Inhabiting imagination involves experimentation. Experimentation with materiality, experimentation with nature. Experimentation in ongoing attempts to understand how we inhabit the psyche and the imagination in relation to the external world.
Inhabiting imagination asks:
How does aesthetic production (creatively) cope with contemporary anxiety?
How can aesthetics create conditions and new experiences?
(How) can aesthetics help us dwell in the conditions we are forced to confront?
If worlds are as much made as found, so also knowing is as much remaking as reporting. All the processes of worldmaking I have discussed enter into knowing. Perceiving motion, we have seen, often consists in producing it. Discovering laws involves drafting them. Recognizing patterns is very much a matter of inventing and imposing them. Comprehension and creation go on together. Nelson Goodman
(Tacita Dean, Formulas for Now, formulated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2008)
In his discussion of the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills argues that the intellectual craftsman’s foremost political and intellectual task is “to make clear the elements of contemporary uneasiness and indifference.” Mills shows us that this task involves active critical reflection and diagnoses of social and cultural problems, while also posing a constructive aspect that involves the articulation of alternate pictures and other possibilities. This constructive dynamic involves production and performance that is creative and imaginative. The research proposed here explores how the sociological imagination is possessed and employed by social scientists, artists and curators through their practice. It asks: How do creative practitioners (artists, social scientists and curators) move from the first stirrings of social malaise to practices of intellectual craftsmanship that give form to social unease and indifference? How can an examination of these practices provide opportunities for social scientists to learn from the dispositions of artists and curators? How do practices within these disciplines already overlap and how can shared capacities be elaborated and developed? Within the social sciences, many practitioners have expressed the limits of their discipline and the failure of available vocabularies to communicate the depth and density of contemporary social processes and subjectivities. As a result, these intellectual craftspeople increasingly advocate for interchange between the sciences, art, storytelling and criticism—for intellectual hybridity where social scientists work with and as artists.
Whereas Romantic aesthetic theories created a division between the artistic imagination and scientific logic, art’s trajectory over the last fifty years has included a sequence of investigations that eroded this distinction. Inquiries into the conditions of perception, challenges as to what constitutes a work of art, and recognition that the artist is not defined by the limits of the gallery, studio and museum, have encouraged artists to develop dispositions and practices formerly circumscribed by the social sciences. Conversely, as social scientists increasingly acknowledge how representations (in the forms of statistics, maps, charts, and archives, for example) freeze and distort the flow of human experience, they increasingly engage in aesthetic and poetic practice. In particular, the emergence of conceptual art moved the artist toward exploration of a larger cultural field just as the various ‘turns’ (e.g. cultural, aesthetic, corporeal) have moved social scientists toward the artistic.
The sociologist announces the possibilities of society. Regina Hewitt
It is often through the art that the society expresses its sense of being a society. Raymond Williams
