DAILY ABSTRACTS
Contemporary Reflections on Plato’s Cave
Disinformation, Perception, and Political Reality
Day 76: The answer to all social and political fragmentation? I do not believe Plato’s Allegory of the Cave offers a complete solution to disinformation or ideological division. What it does provide is a powerful philosophical framework for examining how belief, perception, and manipulation shape contemporary reality.
For more than seventy days, David Deighton revisited the allegory daily through image-making, projection, writing, and experimental video.
Rather than repeating Plato’s ideas directly, the work increasingly moves through varied entry points: physical landscapes, environmental tension, sound, emotion, movement, and lived experience.
Returning to the Cave
Conversion, Doubt, and Ideological Certainty
This section of Plato’s text introduces a difficult question:
what responsibility does the individual have toward those who remain inside the cave?
The passage carries undertones of conversion and moral certainty. Yet the work resists simple conclusions.
What are we meant to think about those who are disinformed, misinformed, or ideologically entrenched? Should we attempt to guide others outward—or does that impulse risk becoming another form of imposed belief?
“If he recalled to mind his first habitation…and his fellow bondsmen”
— Plato, Allegory of the Cave
Interstate Bridge Projections
Experimental Video in the Desert
Day 85.
Videos were projected beneath a remote interstate bridge in the desert while trucks and cars thundered overhead. The concrete structure trembled continuously as sound, dust, and projected light merged into an unstable sensory environment.
Systems Larger Than Ourselves
Standing beneath the bridge, the work shifted away from explanation and toward atmosphere:
movement,
noise,
weight,
and repetition.
The projections became less about persuasion and more about existing within systems too large to control.
“Do you think he would be very keen about such rewards?”
— Plato
Oil Fields and Environmental Distortion
The San Juan Basin Landscape
Day 96.
This sequence documents oil and gas extraction infrastructure in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico, where industrial machinery extends across vast stretches of pinyon and juniper terrain.
Roads carve through the landscape in every direction while mechanical buzzing continues day and night.
Filters, Color, and Altered Perception
The footage was filmed from multiple perspectives before digital filters removed the natural colors of the environment.
The altered imagery transforms documentation into emotional and perceptual distortion, emphasizing rupture rather than realism.
Contemporary Art and Sensory Experience
Beyond Political Explanation
The project increasingly moves away from over-explaining philosophy or disinformation directly. Instead, these ideas become grounded within sensory environments and lived encounters explored throughout projects Book Burning, Land Skeins, Art Flow, U.S. Border Wall, and Questions.
The cave appears not only as metaphor, but as:
vibrating infrastructure,
industrial landscapes,
projected light,
environmental collapse,
and mediated emotional experience.
Letting the Work Remain Open
Rather than resolving political or philosophical questions, the work leaves them suspended:
inviting reflection,
critical thought,
and uncertainty.
Related Projects and Films:
Art Flow
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Land Skeins
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Views from the Cave
View the larger experimental media project examining abstraction, digital perception, political polarization, and contemporary systems of mediated reality.
100 Views from the Cave
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Conceptual Photography
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Short Films
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