is social media feeding
self-deception?

Formless Arts uses Facebook/Instagram to communicate and promote our messages and events. We are fully aware of how social media has been an incredibly beneficial and democratizing tool. Without it, we wouldn't have managed to build up so much professional perspective and autonomy.

The flipside is that recently it seems to have taken a strange turn. For complex reasons, the new direction is one of manipulation, deliberately engineered to control users' behavior, by influencing their choices and inducing people to build up false identities as well as falling into addictive artificial social validation.

Another recent issue is the race for attention that suddenly has got insane proportions. Portraying an image that masquerades the truth of what people are has become a valuable commodity in terms of social currency. To sustain such fake images and status takes an enormous amount of energy is a sure road to personal misery.

Make no mistakes, we are not against social media at all. What we really want to provide, though, is an honest platform to question and evaluate this tendency without being dogmatic about anything.

At our gatherings and events, we create a safe zone to explore uneasy territories of self-discoveries that have become a seldom practice, increasingly undermined by the social media influences.

To recognize all that which is false and tossing it away speaks to the heart of Play-Fight practice, playfully exercising truthfulness, whether by embracing our inner beauty or by confronting our deeper resistances and shadows as well.

In the end, it is about acknowledging the unbroken wholeness of who we are, piercing through social masks and the dysfunctional crystalized layers that have been accumulated for whatever reasons.

That's the spirit of Formless Arts, respecting and honoring individual's path while acting with brutal self-honesty to balance out the ever-increasing self-deceptive behaviours.

Text: Bruno Caverna, Formless Arts Founder