IMAGINING TECHNOLOGIES/TECHNOLOGIZING IMAGINATION(S) I On the Imaginal Edge of Technologies

The proliferation of technology in our daily lives has a huge impact on our sensibilities and capacity to imagine the world we live in. Technology increasingly affects institutions, communication and behavior in the anonymous imaginary field that haunts us and our reality. As a result, according to many scholars, technology should be considered our current oikos, sphere or '(neo)environment'. Looking at the latest technological developments, the relationship between the anonymous imaginary and the more active and personal imagination has become increasingly significant and crucial. On the one hand, the technological devices we use are already filled with sedimented imaginary power and thus (re)shape our world without our consent. On the other hand, the imaginal power held by technology maintains a status of ambiguity, according to which it can inspire but also obstruct our imaginative and creative processes. To understand the world-shaping role of technology in our society, as well as our changing subjectivity, it seems necessary to reconsider imagination, that is, as a free faculty capable of denying what is generally conceived as real, or according to its intimate relation to the perceived world and reality. Imagination can thus be anthropologically understood in terms of its material limits or support, or as something already technically inherent to the knowing subject. Moreover, technological development and the new ways of creating images seem to require the establishment of a corresponding 'techno-imagination'. Given the current ever-increasing peculiarity of "imagination" and "imaginary", we need new ways of investigating our imaginative involvement in the technological (neo)environment, i.e. new philosophical paths of thinking about the chiasm between technology and imagination. Precisely this is the purpose of the special issue of “I Castelli di Yale” titled Imagining Technologies / Technologizing Imagination(s), that is, to ask for contributions concerning the relationship between imagination, the imaginary and technology.