“Each person in everyday life must be dealt with strain, depression, or unpleasant situation in life. These psychology symptoms lead an individual seeking for a way out to escape or release the pain, tension, and depression. This circumstance is called as escapism." - Nensia, Nensia. "Escapism as Reflected in Tennessee William's the Glass Menagerie."

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The Universe is shit right now. That is a fact. How do we change that? 

 

          Due to the current pandemic, we are forced to immerse ourselves within the digital realm, unable to explore the world beyond our front door. The internet as a digital space for our virtual selves to explore and get lost within the depths of the world-wide-web. Before the global shift to self-isolation and quarantine, we used the internet as a form of escapism. What is created when we are almost entirely confined on a digital platform, unable to tell where our physical and virtual selves end. We use the internet to escape our daily lives, where do we escape to when we are now living almost exclusively on the internet. Where is this third space for us to escape to? The unknown, the fabricated, the imaginary realm we use when our virtual selves need to escape and we are unable to return to our physical bodies. 

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How do we transcend physical space and escape our current reality? 

 

With an alternate reality… DUH. 

 

          Escape the Universe asks us to reconsider our own personal realities, looking for new and undiscovered perspectives in the time when we are confined to our homes like a domestic house cat. With a dramatic cultural shift to a digital platform, our former mode of entertainment becomes almost oppressive. How can we recontextualize our current ambivalence towards technology and use it to fabricate a completely new realm, from the comfort of our own homes, as a way to escape both our physical and virtual selves? 

Escape the Universes uses technology to alter our current reality to adhere to our own fantasies creating a self-derived environment.  We create these alternate universes to combat our current realities, finding solitude in the unknown. Using technology, how can we implore the digital realm to sculpt an alternate space, where possibilities are endless. You could live in a world ruled by otters, or live on Mars, or even where Donald Trump wasn’t elected as President of The United States. This space may also be only slightly adjacent to our current one, that it may even go unnoticed. (Ex. Remember that spider you killed yesterday? Well, it turns out that it was actually a fly.) Using this alternate realm to escape in its endless possibilities, getting lost somewhere within space or the coded software of the internet.