THE INTRODUCTION ESCAPIST ARTISTS

‘ THEY CANNOT SUBSIST on the scanty satisfaction they can extort from reality.’ That’s the psychologist Sigmund Freud talking about you and me – human beings – and the concept of escapism: our need to remove ourselves from day-to- day life.

There are a number of ways out.

We can immerse ourselves in a film, a game, a song, a fantasy or a dream and briefly forget the dirty dishes in the sink and the traffic jam on the road. Or we can travel: that’s literal escapism.

We thought it’d be good to offer Discovery readers a few escape routes at the beginning of 2019. It may be that you love your daily routine, the 24-hour cycle of news, incessant emails and the constant pinging of social media updates. Well done, if so. But for anyone who needs a break, writer Kate Springer has provided us with 25 ways, real and virtual, of getting away from it all in 2019: because there’s sure going to be a lot of ‘it’.

And we’re incredibly excited to have made our own journey into the unknown with our cover. It’s the first magazine cover (that we know of) that has been produced by a human artist and a machine driven by artificial intelligence. Victor Wong and his robotic partner Gemini (right) have produced an image that’s very much of 2019 – and yet timeless.