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The crux of the matter: If we imagine possible futures, reality really does become more malleable, just as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby assert in their forthcoming Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming. This is because social expectations create an artificially solidified “real world” that has to be struggled against by imaginative effort; see, inter alia, Catherine Zuromskis’ Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images, for what sounds like a standard socially-focused cultural-studies take on this topic. Unfortunately, there are also growing levels of physical limit that have to be struggled against in quite a different way—Jörg Friedrichs’ The Future Is Not What It Used To Be: Climate Change and Energy Scarcity is a pessimistic assessment of the problem.
And there are perceptual limits within which the invention of possible futures runs up against the conditions of knowledge itself: see Noson F. Yankofsky’s The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us for a computer scientist’s analysis of this intrinsic difficulty.
Our own tendencies towards sliding from dream towards delusion is complicated by, among other things, the impossibility of knowing just how accurate our actual physical perceptions are; this problem once occupied Descartes inordinately, and led Kant into considering the problem of apparitions (Stefan Andriopoulos’ Ghostly Apparitions takes us from Kant to television, a side trip that renders still more complex the territory traversed earlier by Marina Warner). Today it occupies the terrain of physiology and philosophy in a somewhat different key, and Fiona Macpherson and Dimistris Platchias’ Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology brings together various interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic from twenty contributors.
But lest we should give up in despair at this troubled interface between perception, reason, and fantasy, digital media professor D. Fox Harrell suggests in Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression that “the great expressive potential of computational media comes from the ability to construct and reveal phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination.... The concept of phantasmal media, Harrell argues, offers new possibilities for using the computer to understand and improve the human condition through the human capacity to imagine.”
Maybe. We shall bypass such topics as the social dynamics of evolving digital cultures around the planet in Anita Say Chan’s Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism and go straight to the neurological dialogues encoded in such books as Vartanian, Bristol, and Kaufman’s immense overview of the Neuroscience of Creativity, featuring essays by over twenty researchers in the field—a view of the topic that is not the same as the ones offered by the example-laden perspectives of G. Gabrielle Starr in Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience or David Herman in Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. These latter two books attempt to recast the problem in terms more familiar to scholars in the humanities (both authors teach in English departments), but it seems that both could engage in a productive dialogue with what looks at first glance to be the radically reductionist view of Luiz Pessoa in The Cognitive-Emotional Brain: From Interactions to Integration, which at least attempts to provide a neurologically based argument for why the computational model of mind needs to be displaced by “a truly dynamic network view of the brain”—one might say the same of the models for interactions in society and in environments of all sorts, though the “dynamic networks” in question are not at all identical with one another. What the topics have in common is the problem that no single explanatory principle accounts for all the evidence, because the entire network derives its dynamics from a variety of independent but interacting sources.
And that is why dynamic networks can be modified in ways that ....but at that point in writing this concluding sentence of Part One of this precis of an essay to come, a phone call came from a person from Porlock on business, who suggested that I end the sentence, no matter what the sentence might have said thus far, with “and the goat is in the garden.” And that is what I have done.
If this had been an actual essay, it would have gone on to link up with a few forthcoming titles in the art history of Brazil, installation and media art around the world, and the dynamics of cultural and economic interaction in the century in which we live...from memes vs viral videos on the Internet to the rise and demise of the ringtone industry.
And there are perceptual limits within which the invention of possible futures runs up against the conditions of knowledge itself: see Noson F. Yankofsky’s The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us for a computer scientist’s analysis of this intrinsic difficulty.
Our own tendencies towards sliding from dream towards delusion is complicated by, among other things, the impossibility of knowing just how accurate our actual physical perceptions are; this problem once occupied Descartes inordinately, and led Kant into considering the problem of apparitions (Stefan Andriopoulos’ Ghostly Apparitions takes us from Kant to television, a side trip that renders still more complex the territory traversed earlier by Marina Warner). Today it occupies the terrain of physiology and philosophy in a somewhat different key, and Fiona Macpherson and Dimistris Platchias’ Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology brings together various interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic from twenty contributors.
But lest we should give up in despair at this troubled interface between perception, reason, and fantasy, digital media professor D. Fox Harrell suggests in Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression that “the great expressive potential of computational media comes from the ability to construct and reveal phantasms—blends of cultural ideas and sensory imagination.... The concept of phantasmal media, Harrell argues, offers new possibilities for using the computer to understand and improve the human condition through the human capacity to imagine.”
Maybe. We shall bypass such topics as the social dynamics of evolving digital cultures around the planet in Anita Say Chan’s Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism and go straight to the neurological dialogues encoded in such books as Vartanian, Bristol, and Kaufman’s immense overview of the Neuroscience of Creativity, featuring essays by over twenty researchers in the field—a view of the topic that is not the same as the ones offered by the example-laden perspectives of G. Gabrielle Starr in Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience or David Herman in Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. These latter two books attempt to recast the problem in terms more familiar to scholars in the humanities (both authors teach in English departments), but it seems that both could engage in a productive dialogue with what looks at first glance to be the radically reductionist view of Luiz Pessoa in The Cognitive-Emotional Brain: From Interactions to Integration, which at least attempts to provide a neurologically based argument for why the computational model of mind needs to be displaced by “a truly dynamic network view of the brain”—one might say the same of the models for interactions in society and in environments of all sorts, though the “dynamic networks” in question are not at all identical with one another. What the topics have in common is the problem that no single explanatory principle accounts for all the evidence, because the entire network derives its dynamics from a variety of independent but interacting sources.
And that is why dynamic networks can be modified in ways that ....but at that point in writing this concluding sentence of Part One of this precis of an essay to come, a phone call came from a person from Porlock on business, who suggested that I end the sentence, no matter what the sentence might have said thus far, with “and the goat is in the garden.” And that is what I have done.
If this had been an actual essay, it would have gone on to link up with a few forthcoming titles in the art history of Brazil, installation and media art around the world, and the dynamics of cultural and economic interaction in the century in which we live...from memes vs viral videos on the Internet to the rise and demise of the ringtone industry.
