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Articles

Vol. 18 No. 1 (2024): (Un)Recovering The Future

Artificial Imagination

Soumise
June 4, 2024
Publié-e
2024-06-07

Résumé

This article addresses the impact of artificial intelligence on (visual) imagination. Drawing on the work of Don Ihde and Bernard Stiegler, Galit Wellner has put forward the concept of “digital imagination,” arguing that digital media, including AI, institutes a new phase in human imagination, moving us from a perspectival model of imagination to a “layered” model that is “co-shaped” by the new technologies and distributed between them and their human users. Against Kant’s apparently timeless model, Wellner’s model suggests a historicity of the imagination and its openness to technical transformation. However, Wellner’s model leaves open a further set of questions, which I address by way of returning to Kant’s theory of the “schematism” and its role in perceptual experience. By fleshing out, while de-essentializing, this dimension of Kant’s “productive imagination,” which mediates between intuition and understanding by way of a general “schemata,” we will be in a better position to understand the relation between imagination and perspectival seeing. This is important because, as Alexander Galloway has theorized, computational imaging (including AI) creates a new, post-photographic “visual contract” that exceeds perspectival POVs to present objects from all sides at once. With this quasi-schematic view of computational images, we will be able to see the images produced by generative AI as embodying, in an important sense, an external homologue of the imagination and thus fundamentally changing our imaginative relation to the world.