QUESTIONS EXPERIMENTAL FILM
Epistemology, Social Media, and Unstable Reality
Views from the Cave and Digital Uncertainty
The Questions experimental abstract film series emerged from Views from the Cave as the project moved deeper into questions surrounding epistemology, ontology, social media manipulation, and the instability of shared reality.
As the work evolved, the project increasingly confronted the psychological and emotional effects of digital environments shaped by fragmentation, outrage, and competing narratives.
Social Media and the Collapse of Shared Meaning
Disinformation and Simulated Reality
The series reflects on the growing sensation of living inside systems of manufactured certainty while simultaneously navigating landscapes saturated with contradiction, distraction, and fabricated realities.
What remains can feel increasingly like a simulacrum:
a fragmented field of competing perceptions where stable reference points become difficult to locate.
The Difficulty of Identifying Truth
Within this environment, calling out disinformation becomes unstable in itself. Meaning shifts continuously, interpretation feels uncertain, and confidence in shared understanding weakens.
The films do not attempt to restore certainty.
Instead, they remain inside the tension of ambiguity.
Abstract Film and Psychological Atmosphere
Visual Fragmentation and Perceptual Drift
The experimental abstract films use distortion, movement, layered imagery, and shifting visual textures to create environments where perception itself feels unstable.
The work moves away from direct explanation and toward sensory immersion.
Ontology and Contemporary Experience
Questions surrounding reality, perception, and existence emerge not through narrative answers, but through atmosphere, interruption, repetition, and uncertainty.
Political Polarization and Online Hostility
Conversations Across Ideological Divides
During the development of the series, David Deighton spent extended periods engaging with conservative and conspiracy-oriented communities on Instagram through the broader Views from the Cave project in attempts to open discussions around peace, unity, polarization, and disinformation.
Emotional Reaction and Digital Aggression
Many of these interactions became openly hostile, revealing the intensity of anger, defensiveness, and distrust embedded within online political environments.
The work documents not only ideological conflict, but the emotional conditions surrounding contemporary digital communication.
Active Listening and Human Response
Remaining Grounded Within Conflict
Rather than escalating confrontation, the project increasingly turned toward active listening, emotional restraint, and observation.
The challenge became not simply analyzing disinformation, but navigating human reactions without becoming absorbed by hostility itself.
From Digital Conflict to Dialogue
This period became foundational in the evolution of Triptych Dialogue, shifting the work away from purely digital analysis and toward face-to-face political conversation and human presence.
Experimental Art and Open Questions
Living Inside Uncertainty
The series suggests that uncertainty itself may no longer be avoidable.
Rather than offering ideological certainty or philosophical resolution, the films ask viewers to inhabit instability directly:
to question,
to observe,
and to continue navigating perception critically.
Good Luck to All
The work leaves these questions unresolved.
It simply acknowledges the condition we are already moving through.
Related Projects and Films:
Cognitive Bias
Examine experimental videos investigating confirmation bias, declinism, and the psychological mechanisms shaping political belief systems.
MAGA Memes
View political meme-based artworks examining online tribalism, echo chambers, and the emotional dynamics of digital culture.
Book Burning
Explore an experimental projection work examining censorship, truth, illusion, and symbolic destruction through Plato’s Cave.
100 Views from the Cave
View abstract experimental films combining projection, distortion, philosophy, and digital imagery to question contemporary reality.
Short Films
Discover experimental projection films exploring abstraction, uncertainty, technology, and mediated perception through moving image.