title: reality was overrated
year: 2024
src origin: link to asset
type: unique digital asset
size: 1347 × 1347px, 300dpi
type: png

Reality Was Overrated presents itself as a digital text-based intervention in public space, engaging directly with contemporary discourses on reality, virtuality, and the shifting foundations of collective self-perception. The concise, seemingly dry statement displayed on a large digital board gains critical weight through its brevity: it reflects on the gradual erosion of the concept of “reality” in an age shaped by digital mediation and algorithmically filtered worldviews.

Art historically, the work draws from the lineage of conceptual text art, echoing practices by artists such as Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger, who used public display systems to deliver pointed, often ambiguous messages. Yet unlike its predecessors, this piece seems to speak from within the digital condition itself—its voice not only mediated by technology, but seemingly authored by it. The phrase reads as a digital echo of collective disillusionment, a sober summary of a time defined by deepfakes, virtual identities, and simulated public spheres.

In the context of contemporary artistic practice, Reality Was Overrated exemplifies a postdigital sensibility—one that no longer distinguishes between “reality” and “representation,” but instead examines their mutual dissolution. The work stands as a commentary on an era in which real experience is increasingly overlaid by curated, algorithmically constructed access to the world.