SUBTTLD aspires to help us live examined lives, by translating art through news and news through art. Read all about our mission below and keep up with stories on Instagram.

““The unexamined life is not worth living.” - Socrates”

As the story goes, after going to trial for annoying too many people, Socrates chose death over living an unexamined life. Today, we’ve been trained to look a lot, but not too deeply. As a consequence, news and art dramatically lose meaning in our lives.

We can redefine the role art plays beyond the elite status we’ve granted it. Art can draw meaning from our personal experiences and help us understand our worlds. SUBTTLD aspires to democratise art by uncovering its relevance in everyone’s lives, dictated by individuals not by institutions.

Flaubert believed “the press had made it very possible for a person to be at once unimaginative, uncreative, mean-minded and extremely well informed.” It had "armed stupidity and given authority to fools.” 150 years later, it couldn’t be more true. But how do we care more about the news? In the process of rewriting the relevance of artworks, SUBTTLD will help us translate the news and find personal significance in global headlines.

One of the most valuable lessons art teaches us is how to read the world. The more practiced we are at reading artifice, the more likely we will carry these lessons on to perceive digital media as the artifice it is, to understand information as distinct from consuming it.

SUBTTLD (Subtitled) is a project with the mission to use art to help us lead the examined lives that Socrates would approve of.