OFF THE REALITY began as an audiovisual EP developed between 2017 and 2018 by multidisciplinary artist Giek (Stephanie Smit), in collaboration with producer J(ay).A.D. Emerging from a period marked by addiction, emotional fragmentation, altered states, obsessive love, and increasing detachment from consensual reality, the project gradually evolved far beyond music alone.
Originally conceived as a series of songs accompanied by videos and visual experiments, the work later expanded into larger concepts surrounding immersive environments, symbolic navigation systems, interactive storytelling, multidimensional game structures, and collaborative digital worldbuilding.
Looking back, the project now feels less like a conventional music release and more like an unconscious prototype for many ideas that would later reappear throughout the broader Reality Cult practice.
Many of the themes that would later become central to Reality Cult already appeared intuitively throughout the lyrics and imagery years earlier: reincarnation, immortality, symbolic memory, duality, altered consciousness, transcendence, emotional possession, identity fragmentation, and the longing to escape constructed reality.
The title itself, OFF THE REALITY, reflects both psychological dissociation and a desire to move beyond the limits of ordinary perception. During this period, the artist often disappeared entirely into intense emotional and creative fusion with another person — a recurring dynamic that became entangled with addiction, projection, fantasy, and self-loss. The songs emerged directly from within that state.
Rather than being traditionally “written,” many of the tracks felt channeled or intuitively received. In hindsight, several lyrics now read almost prophetically, carrying strange anticipatory echoes of themes that would later define both the artist’s research practice and broader collective experiences surrounding isolation, disconnection, psychological destabilization, virtual existence, and the search for transcendence within collapsing systems.
Lines such as:
“You probably won’t remember this in your next life”
“I can make you immortal”
“Before we’ll get trapped forever”
already revealed a symbolic language that would later reappear throughout the Reality Cult universe in performances, immersive installations, lectures, constellation research, and audiovisual storytelling experiments.
The project continuously moved between euphoric transcendence and psychological collapse, between mystical longing and self-destruction. It romanticized escape while simultaneously documenting the consequences of disappearing too far into illusion, fantasy, substances, virtuality, or another person.
In later years, the work gradually evolved into a larger unrealized project titled OFF THE REALITY — Choosing Your Own Destiny, envisioned as a multidimensional audiovisual game environment in which users could navigate symbolic realities connected to the themes of the EP. These concepts later expanded toward nonlinear identity structures, collaborative worldbuilding, reincarnation archetypes, immersive storytelling systems, and interconnected symbolic constellations — many of which eventually resurfaced within the Reality Cult framework in different forms.
Although the larger project was never fully completed due to financial and technical limitations, fragments of it continued evolving through performances, videos, installations, live shows, symbolic research, and the ongoing development of Reality Cult.
Now, years later, the work is being shared publicly for the first time as part of the Reality Cult archive — not as a polished commercial release, but as an honest artifact from an earlier chapter of the artistic practice.
TRACKS
IMMORTAL
A dark romantic meditation on obsession, possession, eternity, and transcendence. The track explores the desire to overcome mortality through emotional fusion, while simultaneously revealing the destructive consequences of that longing.
The repeated line:
“I can make you immortal”
functions both as seduction and warning — reflecting themes of reincarnation, continuity, and psychological entanglement that would later become central to the artist’s work.
PARADISE
A psychedelic collision between spirituality, altered states, ecstatic connection, and internal world-building.
The song frames paradise not as an external destination, but as a psychological and energetic state generated between people. Biblical references dissolve into chakra symbolism (perhaps linking to Kundalini awakening), cosmic imagery, and ecstatic transcendence.
At the same time, the track questions whether these euphoric states are forms of awakening or forms of escape.
DUALITY
Perhaps the most autobiographical track on the EP.
DUALITY directly addresses addiction, dissociation, emotional suppression, self-destruction, and the internal split between transcendence and survival. The lyrics move through cycles of guilt, craving, exhaustion, loneliness, and temporary ecstasy.
The recurring phrase:
“You probably won’t remember this in your next life”
introduces reincarnation not as abstract philosophy, but as emotional exhaustion — the sense of repeating patterns across lifetimes, relationships, and states of consciousness.
SUMMON
A song centered around escape, longing, and psychic connection.
What initially appeared to be a love song later revealed itself as something stranger: a desperate attempt to “summon” another person out of emotional collapse and shared psychological imprisonment.
Lines such as:
“Before we’ll get trapped forever”
and references to poison spreading “like a virus” now carry eerie resonances that feel unexpectedly collective in hindsight.
The track exists somewhere between romantic obsession, spiritual invocation, and apocalyptic fantasy.
BALANCE
The closing track functions almost like a grounding prayer after the psychological intensity of the previous songs.
The lyrics revolve around the longing for stability, protection, grounding, and emotional regulation, while simultaneously revealing dependency and fear of collapse.
The repeated plea:
“Promise me to keep an eye on me / Cause when I go too high / I might just die”
captures the fragile tension running throughout the entire EP: the desire for transcendence constantly colliding with the danger of self-erasure.
CHEAP THRILLZ
Cheap Thrillz was the only track from the OFF THE REALITY era to receive an official public release.
The accompanying video explored exaggerated online personas, gender performance, seduction, irony, and social media identity construction through hyper-stylized archetypes and performative characters.
As described at the time:
“Cheap Thrillz takes a funhouse-mirror-sized magnifying glass to the way social media forces us to act. Giek_1 seamlessly shifts between the social media starlets and the camo-clad tough guy, all of them eyefucking the camera in their own way.”
Looking back, it now feels symbolically revealing that the one piece that entered public space was the most image-driven and performative track of the project, while the more mystical and psychologically layered material remained largely hidden.
Rather than existing separately from the rest of the EP, Cheap Thrillz forms another fragment within the larger OFF THE REALITY universe — exploring illusion, projection, spectacle, escapism, and identity construction in contemporary culture.
ARCHIVAL NOTE
The material presented here remained unreleased for years and was never distributed through streaming platforms or public music channels. The videos and recordings existed privately throughout multiple phases of the artist’s life before eventually becoming part of the larger Reality Cult archive.
Rather than revisiting the project as a commercial release, the work is now shared in its original unfinished spirit — as a raw document of transformation, fragmentation, longing, symbolic perception, and survival.
Several of the tracks were performed live throughout the late 2010s/early 2020s as part of the artist’s first live performance project, Own Reality — an early multimedia performance exploring altered states, identity fragmentation, emotional projection, transcendence, and the construction of personal mythologies.
In this sense, the songs were never entirely hidden from the public. Fragments of the material already existed within live environments, performances, visuals, and ritual-like stage experiments years before the formation of Reality Cult as an official platform.
Many of the symbolic themes explored throughout OFF THE REALITY would later evolve further within subsequent Reality Cult performances, lectures, audiovisual installations, and reincarnation research projects.
OFF THE REALITY REALITY — Choosing Your Own Destiny
In the years following the development of OFF THE REALITY, the project gradually began evolving into a much larger conceptual world-building experiment titled ‘OFF THE REALITY — Choosing Your Own Destiny’ (2020–2023).
Initially conceived as a digital extension of the EP itself, the project started as an idea for an immersive audiovisual environment in which the music videos, symbolic themes, and emotional atmosphere of the songs could exist spatially inside a navigable 3D world.
Over time, the concept expanded into something closer to an experimental narrative game or multidimensional exhibition space.
The original idea revolved around users moving through different symbolic dimensions connected to the five tracks of the EP, each representing distinct psychological and spiritual states: transcendence, addiction, duality, emotional fusion, grounding, escape, illusion, and transformation. Visitors would navigate these environments through narrative pathways, symbolic choices, and branching realities — effectively “choosing their own destiny” while moving between different emotional and energetic states.
As the concept evolved further, the game gradually became envisioned as a collaborative artistic ecosystem rather than a purely personal work. Other artists, musicians, performers, and friends would appear as characters, guides, or dimensional hosts within the environment, each representing their own “reality” through audiovisual fragments, artworks, performances, and narrative encounters.
The project also incorporated early ideas surrounding fashion, immersive storytelling, symbolic archetypes, reincarnation, and nonlinear identity structures — themes that would later resurface within Reality Cult’s constellation research and broader artistic framework.
One of the central visual experiments involved a partially developed 3D video project created in collaboration with artist Enrique Arce Gutierrez. During this process, green-screen footage and motion experiments were filmed featuring the artist interacting with a massive live snake over three meters long. The material was intended to be transformed into a surreal digital environment in which a 3D-rendered version of the artist and the serpent would move through symbolic spaces connected to the track Immortal.
The serpent functioned simultaneously as temptation, transformation, immortality, danger, initiation, and rebirth — recurring archetypes that unconsciously echoed throughout much of the work from this period.
Although the larger game environment was never fully completed due to financial and technical limitations, the conceptual framework behind OFF THE REALITY remained highly influential.
Looking back, many aspects of the unrealized project now appear as early precursors to later Reality Cult developments: immersive constellation mapping, nonlinear identity structures, multidimensional storytelling, symbolic navigation systems, participatory myth-making, reincarnation research, and interconnected relational worlds.
Rather than disappearing entirely, fragments of OFF THE REALITY eventually transformed into new forms — continuing to evolve through performances, installations, audiovisual research, and the ongoing development of the Reality Cult constellation archive.
