"Real!" refuses nostalgia for photographic innocence. It proposes that authenticity today lies not in an image’s indexical bond to the world, but in the transparency of its construction and the affective truths it sparks. By baring the seams of generative process while dazzling us with its finesse, Waisbren invites a new literacy: one that recognizes the synthetic as a site of genuine encounter, and that understands “truth” less as evidentiary fact than as the negotiated space between eye, algorithm, and emotion.

The project extends the artist’s earlier AI experiments, which morph self-portraits into tinnitus-like shimmers, and the his viral "You Are What You Eat" videos, in which cannibalistic food creatures gorge on their own substance, amassing millions of views across platforms. Those works already treated embodiment and excess as unstable data streams; "Real!" pushes further, folding documentary tropes into a hall of mirrors. The everyday is replayed as glossy 4K tableaux, family snapshots bloom into weird, uncomfortable moments, and the boundary between social media posts of our lives and deepfakes grows porous. Each image arrives immaculate, sharp, perfect, yet carries a faint aftertaste of doubt, like a memory you can’t quite place. This is the new reality we are asked to navigate in 2025!

Waisbren’s biography sharpens the conceptual stakes. Years spent in corporate design drilled him in visual persuasion; chronic tinnitus, OCD loops, and food addiction tuned him to the feedback hum between stimulus and craving. In "Real!" these personal experiences become contemporary video artworks packed with the ethics of exposure: we are seduced by sensation and spectacle even as we recognise the mechanics behind it.