FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
FUTURES Thoughts: Imaginative Futures. Imagination, Art, and Media in a Strange World

Speaker

Bo Reimer

About

This talk will delve into the book I am currently writing, provisionally titled "Imaginative Futures. Imagination, Art, and Media in a Strange World."

We live in troubled times and we are disoriented. To look ahead, imaginative thinking is required. However, it seems that now, when we need imagination more than ever, it is failing us. As cultural critic Mark Fisher observed, it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. The problem is not only political or global; it reaches into everyday life. Our collective ability to think and act ahead appears to be diminishing. Anthropologist David Graeber called this a “collapse of our collective imaginations”.

The book examines the capabilities and potentials of imagination. What is this mysterious faculty, and how can imagination help us envision what I call imaginative futures? With the help of a historical retelling of imagination’s capabilities and potentials, I argue for the crucial importance of the faculty. However, I also argue that imagination needs support to thrive. To see the new and to think the previously unthinkable, imagination requires imaginative input; an input that goes beyond the mundane and ordinary. That input comes from art understood broadly, including both high culture and popular culture.

Art practices are often regarded as attempts to portray aspects of reality in penetrating, thought provoking ways. But art can do more than represent the world as it is: it can show the world as it might become. As argued by Ernst Bloch: art is a practice for transcending reality, providing ideas, hopes, visions, and fears that set our imagination in motion.

In the book, I explore how art can help us “venture beyond the known” (Bloch), conducting readings of significant art pieces in different genres and different media. But I also focus on the increasingly entangled relationship between art and media. As gatekeepers, media shape which kinds of art are made widely available. Increasingly, art is adapted to fit the logics of media distribution and commercial imperatives rather than purely artistic considerations. What does that mean for the role of art in general, and in particular for the role of art in relation to imagination.

At the FUTURES Thoughts seminar, I will present the main arguments of the book and invite discussion.