reaching between
earth and sky
Hard not to think of this now, in the post-digital era, when images no longer just depict reality but intervene in it, fold into it, dissolve it. A face that never existed. A body that moves but was never filmed. A landscape no one has ever stepped foot on. The closer we try to depict the world, the more slippery it gets.
What does it mean to get back to the real? Baudrillard warned of the hyper-real, the copy with no original, the simulation that replaces the thing it was meant to reflect. But maybe the shift is even stranger than that—maybe images now are like thought-forms, their own kind of energetic entities, pulsing with intent, untethered from an origin. Deep-fakes, generated personas, algorithmic hallucinations—they don’t just blur reality, they generate it. And we take them in, knowingly, unknowingly, until they settle into our perception, shaping our sense of the world.
Design thrives on this ambiguity. It trades in semiotics, in the construction of meaning through image and text, grid and interface. It smooths the surface, refines the message. But if thought precedes form, if the idea shapes the real, then design is also the work of conjuring worlds. Branding, storytelling, political myth-making—who gets to say what’s real, and for whom? A perfectly optimized ad, a carefully controlled feed, a deep-fake—each is a construct, a thought-form made visible. Theosophy suggests these forms exist in a realm beyond ordinary sight, that they are always at work, shaping what we take to be true. Maybe digital images, infinitely replicable, endlessly mutable, are the same—an invisible architecture behind what we think of as real.