The sky is falling in. We are spiritually bankrupt.
The social landscape has become both a noisy and fractured space. From the opiates of the masses that sedate us to the mass consumerism that drives us, Capitalism has cannibalized the civility in our civilization. Our time is one of continually deferred expectations and anxieties where the sustained narrative of tabloids becomes history, presidential tweets become regulation, and reality shows take form as the modern-day "coliseum". It is one of drug epidemics, global pandemics, political polarization, and technologically mediated friendships. The sanctity with which we viewed traditional values has diminished. Lost, is perhaps, as universal a feeling as love nowadays–– as we become physically, geographically, economically, temporally, or existentially disoriented.
The structural and material inequalities within the world economy are maintained by the apathy amongst those who have, the socio-economic limitations that confine those who do not. While hunger traps most of the world in poverty, problems of obesity rise. While one-fourth of all humans live without electricity, the other three-fourths don’t have lives without it. For all intents and purposes, this series focuses on the latter. For this subset of society, the boundaries between life and tv have become increasingly obscured. The poverty of experience at the hands of our hyper-accelerated society goes without question. A billboard propagating misplaced values has been replaced with a sidebar on our desktop, more so than ever before in history are our decisions informed by ads, our desires driven by artificial needs, our happiness contingent on consumption. The simulacrum does not hide the truth, but rather reveals its absence. The medium has swallowed the message, while the multi-medium proliferated it in all directions. Reality exists only in the form of representation. The ideological contradiction at the heart of this myth is the delusion underpinning it.
Our preoccupation with accumulation and enough never being enough consumes the ethos of our time. Collectively we buy into the lie, and turn our backs to the albatross of exploitative means necessary to satisfy our insatiable need for the newest, latest, cutting edge gadget. Shelf life is not sacred - nothing is sacred, as built-in obsolescence fills landfills with last years’ models. The death of religion created a power vacuum, filled shortly thereafter with a parade of false idols: Kardashians, iPhones, Snapchat. Doom scrolling, retail therapy, heroin hooked suburban sprawl are hallmarks of our time. We are asleep at the wheel. Meanwhile, our carbon footprint goes unchecked, profit over people remains the name of the game, a mass extinction goes unnoticed, the rainforests burn, the ice caps melt, the north pacific garbage patch grows-the list goes on. Our indifference is symptomatic of our spiritual and moral decay. Is this what we will be remembered for?
United by its unconventional exploration of semiology and its role in cementing consumerism, commodification, and a mythology of a fictional past, Caged Canary looks at the unique cultural phenomenologies intrinsic to our time.
