#Keep it real meaning full#
There is no turning back, no full employment, no natural lifestyle. KEEP IT REAL! Don’t avoid conflict! Face the facts, as disagreeable as it may be! Fact is, we are living in the digital age. Who wants to have their free will and true desires exposed as a result of market research? There it is again, an origin, a genesis, a heteronomy that embarrasses us. As the focus group revealed: The majority of customers react positively to hyper-realistically vamped up pictures of rural idyll. Authenticity is nothing more than the corny scenery of alpine pasture imprinted on the plastic-coated milk carton, whose contents have been industrially produced without any cow ever standing in a meadow.
#Keep it real meaning Offline#
Even going offline is nothing more than a pose masking our socio-historical genesis – the wiring beneath the surface. Claiming authenticity, realness, originality, and naturalness becomes fake. You are digitally recorded, hooked up, algorithmically determined, and statistically analyzed. You are fictional, fabricated, industrially produced, and priced. Suddenly another gaze appears from behind the screen – and we are the ones caught in it. The gaze no longer originates in real life and looks at the screen. Now, due to its avatarian kinship, the phrase takes on new meanings. KEEP IT REAL! For a long time, the slogan was aimed at imposters and posers, those embarrassed by their origins, deficits, weaknesses, by their otherness and impotence – pretending, performing and hiding behind empty masks. They are the ones claiming realness for themselves. But an interpretation as accommodating as this one cannot hold up, since the slogan is inextricably linked to the avatars, cut into each other in the video clip and glued together on the wall. Then there is the cozy word “keep.” It does not call for anything new but for the preservation of the status quo. In times of fake news, TV star politics and anonymous online agitation the call to “keep it real!” seems like a yearning to take a step back – to move away from the screens and become an authentic self again – and to engage in actual acts amidst the real world. KEEP IT REAL! At first glance, this is a pretty conservative appeal. This text was written by the writer Luise Meier in September 2018, commissioned by HAU Hebbel am Ufer to go along with the film and poster campaign “KEEP IT REAL”, which accompanies the new five-year cycle of the directorship of Annemie Vanackere and her team at HAU from summer 2017.