We are entering a phase where story outstrips physical, phenomenological reality.
Who gets to be the architect of story? How is it that we’re tricked into writing a different story than the one that’s spooling out? The airplane is falling, but it’s not falling. It’s not an airplane. What airplane? What fall?
The falsehood is flashed in the air like a shimmering cymbal and smash! it becomes reality. The very construct of truth is rendered momentarily pointless.
What’s my responsibility as an artist in this circumstance? How best to use my relative privilege and skillsets to resist this ricochet into the miasma of fascism?
At the bare minimum I can hold up a mirror that both reflects and cuts through artifice, tilting to show fragments of what is really happening. See how this system operates? See how these lives have value? See how the very future of meaning is in your hands?
– Freedom Baird,
January 2025
Bio >>