Subliminal Lullabies for a Postmodern Inheritance

 As younger generations enter the labour market to build upon dreams inherited from the past, we start to confront the limits that centuries of unchecked acceleration and colonial legacy have brought us to. In a time defined by the diffuse, fragmentary and multi-dimensional fallout of modernity (Herwitz & Daniel, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics: Postmodernism, 2008), where and when can we find rest? What do we still dare to desire for a better future for ourselves and those who will come after us? And what do we need to mourn in order to move on from the crushed remnants of expectations and utopias past?

With an increasing sense of loss and the contemporary turn away from traditional spirituality, we have ushered in an age of digital snake oil sales tactics and self-help techno-spirituality. Subliminal sound bites proliferate the underground of social media, selling irresistibility, success and security to the vulnerable in exchange for ad revenue. Blending sound and text with visuals that transport the mishmash of old-new-secular-spiritual-here-there, “Subliminal Lullabies”, borrows from the aesthetics and forms of these subliminals and manifest-affirmations to tap into the very real, pressing feelings of precarity and alienation that these hyper-individualistic solutions address and exploit.

The text and audio is extracted from interviews with individuals struggling to come to terms with the current polarising state of the world and corresponding anxiety about the future, mixing and distorting the swirls of emotions, hopes and fears into an experimental lullaby-lament for regulating the nervous system without turning away from the pressing preoccupations of our time.