la caverna

(released on April 26th 2023, link to mint site on Vertical Crypto Art platform)

la caverna deals with the impossibility of seeing the absolute truth given our subjective minds and our subjective world. The title is a tribute to Plato’s allegory of the Cave, included in his work Republic. It does not only deal with the fact that what we perceive is affected by our senses and our mental state, which is a function of our genetic inheritance plus our life experiences, current and past, but it also is a reflection of today’s world, where a fabricated reality is no longer distinguishable from what it really is. What is reality today?

*la caverna, test output. 2023 Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez*

The artwork is a triptych composed of the three stages that constitute the final perception. The stage that is revealed first chronologically is the last stage, or what we as humans end up perceiving.

To create the triptych, the artwork creates a set of basic volumes, inspired in the platonic forms, which represent a potential ideal reality. It then presents a distorted view of that reality through several steps of distortion. This is what we as humans can experience: our viewpoint in life, different to that of other person, influenced by context, both natural and mediated by third-party interests, and history. This distorted final view is, as mentioned, the first piece that a collector will get, reinforcing the message that this is what you see first. Only if you persevere in investigating a piece of your reality, you can start to see other things, the factors that are playing into your perception, and potentially a glimpse of some part of a potentially more objective truth.

The other two parts of the triptych are the intermediate layer that transforms whatever the factual reality is, and that reality as it is, composed of the platonic solids. However, there is no possibility of grasping the true nature of that reality, so even that layer is a representation of what those solids would be.

*a view of a less distorted piece of the world - but still it is not the true reality. 2023 Marcelo Soria Rodríguez*

*a view of a representation of the distortion layer in a test output. 2023 Marcelo Soria Rodríguez*

These layers are released as individual pieces (independent NFTs) and will be distributed to the collectors of the corresponding piece. Each triptych is unique, generated from the same seed. The three pieces that make up the triptych is what the collector acquires when buying the first one.

Each piece of the triptych allows to refine the view (simulating more light, creating stronger images) pressing "r". You can save the current image pressing "s". You can decrease/increase the resolution appending in live view the URL parameter ?globalResK=2 (for example). By default, globalResK is 1. You can go as high as your graphics card can handle.

Tested to work fine on Chrome, Safari, Brave on macos, Chrome, Safari, Firefox iOS, Edge Windows. Firefox macos fails to render the image correctly. Please check before you purchase.