INTRODUCTION

Iconically, the artificial world of The Matrix is set in the year 1999, described in the film as “the peak of human civilisation.” The Matrix was released in the same year and reflects an irony as if the Wachowskis were already anticipating the cultural climate of the decades that followed. Rather than existing in what Baudrillard calls the profound reality (physical reality), this thesis argues that the current cultural condition epitomizes The Matrix’s system - not via a dramatic cinematic moment, but from the slow accumulative effect of the cut.

Much of my practice has innately engaged with this structure, reflecting a sense of artifice or half-reality – the fictional and real spliced together. The work immersed itself with cinema, either by creating moving image works, or by rephrasing classic American Westerns in comparison with Welsh identity. By examining and therefore transforming nostalgia-infused media as described by Fisher, I was led to noticing how this structure can be examined by the cut – this essay’s metaphor as analysis device. Now, my practice aims to move on - it seeks to explore the origin of the half-reality of the contemporary world, evolving past creating work strictly about my alter ego ‘Tom Alabama’.

This argument develops across several dimensions. Drawing from cinematic montage theory and extending it beyond film, the cut operates from a fundamental logic shaping our understanding and experience of time, space, and mental perception. The granular and discontinuous nature of time now mirrors the structure of images and the real. Modern architectural and digital environments function as objects of montage. Hyperreality, post-truth and contemporary advertising culture also reflect the same mode of cinematic logic. By tracing how cinematic logic can explain how spatial, temporal and societal reality functions, this dissertation argues that we do not simply consume images in the public or private sphere—our mode of existence means we live inside of the cut. The cut is therefore not only a filmic device but the device with which we can describe how mental perception is cut.