Nothing Feels Real

Nothing Feels Real: Transmission from a Familiar Dystopia The Nothing Feels Real collection intersects—naturally, inevitably—with the Click of Causation series. Certain pieces exist in both realms, not as duplicates but as echoes; alternate outcomes of the same triggering moment. It all began with a sliver of imagery—a fragment surgically extracted from a densely constructed, maximalist mothership. One of the first two pieces of the broader collection. A scene within a scene. A billboard glimpsed in the background of a post-apocalyptic cityscape, its chaos choreographed with obsessive precision. At first, it was still. Silent. Background noise in a world already too loud. But the world it belonged to—this quietly collapsing dystopia—refused to stay still. In that universe, the apocalypse has long since arrived, and what remains is the normalization of horror. Society isn’t crumbling—it crumbled. People live in the residue. They've grown accustomed to uncertainty, even found a warped comfort in the now-acknowledged conspiracies. The so-called "crazy" theories turned out to be real, and in a strange way, that knowledge is a balm. No more guessing. No more debates over what's true. Spoiler: none of it ever was. The government—if you can still call it that—no longer bothers with illusion. It has calcified into a totalitarian regime. Secrecy is obsolete; transparency now functions as control. Truth has been weaponized. There are individuals being quietly collected—“special” ones. Some of them know. Some have adapted. Others... not so much. They’re ghosts before death. Trapped in routines, mourning worlds and people that no longer exist. Addiction has become its own form of survival. Substance use—long a societal undercurrent—has erupted into something biblical. Alcohol consumption, ironically, offers mild protection against radiation poisoning. Which means those once considered the weakest—those long dismissed as self-destructive—are now statistically the most resilient. The broken inherit the earth. Or what’s left of it. That billboard—the origin point—kept resurfacing. Visually, emotionally, symbolically. I started pulling it forward, generating variations, expanding its narrative. What was once static became kinetic. Scenes unfolded. Layers revealed themselves. The billboard evolved into a kind of moving picture theatre, performing micro-episodes from the broader mythos of the still works. And now, it seems inevitable: these "scenes"—these animated extensions—will become a recurring feature. The stills speak, and now they also move. Each new piece may hold its own living fragment, a loop, a flicker, a reenactment. A causational residue. Because in this world—and perhaps ours—nothing truly stands still. And nothing feels entirely real.