A Civic Prototype for Shared Meaning in a Fragmented World
For decades, the promise of public art has been to provoke, to beautify, to “activate” space. But in an era dominated by spectacle—a condition famously critiqued by Guy Debord, where social life is reduced to images and mediated representation—this promise has been hollowed out. Our cultural language has been flattened into marketing taglines, aimed not at deepening understanding, but at capturing attention and steering behavior. Art has become propaganda—regardless of ideology—where the goal is not exploration, but confinement; not disclosure, but assertion.
In this context, art, public life, and communication itself have become a series of curated experiences designed to seize attention rather than deepen participation. These experiences fragment and categorize our realities instead of offering spaces for shared understanding. Public art is often reduced to objects installed for aesthetic enhancement, events staged for fleeting engagement, or performances programmed either for ideological reinforcement or social media appeal. The result is art that is consumable, commodified, and ultimately disposable—just another flicker in the endless scroll. Our experience of life itself has been fractured into moments designed for consumption rather than connection.
This pattern is not incidental. As Iain McGilchrist argues in The Master and His Emissary, our cultural and technological systems co-evolve with our neurocognitive structures. The dominance of left-hemispheric modes of perception—characterized by abstraction, control, and fragmentation—has shaped a world of optimization, categorization, and propositional knowledge, while suppressing the right hemisphere’s capacities for relational, contextual, and participatory awareness. The fragmentation of public space mirrors the fragmentation of perception itself. We are caught in a feedback loop between mind, culture, and design—one that accelerates our disconnection from embodied, relational, shared reality.
Yet beneath these aesthetic outputs—murals, exhibitions, campaigns—the deeper crisis remains: not a crisis of creativity, but a crisis of coherence. What we lack is not expression, but shared meaning. Not content, but collective presence. Creative abundance is no longer the solution—it is part of the problem. A flood of content without a frame to hold it. Our cultural output reflects the inner fragmentation of our symbolic lives—communications that reinforce our separateness rather than inviting us into a sense of shared wholeness.
We are drowning in misdirected creativity—creativity that serves isolated subjectivity, feeding cycles of distraction, consumption, and novelty for its own sake. Tristan Harris, former Google ethicist, calls this the “race to the bottom of the brainstem”—a game-theoretic dynamic where platforms and products are optimized not for wisdom or flourishing, but for engagement metrics that trigger our most reactive instincts: fear, outrage, addiction. In this world, even creativity is extracted—our existence repackaged as content. We do not relay ourselves forward—we sell our selves.
Art, in its current dominant forms—and the philosophical frameworks that shape it—is no longer sufficient to meet the challenges of the meta-crisis: ecological collapse, social disintegration, and the erosion of meaning itself. Axiology—the philosophical study of values: of what we consider good, beautiful, or meaningful—underpins how we frame these stakes. But the scaffolding around art has become too narrow, too transactional, too propositional—detached from the existential conditions we face.
The future of art is not in objects, programming, or spectacle—it lies in creating existential frameworks for participatory awareness: civic prototypes that support collective presence, distributed cognition, and symbolic coherence. (Distributed meta-cognition refers to the shared practice of reflecting on how we make meaning together—not just thinking, but becoming aware of the thinking process itself as a collective act.)
We must decenter art from the object and return it to the living flowing process of relation—understanding our shared life, our presence in space, and our interactions with each other and the more-than-human world as a form of art itself.
This is the meta-proposition of EXIT: a living experiment in Boston that reframes public space—not as a site for transaction or entertainment, but as a vessel for shared reflection, dialogue, and the practice of being and becoming together. Communication here is not a rhetorical transaction to reinforce preexisting identities, but a co-creative act—an inquiry into the potential of the present.
The most radical and necessary art practice today is not aesthetic provocation, nor political propaganda, but the creation of living civic forms that foster attunement—to each other, to place, and to the rhythms of a shared world.
The Meta-Crisis and the Loss of Shared Space
To understand the deeper context of EXIT, we must first recognize the shape of the meta-crisis. The meta-crisis is not a singular issue but a convergence of systemic failures: ecological degradation, social atomization, and the erosion of shared meaning. As John Vervaeke articulates, it’s a crisis of sense-making—a breakdown in our collective ability to orient ourselves within reality. Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall further describe it as the failure of our cultural, political, and epistemic systems to navigate the complexities of the world we’ve constructed.
At the heart of this crisis lies the disintegration of shared symbolic structures. Our attention—once anchored by ritual, narrative, and communal spaces—has become fragmented, commodified, and extracted. Spaces that once fostered reflection and collective meaning-making have been transformed into transactional sites: shopping districts, bars, pop-ups, and curated moments designed for passive consumption.
Commercial spaces have shifted from being communal gathering points to arenas of disassociation. The concept of placemaking—a term used by urban designers to describe the creation of community spaces that foster connection—has been diluted into superficial aesthetic interventions that signal market value, rather than addressing the deeper fractures in our cultural fabric. Beauty itself has been reduced to the “smooth”—the frictionless ease of mass digestion. Just look through any Instagram model’s skin adjustment filter to see it: a culture chasing perfect surfaces, optimized appearances, and ever more seamless consumption.
Urbanists, planners, and designers have responded with the language of the “third space”: a necessary shift in framing civic sites—not as venues for transaction, but as spaces for community-building and meaning-making. Yet even this ‘design for depth’ framing does not go far enough. It remains an architectural and urbanist response to a philosophical crisis. It fails to acknowledge the deeper psychological and existential roots of our disorientation—how the collapse of shared meaning is both mirrored by and shapes our built environment.
What is needed is not just new design strategies, but a reorientation of perception itself: a cultural and cognitive shift in how we conceive value, presence, and participation in public space. The third space is not simply a new kind of venue—it is a call to recognize that any context, any street corner, any shared moment can become a site for collective meaning-making. It is not a feature of urban design alone, but a psychological and symbolic reawakening: an attunement to the potential of every space to become a vessel for reflection, dialogue, and relational awareness.
We face a paradox: in an era saturated with information, we have unprecedented access to content, yet we are increasingly disconnected from the symbolic frameworks that provide context and meaning. The issue isn’t the quantity of data, but the absence of shared symbolic context—the capacity to perceive our lives, relationships, and actions as part of a greater whole. We possess vast knowledge but lack the wisdom to wield it effectively.
This isn’t accidental. As Harris and others argue, the incentive structures of attention economies are designed to fragment our perception, capturing our time and focus not for reflection or relational awareness, but for market advantage. In the absence of shared symbolic frameworks, our collective attention is atomized—shaped by algorithms, game theory, and a constant race for engagement at any cost.
At the heart of this fragmentation lies a deeper shift in hermeneutics—the philosophy of interpretation that shapes our cultural imagination. Today’s dominant lens is one of suspicion: a mode of perception that seeks to decode, critique, and deconstruct, often reducing meaning to power dynamics, bias, or hidden agendas.
This hermeneutics of suspicion, as Paul Ricoeur termed it, has been a vital tool—exposing systemic injustice, revealing ideological distortions, and sharpening our awareness of manipulation. Yet when suspicion becomes our default orientation, it flattens the field of meaning. It erodes the possibility for beauty, trust, and symbolic resonance to emerge.
In contrast, a hermeneutics of beauty invites us to interpret symbols, spaces, and encounters as openings—gateways into deeper layers of meaning and shared experience. It asks us to approach the world not merely as a puzzle to be solved or a system to be critiqued, but as a participatory mystery to be explored. This shift—from suspicion to beauty, from apprehension to disclosure—is essential if we are to rebuild the symbolic frameworks that hold us in relation.
Without this shift, aesthetics collapse into mere surfaces—optimized for attention, stripped of the depth that can orient us toward collective flourishing.
EXIT proposes a vessel for practicing a hermeneutics of beauty: a space where aesthetic experience is not an end in itself, but a threshold into shared reflection, presence, and participatory meaning-making.
This loss is not merely the disappearance of physical communal spaces, but a deeper erosion: the fading of relational containers—vessels that allow us to perceive our embeddedness in the world and practice the art of being together. It is the loss of our capacity to imagine what space could be, what it could hold. It is the cognitive overindulgence in a negative mode of perception—one that sees reality as a system to dismantle rather than a living field to tend.
This collapse is not abstract—it manifests in our bodies, our minds, and our communities. In the U.S., nearly 60 million adults—over 23% of the population—experience a mental illness each year, with over half receiving no treatment. Rates of depression and anxiety are soaring, and 2022 saw the highest number of suicide deaths ever recorded in the U.S. Among youth, one in five adolescents faces a major depressive episode, and over 3.4 million report serious thoughts of suicide. These numbers reflect more than individual struggles—they are symptoms of a deeper breakdown: the loss of shared structures for reflection, connection, and the symbolic grounding necessary for collective well-being.
As moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues in The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation, this crisis is not simply psychological, but cultural and moral. Haidt identifies how shifts in parenting, education, and digital technologies—particularly the rise of algorithmically-optimized social media platforms—have eroded young people’s capacity for resilience, discernment, and moral reasoning. Without shared frameworks of value and mutual understanding, we struggle to navigate the complexities of the modern world, defaulting instead to polarized narratives, outrage cycles, and a deepening sense of alienation. The collapse of moral ecology, as Haidt frames it, is inseparable from the broader meta-crisis—fragmentation, disconnection, and the erosion of shared meaning.
Research further shows that an overemphasis on subjective self-identification—where individuals define themselves predominantly through internal narratives and isolated self-concepts—is strongly correlated with higher rates of anxiety, depression, and psychological distress. This pattern is particularly pronounced among adolescents and young adults immersed in social media environments that promote constant self-monitoring, comparison, and the reinforcement of an ego-centric frame. In this climate, identity becomes a performance—endlessly curated and optimized, yet untethered from deeper relational and existential grounding. The result is a feedback loop: the more we fixate on the self as an isolated unit, the more we suffer—cut off from the relational fabric that gives our lives meaning.
In contrast, shifting toward an intersubjective framework—where meaning is co-constructed through shared experiences and mutual recognition—has been shown to alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety. Intersubjective therapy, for instance, emphasizes the relational context of experiences, fostering a sense of connectedness and understanding between individuals. This approach resonates with the concept of distributed metacognition: the practice of collectively reflecting on how we think, which enhances empathy, collaborative problem-solving, and shared sense-making. Such communal engagement can counteract the isolating effects of hyper-individualism, promoting psychological well-being and social cohesion.
It is within this context that EXIT emerges—not as a solution, but as a prototype for reimagining public space as a vessel for shared reflection, dialogue, and the practice of being together. As a tangible embodiment of this intersubjective shift. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative or aesthetic, it offers a dynamic space where participants engage in the co-creation of meaning. By facilitating shared experiences and dialogue, EXIT serves as a vessel for collective presence and mutual understanding.
In this light, EXIT is not merely an art installation, but a living experiment in cultivating intersubjective awareness. It invites us to move beyond solitary self-examination and toward a participatory mode of existence—where meaning is continuously shaped through interaction and shared reflection.
EXIT as Civic Prototype: Vessels for Shared Awareness
EXIT is not a gallery. It is not a retail concept. It is not a venue for scheduled programming. It is a prototype for a new kind of public space—one designed not to sell, entertain, or distract, but to create the conditions for participatory awareness: a soft architecture for shared presence, distributed meta-cognition, and collective sense-making.
EXIT conceptualizes and contextualizes the existential process itself—framing the shared process of becoming as the very context we inhabit. It invites a perceptual shift: to see space itself as a container for ongoing relation, shared identity, and participatory meaning-making. A vessel for practicing presence together in a fragmented world. A lobby of life. EXIT echoes and extends Virgil Abloh’s ‘Everything In Quotes’ logic—shifting from ironic detachment to existential recontextualization. It places quotes around space itself, turning architecture into a frame for meaning, inviting participants to reconsider the ground they stand on...EXIT to EXIST.
If “third space” is the language urbanists, designers, and planners have used to describe the need for spaces of connection beyond home (the first space) and work (the second space), EXIT proposes a next iteration—a refinement of that concept. It is not enough to carve out zones for community. We must also articulate the philosophical and symbolic frameworks that guide how we gather, how we perceive value, and how we orient to one another in those spaces.
Where the language of "third space" often stops at spatial designation, EXIT advances a deeper ontological proposition: that any space—a corner, a street, a café, a public square—can become a vessel for shared meaning-making, if we cultivate the awareness to see it that way. It’s not the aesthetic style of a space that makes it a site for community—it’s the philosophical orientation we bring to it.
EXIT reframes public space as a living symbolic interface: a context that doesn’t just house transactions or events, but invites us to remember the relational, participatory nature of reality itself. The word EXIT already exists as a ubiquitous signal—embedded in the architecture of every building, silently pointing toward thresholds. It ritualizes our movement toward improved states of physical being. It is universally recognized, yet rarely considered. EXIT reclaims and reframes this symbol as a metaphysical reminder: that we are always in movement, always becoming, always transitioning through meaning.
By rooting this intervention in a familiar, legible form, EXIT introduces a cognitive layer into the perceptual commons—activating new symbolic meaning within everyday space. It is a subtle but powerful shift in how we read and relate to our built environment.
EXIT spaces, as deepened aesthetic contextualizations of this symbolic intervention, are venue for interaction, where the act of gathering—sharing coffee, engaging in dialogue, inhabiting a shared space—is the performance. It decentralizes art from object and spectacle into the practice of participation itself. It looks like an open-format café or studio, but its design is intentional: a symbolic architecture of the liminal. The space is a vessel—a tunnel-like form, an exit on both sides—inviting you into a process of flow, presence, and collective becoming. The aesthetics are subtle prompts—each an invitation to slow down, to enter into attunement, and to remember what it means to be here, together. The space itself is sacred architecture—not in ornament, but in functional intention. It is a living threshold for relational awareness.
This is what we might call Placemaking 2.0—a shift from designing for programming to designing for perception. (Placemaking, as commonly defined, refers to the process of creating quality public spaces that foster connection, community, and a sense of belonging. Placemaking 2.0 extends this by embedding philosophical intent, symbolic framing, and aesthetic reflection into the design of space itself—orienting us to deeper layers of meaning.)
It’s not just about activating spaces through events or amenities, but about cultivating environments—physical, aesthetic, and symbolic—that reorient awareness: from passive consumption to active co-creation, from individual entertainment to collective reflection.
EXIT’s design principles are deceptively simple:
Art is not an object, but a context for attention.
The aesthetic is the interface—not the product.
Participation is the content.
Presence is the public good.
Over the past six years, EXIT has been activated across five commercial storefronts in Boston, quietly prototyping this philosophy through thousands of moments of shared reflection, dialogue, and relational presence. Each iteration is not a fixed exhibition, but a living civic and anthropological experiment—a test case for how we might reframe cultural infrastructure away from spectacle, away from content, and toward process: the continuous work of being together in the flow of a shared world.
EXIT is not a critique in the abstract. It is a living critique in action: a refusal to perpetuate the cycle of division, disconnection, and distraction that much of contemporary art funding supports. The cultural institutions and funding models we have inherited are designed to sustain a postmodern logic—one that enshrines subjective truth, relativism, and propositional knowledge as the highest forms of value. But this logic has fragmented our shared reality and left us unable to act in common purpose. EXIT is a counter-move: a prototype for an ecological, participatory, and integrative approach to culture. It is a proposal for what comes after postmodernism—not as a theoretical critique, but as a practical, embodied intervention in the public sphere.
In this sense, EXIT is not just a design project. It is an axiological proposition: a redefinition of what we consider valuable in public space. It asks:
What if value is not in what is produced, but in what is held?
What if the true function of public space is not to entertain, distract, or transact, but to cultivate the conditions for shared reflection?
What if we designed not for efficiency, but for attunement?
EXIT is a prototype for this shift: not a product to consume, but a container for presence—an architecture of subtlety, patience, and relational awareness. A space where we can build the capacities to mutually recognize our ongoing interactions as a process of shared aim and coordination toward the further actualization of potential and growth. A space where our ongoing relational process is itself the art—a living expression of mutual awareness, coordination, and shared orientation toward a higher good. Here, value is not in what is extracted or produced, but in what is held, practiced, and deepened together.
Toward an Ecology of Awareness: Decentralizing Art into Life
If the 20th century was defined by the aesthetics of critique, spectacle, and fragmentation, the 21st demands something else entirely: a reorientation of value itself. The future of art—and of public space—lies not in producing more content, but in cultivating contexts for participatory awareness: frameworks that afford reflection, dialogue, and collective sense-making.
This is the shift from art as object to art as ecology—a living system in which presence, relationship, and meaning are co-created through shared attention.
EXIT is a prototype for this shift: a living civic framework that decentralizes art from the gallery and market, returning it to the relational fabric of everyday life. It is not a product, a brand, or a fixed aesthetic. It is a symbolic architecture—a vessel that scaffolds our capacity to be together.
This approach builds on a lineage of practices that have long understood the role of symbolic containers in shaping perception and cultivating wisdom:
The peripatetic schools of ancient Greece, where philosophy was practiced as embodied dialogue in public space.
The mystery traditions—including Kabbalistic mysticism—which used layered symbols, metaphors, and rituals to guide participants through ontological initiation.
Zen non-dualism, where relational awareness is cultivated through direct, embodied practice.
The Trinitarian metaphysics of Christian theology, which frames reality as a dynamic relational process—unity through difference, participation as belonging.
Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality, which reframes the universe not as static substance but as a continuous, participatory unfolding of events.
John Dewey’s Art as Experience, which situates art as an aesthetic mode of life, not a discrete object for consumption.
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which frames education as a dialogical, participatory process of becoming aware.
The Happenings of the 1960s, where art dissolved into life, creating ephemeral spaces for shared attention and spontaneous co-creation.
These traditions, diverse as they are, point toward a shared insight: that meaning is not transmitted through objects alone, but through relational structures—the subtle scaffolding of attention, space, and symbolic framing that orients us to the whole.
Where third space and placemaking frameworks often focus on spatial interventions—parks, cafes, markets—EXIT proposes a deeper, more radical reframe: that the space itself is not the point. It is the context of perception that must shift. The axiology—what we value, and how we see that value in relation to others—must be reoriented.
This is not a design problem, but a philosophical challenge: How do we relearn to see the spaces we already inhabit as sites for collective meaning-making? How do we remember that every street corner, every conversation, every shared pause is already a vessel—if we are present enough to recognize it?
EXIT is a contemporary answer to that challenge: a soft civic intervention that does not prescribe content, but reorients perception. It is an invitation to practice distributed meta-cognition—the collective awareness of how we make meaning together in real space and time.
In a culture dominated by left-hemispheric modes of control, measurement, and abstraction—what McGilchrist calls the "emissary’s takeover"—EXIT is a right-hemispheric counter-move: a relational, ecological, and participatory architecture that restores the primacy of the living whole.
It is not art as image, commodity, or message. It is art as distributed awareness: an ongoing, collective practice of being present to the world as it unfolds—together.
The aesthetic ‘objects’ within the container are not inert decor—they are functional tools within the relational field. They serve a purpose in context: to reflect the intent of connection in real space and time. These objects are not static artifacts, but contextualizations—fragments of the hyperobject of our interconnection itself. These aesthetic objects function as invitations into a hermeneutics of beauty—opening us to the participatory mystery of the shared world, rather than reducing it to surfaces for consumption.
They work actively:
to reorient our narrow perceptual focus,
to remind us of the relational process we are always already in,
to invite mutual awareness of our shared orientation and our capacity to coordinate toward a higher Good.
These objects are not the end, but the means: they serve as scaffolding for participatory epistemology—a reflection of our collective process of making meaning, together.
Anticipating the Regress: Not an Assertion, but an Invitation
It’s worth acknowledging a potential paradox: in naming and framing EXIT, are we not simply offering yet another proposition—another model seeking to assert itself over others? This critique arises naturally—and is, in fact, welcomed. But EXIT does not claim to resolve this tension through abstraction or argument. Instead, it seeks to hold the paradox, to make space for it, and to practice its unfolding in real time, in shared space, through lived engagement.
EXIT is not a final theory, a fixed ideology, or a prescriptive solution. It is an invitation—a prototype, not a program. It is a hypothesis in action: a context where we can notice, together, how we perceive, how we orient, and how we might reattune toward deeper mutuality and shared meaning.
Rather than collapsing into the logic of domination—of needing to be the answer—EXIT aims to cultivate the capacity for asking better questions: How do we build the containers for participatory sense-making in a fractured world? How do we stay open to the ongoing process of co-creation, rather than rushing to close it down?
EXIT does not escape the paradox. It moves through it—by practicing a different orientation: not assertion, but invitation. Not closure, but co-creation. Not an argument to win, but a space to inhabit, together.
EXIT is a prototype, but it is also a quest—an adventure we step into, side by side. It is not a solved problem, but an open process: a living story we are called to co-create, to practice, to refine. The value lies not in what we extract, but in the shared journey of seeking deeper alignment—of becoming, together. This is an invitation, not an assertion. Let us hold the question, not as something to answer, but as something to live.
REBRANDING ‘ART’
In an age dominated by spectacle, noise, and distraction, the most radical act is to create space for presence. The most urgent art is not to provoke, decorate, or sell—but to hold. To make room for what we have forgotten how to see.
EXIT is not a final solution. It is not a product. It is not an institution. It is a prototype—a civic framework that signals a new direction for art, design, and public space.
It proposes that the real work of art today is not to produce objects or content, but to cultivate relational containers: contexts that help us remember our participation in the unfolding of reality. It is a call to reimagine cultural infrastructure—not as programming, event, or spectacle, but as a living architecture for shared awareness.
This is the rebranding—
or rather, the re-grounding—of how we ought to perceive art in society:
Not a spectacle, but a vessel.
Not a product, but a practice.
Not a content feed, but a framework for reflection.
Not a discrete event, but an ongoing field for presence.
It is a shift in axiological principle:
from extraction to attunement,
from transaction to relation,
from content to context.
From art as thing,
to art as the practice of perceiving together.
EXIT is a prototype for this shift.
Not the final form, but an early signal:
an open, evolving structure that invites us to design new forms of life—
not by imposing solutions,
but by holding space for shared questions.
This is the deeper task ahead:
Not just to critique, but to build.
Not just to react, but to reorient.
Not just to resist, but to remember.
In a time of cultural fragmentation and existential precarity, the future of public art is not something to look at.
It is something to step into.
It is something to exi[s]t within.
This is an open call—to those who care about the future of public space, art, and our shared civic life. This is not just the work of EXIT, but of all of us. It is an invitation to join the ongoing practice of becoming together—by showing up, by participating, by remembering that every interaction is a part of the whole. This is the deeper work ahead.
Let us build it, together.
References
Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle.
Vervaeke, J. (2019). Awakening from the Meaning Crisis [Lecture Series].
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The Master and His Emissary. Yale University Press.
Schmachtenberger, D., & Hall, J. (n.d.). Civilization Redesign and the Meta-Crisis.
Harris, T. (2020). The Social Dilemma [Documentary].
Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality. Free Press.
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. Minton, Balch & Co.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder.
Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press.
Stein, Z. (2021). Education in a Time Between Worlds. Bright Alliance.
Haidt, J. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press.
Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press.