.
But something changed in 2001. The 11S attacks were the first global event lived as a real -time show. The image of the towers falling was repeated with an almost cinematographic aesthetic. From that moment, The border between documentary and fiction became diffuse. And fiction began to change: less epic, more conscious, more dystopian.
The dystopia, formerly marginal, has become mainstream. It is no longer a warning, it is a dominant genre. It reflects contemporary disenchantment, but it also turns it into a product. So,The big social problems are not only discussed in forums or manifestosbut they are sold in chapters, they are discussed in networks and consumed as entertainment.
Perhaps the current challenge is not to choose between truth and fiction, but to recognize how they mix. And this starts from understanding how the media configure our perceptions is key, because in the end the stories we tell determine the lives we live.
