[Last modified: November, 14 2024 11:22 PM]
My proposed dissertation topic is rooted in cognitive, largely theoretical concepts. I aim to shift my focus from the pilot project to my forthcoming dissertation. Some preliminary, relevant notes as 14 Nov:
- Potential titles and areas of interest are to be specified in the coming weeks, but currently include: Memories of water; Sensoriality, healing, and peace: distinguishing the self within the body; Energy Containers Made Tangible: Digital/Generative art as a medium conjoin basic elements of Earth to support the recollection, remembrance, and reframing of the present moment; Playing with the simulacrum of time through imagination (themes Addiction, Trauma, Rebellion-Denial-Pride-Grief- Love, Healing)…
- Imagination is best understood in non-holistic and non-instrumental terms
- Stories, images, legends
- Tension between globalization/modernity and the social imaginary (rising speed of sharing and acquiring info)
- Fixed totality of culture (otherness, fixity, homogeneity) is substituted by fluid totality, implicit –imagination is not ‘a whole’ as culture aims to express, it is just as holistic if not more
- Focus on social and material means to define technologies of the imagination
- Tim Ingold: social role of technology + Castoriadis’ philosophy on ‘indeterminate’ character of imagination
- Consider: prophecy, migration, internet use, open source software design
- Kant: imagination is pervasive in all human apprehension, a basic faculty of consciousness, the ability to bring to mind that which is not entirely present to the senses
- Allows synthetic formation of knowledge thru conjoining diverse forms/appearances and the ability to relate to them
- Just as we construct meanings, we imagine realities
- Imagination anticipates and pre-views, serves action, draws before us the configuration of the realizable before it can be realized (Starobinski, 1970:173-4)
- Consider how online chatrooms operate, from the binary logics of machine code comes the elaborate virtual personae (avatars) that people ‘wear’ – chatrooms participants seem to be more conscious of the moral character of their online activity as a result of this face
- Alfred Gell: “art is not institutional, nor is it aesthetic or semiotic, the definition is theoretical. The art object is whatever is inserted into the ‘slot’ provided for art objects in theory (1998:7),
These themes overlap practically completely with phenomenological perspectives. Thus, the intersectionality of my approach takes precedence. Each human perceives their experience and awareness as individually as they do collectively – even the lack of experience/awareness is indicative of how it is they move in our collective reality, our social imagination. This project’s aims are to understand exactly how one’s internal world reflects their specific beliefs and ideas – whether they are political or not is also political.
- The distinction between actors in the private v. public spheres, the backstage v. onstage – is almost impossible to capture due to its temporality and singularity. In the consideration of stories, images, legends, spirituality, and nature in the context of the social imaginary, what is internalized is inevitably externalized. Modalities of healing with respect to the internal worlds of humans are often contested with a scientific rebuttal in which pharmaceutical, neurological, psychological methods have become supposedly more widely trusted…
I believe that energy work has connections to contemporary conceptions of mental health practices – CBT, DBT, IFS, EMDR – all of these are valid forms of healing modalities, as is dancing/writing/painting/singing/et cetera. My current positionality supports the validity of alternative healing methods, the fluidity of expression in all realms of life (and thusly, the fluidity of the body as a material itself in relation to its present imagined “safe space”, ideally made tangible through digital/generative/web art). The potential outcomes of my research would simply be an exploration of time, existentialist imaginations of our bodies as materials and the expression of the senses. I hope it inspires people to consider their existence in a hopeful way. Kwong’s (2022) essay argues the phenomenology of hope as a term with positive connotations as well as the ontological question of whether hope is an emotion. In order to adapt my methods for these political elements, it would require a more specific research question.