Exit Reality

"The Internet is an alien entity," announced David Bowie in 1999: today the prophecy has come true, and our digital tools have become magical portals with mysterious properties, windows that look out onto a dimension on the border between dream and reality. Exit reality is the first attempt to map a world that, imbued with disorienting hallucinatory qualities, appears to us as a parallel planet that emerged from the galaxies of codicespace. Beginning with the advent of vaporwave, which in the early 1910s infused the network's native imagery with phantasmic qualities, Valentina Tanni takes us on a descent between levels that passes through the silent horror of backrooms, touches on the obsession with sensory stimulation of ASMR, traverses the algorithmic surrealism of weirdcore, and lands in the pseudomagic practices of reality shifting and memetic rituals.