LOOK BENEATH THE SURFACE
The digital world has offered us many wonderful things, but digital life can often feel thin, lacking the depth and quality experienced by losing yourself in a good book, or talking with friends about your favourite movies. This shallowness comes largely from the ephemeral nature of internet culture, which offers (to quote Bo Burnham) “anything and everything, all of the time”.
Many of us are convinced that it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a route through this digital landscape that runs between apathetic consumption and a luddite rejection of technology. My offering to this is Art Of Conversation, an online project to engage deeply with culture as a rejection of the idea that audiences are merely consumers and that escapism is all that books and cinema are good for.
To put it more positively, at Art Of Conversation we are cultivating an appreciation of culture that is not narrow, and that understands that the best things in life are not quickly nor easily obtained.
Here, we will introduce literature and cinema to philosophy and science, blend pop culture and high culture, and mix the contemporary with the classics. Expect Kafka's Metamorphosis to meet the Marvel movies, metaphysics to influence metal music, and Nabokov to explain Netflix.
Perpetual Spoiler Warning: Art Of Conversation does deep-dives on culture, so it's a good idea to assume that if a book or movie is featured in an essay, we will be talking about it in detail.