Written by SFI Research Fellow Anthony Eagan
Since the origins of modern philosophy and poetry, imagination has been a technical term for the human ability to cognize in images and thought combinations that reconfigure our memories or immediate experience. Gaston Bachelard puts this well in his book Air and Dreams when he writes, “We always think of the imagination as the faculty that forms images. On the contrary, it deforms what we perceive; it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them.” The imagination, then, allows us to conceive of new ideas, concepts, shapes, formulae, and compositions (rather than merely navigating what we perceive empirically).
It was with this in mind, along with the idea that the imagination may be the faculty that most distinguishes us from so-called alien intelligences (AI included), that SFI Director of Experimental Projects Caitlin McShea and I conceived of and hosted Synthetic Imagination, a small multi-day symposia series, in SFI’s new Gurley Forum this past September. Given our belief that the imagination spans all human practices and provides the means for growth and innovation, we invited a variety of professionals who implement the imagination to wonderful effect.
The range of possible contributors being so vast, we limited the inquiry to architecture, urban design, and other “species of spaces” that both result from and foster the imagination, with the aim of making the event the first in an ongoing series devoted to investigating how the imagination operates. Just what is imagination, and how is it relevant to our particular endeavors — in this case the art and technique of building?
We inaugurated the series with architecture because well-designed human structures present a rich, inhabitable synthesis between the creative and constructive faculties. Each structure tends to replicate its mental origin and endow it with greater permanence and plastic possibility, and, in this sense, the poetics of space and the space of poetics may illuminate one another.
Opening with a screening of Nest (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022) — a short film about three siblings who slowly build, modify, and play in a treehouse — we continued with a presentation by book-architect and artist Keri Schroeder and my own talk about bridges. Ensuing days included contributions by urban designer Jorge Almazan (“Design Fieldwork in Architecture”), photographer Kate Joyce (“Photography as Theft of the Imagination”), winemaker Abe Schoener (“Roles of the Imagination in Thinking about Vineyards”), novelist and SFI Miller Scholar Tom McCarthy (“The Threshold and the Ledger”), and SFI President David Krakauer (“Secret Histories of the Nomological Imagination”). The private event concluded with cocktails and a book fair.
McShea was excited to activate newly imagined, now actualized spaces across the Miller Campus in novel experimental ways, using Gurley Forum as a theater and establishing an art gallery featuring Kate Joyce’s photography. As she put it, “Miller Campus embodied the actual subject matter of Synthetic Imagination.”
Synthetic Imagination is supported by The Miller Omega Fund.