Conclusions
The history of western thought has always been linked with the
confusion between reality and unreality. The nature and morphology of such
disorientation is diverse; and a sign of its importance and complexity is that
figures as diverse as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Baudrillard, Geoff King, Zizek,
Allen, Godard, Cronenberg and Lynch have each dedicated part of, or their
entire, production to the contemplation and analysis of this phenomenon.
Today, the peculiarity of the confusion between reality and unreality is
wholly and inevitably linked with the rapid development of technology. The
configuration of our future will depend upon our ability to understand the
present and our capacity to react to and defend ourselves from potential
threats. If we do not want to make true the worst forecasts about our future,
we need to anticipate the consequences, identify and find solutions for them.
Our future depends on us, on our decisions, today. The notion of
‘potentiality’ is indeed recurrent in this research because the technological,
social and historical processes that it describes are incomplete and their
consequences are certainly predicted but remain uncertain.
In western societies we are currently living in a constantly changing
environment in which technology has affected the majority of the contexts of
our personal and professional lives. We live in houses surrounded by
technological devices; our work is often influenced by technology; we use
transport that is managed by technology; and, most crucially for this project,
our leisure time is very often employed in finding satisfaction through
technology. Therefore, the different levels of ignorance that we manifest
about how and why these technologies operate means that, nowadays, we do
not know ourselves and, more importantly, we exhibit a tangible paralysis
when it comes to actually analyzing, understanding and knowing the future
perspectives of our society. Our perception of the world is also being
radically transformed. Many of our daily perceptions and communications are
compositions of 0s and 1s, hence our interpretation of reality is
technologically mediated and altered: we are observers of a world of
representations. The reality that we perceive today does not only consist of
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