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Digital Imagination: Ihde’s and Stiegler’s Concepts of Imagination

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A Commentary to this article was published on 20 March 2021

A Commentary to this article was published on 13 March 2021

Abstract

As AI algorithms advance and produce surprising outputs, the question of imagination arises. Can we classify their output as imaginative? And what is their effect on human imagination? Apparently, algorithms follow Kant’s explanations on human imagination, thereby pushing us to update our understanding of imagination by taking into account the co-shaping between humans and their technologies. Such a new understating is offered in this article based on the theories of Don Ihde and Bernard Stiegler. With Ihde, imagination is conceived as tightly linked to perception. Imagination evolves from the modernist task of seeking new points-of-view to a new mode in which technologies present imaginative layers of information on top of reality. With Stiegler, imagination is regarded as tightly linked to memory. He demonstrates how imagination complements memory, serves as a condition to memory/technology and at the same time how imagination itself is conditioned by memory/technology. In this article I develop a new synthesis: imagination as composed of perception and memory. This is the foundation of my layered model of digital imagination. In this model, the task of AI algorithms is the filling in of the layers with data. By producing endless possibilities, these technologies “automate” the Kantian “free play” of imagination, allowing us to examine more options and focus on the best of them. The model reserves the production of meaning to humans. Our role as humans is to generate (or reveal) meaning to the link(s) between layers and establish new layers.

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Notes

  1. https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18013190/ai-art-portrait-auction-christies-belamy-obvious-robbie-barrat-gans (Accessed 29 April 2019). A year earlier, Mark Coeckelbergh (2017) examined whether machines can create art. While Coeckelbergh starts with the question of what a work of art is, my focus here is on imagination and whether it can be attributed to technologies.

  2. https://magenta.tensorflow.org/assets/sketch_rnn_demo/index.html.

  3. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/improvise (accessed 14 April 2019).

  4. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=improvise (accessed 14 April 2019).

  5. The transcendental imagination appeared in the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and was omitted six years later in the second edition (1787). Some scholars explain the omission as a realization on Kant’s part that the concept he drew was too radical. Paradoxically, this omission contributed to an increased scholarly interest, led by Heidegger (1968).

  6. An earlier version was published back in 1966, see Ihde (1966).

  7. For a discussion of the importance of posture and brain size in this passage see (Stiegler 1998).

  8. A subset of “imagination as technology” is “imagination as invention”. The possibilities that imagination open up can lead to innovation. This is the basic contention of Gilbert Simondon. In States of Shock (2015) Stiegler reads Simondon who describes imagination from an original perspective: not of the human who imagines but from that of the image: “First, pure and spontaneous growth [...], each image, an embryo of motor and perceptive activity, develops here for itself [...]. Next, the image becomes a way of receiving information coming from the milieu and a source of schemes that respond to these stimulations. [...] Finally, [...] affective-emotive repercussions that organize images according to a systematic mode of linkages, evocations and communications; a genuinely mental mode.” (Stiegler 2015, p. 80). Simondon analyzes imagination for the conceptualization of the process of invention. The process is recursive, according to Simondon, where each stage serves as a basis for the next one. Thus, “Imagination is not only the activity of producing or evoking images, but also the way of receiving images concretized in an object, the discovery of their meaning” (2015, p. 79). Imagination as seeking new meanings enables us to watch films and use our imagination to improve the world.

  9. Later on, in the first volume of Automatic Society, Stiegler refers to cinema as “industries of the imaginary,” and to Hollywood as “the factory of dreams” (Stiegler 2016, p. 81). These expressions are meant to indicate how cinema attempts to mimic the human imagination and fantasy.

  10. Such a narrow application of imagination to the visual field leads Stiegler to view imagination as limited to aesthetics (Stiegler 2009, p. 92), linking between exteriorization and aesthetics (see (p. 70)). Indeed, in his 2015 book States of Shock, images and imagination are indexed together…

  11. And even regards it a transitional object! See (2011b, p. 151).

  12. E.g., (Kearney 1988, p. 190).

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Wellner, G. Digital Imagination: Ihde’s and Stiegler’s Concepts of Imagination. Found Sci 27, 189–204 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09737-2

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