Broadcast your life for anyone to see, on the Internet or on TV, for anyone to click onto, out of boredom or maybe just by accident. This is the basic idea. People need to show themselves, they need the means to show themselves and see themselves in the everyday privacy of their own homes—a phenomenon that has become an expression of the urge to live, a way of filling a gap, of dealing with loneliness and making oneself feel alive. People build virtual lives, above and beyond real life, in which Eternity seems somehow within reach long before death strikes. In these imaginary worlds, images stand in for God. Consciously or not, everyone does their best to make life more beautiful, and better than it is. Everyone is either an illusion, or the object of someone else's illusion. Hoping to make life bearable. "This sense of freedom, it's unbelievable," says one of the characters out boating on a stretch of river that slips under the highway. No outboard motor speeding out to infinity. Happiness is there. And it isn't. We make happiness and reinvent it, as we design our lives, our belief systems, and our practical arrangements to find some kind of sense of freedom wherever we can in the visual world nowadays.

This is my subject matter: the life force, the very human dependence on belief (even to the extent of self-deception), the vital energy involved in pulling one's life together, in devising or undertaking whatever it takes to find enjoyment. In parallel, the adults struggle and organize and sometimes what they do verges on the absurd or on the insane—when it escapes them. And then: Nat. She has her own system, unconscious and abrupt, playful and sincere. Nat runs at life, but always it seems to slip out of her grasp. She is so young that the business of surviving, day in and day out, leaves her looking wide-eyed. "Us, we'll never die," she proclaims.

Wrong. Within a couple of days and nights, her illusions are shattered. Truth and reality reassert themselves. Characters step out from behind their screens, step out from their homes. And as they come face to face with each other, they must face up to themselves. So different to what they hoped for and wanted and believed, different to their childhood or adult dreams. Painful, yes. But throughout this story, pleasure and pain are inextricably combined, the one meaningless without the other: In the world I want to describe, pleasure and pain are colors.

It's a flawed yet colorful world, in which settings stand as characters and ideas. And then, for Nat and Adrien's outing, as she touches everything he can only see behind glass or across a screen, the vision turns sensual. The structure is like a network, bringing the various characters and events into poetic contact with each other. In the end, the story hones a multitude of lives into a single movement that encompasses and connects them all.