Keywords

The expression “Technological Imagination” can be interpreted in two ways.

Firstly and among other things, our imagination operates brilliantly and creatively in the technological field, introducing major innovations therein not only functionally speaking but also in the aesthetic (products that are more appealing and enjoyable to use) and ethical (products that improve quality of life and the environment) sense. This first linguistic use is widespread in the field of architectural design. However, the second meaning of the phrase is more radical and specifically that a profoundly technological element is at work in the human imagination as such. I shall focus here on this second meaning, in the belief that a philosophical and anthropological approach that justifies and clarifies it will prove particularly helpful in the current phase of technological development which is strongly marked by an—often unhesitating—reoccurrence of the fear that human cultures have always had of technology. Simply think of Artificial Intelligence (on which I shall say a few words at the end of this article) and the presumed or real “dehumanization” scenarios that it seemingly indicates.

I have mentioned a philosophical and anthropological approach. Allow me to introduce this by taking a cue from a helpful concept disseminated primarily by a famous Walter Benjamin essay on art in the age of its technological reproducibility but that has long and greatly ramified roots. I refer to the concept of a “field of action” (Spiel-Raum) that, from their earliest beginnings, human cultures managed in their relationship with material reality. It is a space that, to Benjamin’s eyes, technically produced works of art reflect with particular plasticity, given that in the “decay of the aura”, which distinguishes them more than all, “what is lost (…) is matched by a huge gain in the scope for play”.Footnote 1

In the Benjamin essay in question, the concept of “play” is thematic within an important distinction between two forms of technology, defined, respectively, “first and second technology”, albeit not chronologically speaking. It is in the third version of the essay that the idea of a “second technology” is discussed in a way that only today, in the digital era, can Benjamin’s great foresight perhaps be appreciated. His concept is that the way in which the human being’s relationship with technology—which he sees as constitutive and not adventitious—is initially manifested is founded on ritual, magic, and semblance, and accompanied by a second founded essentially on play and experimentation. In this, Benjamin clearly falls within a tradition of thought that is associated in philosophy with the names of Kant (who saw the “free play of imagination and understanding” as the source of human experience) and Schiller (who spoke of a genuine “play drive” in the human being).

This is how Benjamin describes the second technology:

The origin of the second technology lies at the point where, by an unconscious ruse, human beings first began to distance themselves from nature. It lies, in other words, in play.

(…) The first technology really sought to master nature, whereas the second aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity.

The primary social function of art today is to rehearse that interplay.Footnote 2

In a work note of 1936, Benjamin added a striking observation on “human nature”, of which he underlines the profoundly mediated nature: “Concept of second nature: this nature has always existed but was not previously differentiated from the first. It only became the second when the first formed within it.”Footnote 3 This is a genuine paradox that I wish to reformulate as follows: the main trait of human beings consists in their ability to distance themselves from the material world and see in its spaces and opportunities for technical play. This means that “human nature” has from the very first been technical (a ‘second’ or ‘mediated’ nature) and, more precisely, that human sensitivity and imagination can, in principle, be implemented technically.

Here is a simple and effective example: the sensitivity and imagination of those who cannot see or who have lost their sight extend to the tip of the long stick they use to gain a sense of their surrounding space.

This reference to space is particularly important here. One of the principal fields of action mentioned by Benjamin is linked to a specific and extremely technical ‘game of spatializing’. In other words, the spatializing characteristic of humans stems from the fact that the human sensitivity and imagination prove technically implemented therein.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger—in many ways totally incompatible with Benjamin—had a similar thought on this point. Space is not something ‘given’ but the result of active spatializing. What does spatializing mean? Here is one of Heidegger’s examples: imagine the action of clearing a path through a dense and compact blanket of snow. Try picturing it and you will immediately realize that it cannot be done without introducing a tool to which the human body spontaneously resorts for the execution of this operation. Heidegger’s philosophical vocabulary contains several words to describe this spontaneous recourse to a technical means by the human body. One of these words is Verlässlichkeit, reliance. The human being relies on technology, adopting its resources very naturally. In a famous comment on a Van Gogh painting, Heidegger added that the very essence of the technical medium, i.e., its usability, rests on its Verlässlichkeit.Footnote 4

What defines the human being’s “second nature” is therefore its reliance on technique.

It is the natural technical mediation that allows the human to feel, experience, and modify the space wherein its life forms are organized. So, the human habitat has from the very first been a media environment, something built within which the unbuilt takes its authentic form. Precisely as the first, nature only takes shape within the second. A striking description of this condition can be found in an important Heidegger text, Building, Dwelling, Thinking.

The bridge swings over the stream “with ease and power”. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.Footnote 5

The Recapitulating: human sensitivity and imagination extend themselves spontaneously into artifacts that are incorporated, internalized, and adopted. In doing so, they differentiate their “field of action” (Spiel-Raum) in an ever more refined way, proving particularly receptive to the affordances present in material reality. Simply think of how many different operations can be executed with a stick and in how many different ways we can ‘feel’ a stick as an extension of our bodies.

But what happens when sensitivity and imagination rely on technique? The imagination, in particular, is remodeled by this technical interplay with nature and this re-modeling primarily affects one of the principal properties of the imagination, its multimodality—namely the fact that the imagination works not only on an optical and visual plane but extends its action to our entire sensorimotor system. The most recent acquisitions on the human brain tell us that no areas of the cerebral cortex which are specialized for certain functions—e.g., those intended for sight—cannot be given a new function. For example, in the event of supervening blindness, the areas of the cortex responsible for vision can receive input from tact or hearing. So, it is by no means metaphorical to say that blind people see with their hands (extended into a stick) or ears.

I believe that the spontaneous technical reliance of the human imagination is manifested in a highly significant manner at the level of its multimodality, which is reorganized by it. This means that the technological human imagination is continuously engaged in a complex game in which its multimodality is reorganized in a way that also redefines the crossover zone between the built and the unbuilt (remember Heidegger’s effective bridge example). And that new dimensions of the “material culture” emerge in this game along with new ways of being of what we call “matter” or “material reality”. In short, the technological imagination is constantly engaged in integrating its different components in a new manner and, thanks to this game, renegotiating the boundaries between the material and the virtual, the natural and the artifact, and the built and the unbuilt.

The verb integrate defines this game better than any other but beware, in no way does integration mean peaceful reconciliation. One example, which is striking to the same degree as it generally goes unnoticed, will help specify this point of capital importance.

In one event in the specific evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, the work of integration and multimodal reorganization performed by the imagination gave rise to a real paradigm. This occurred when Homo sapiens (and it alone) acquired the most powerful of all its technologies, spoken language. This technology is to be considered totally distinct from the expressive, mimetic, and gestural communication systems employed by the genus homo many thousands of years before the sapiens species appeared (today accredited as approximately 300,000 years ago) although, of course, no spoken language could have emerged during evolution without the support of those more archaic systems.Footnote 6

Homo erectus, for example, was responsible for a prolific tool production. Neanderthal perhaps created the “Schöningen spears” which in terms of ballistic properties are by no means inferior to modern competition javelins. Clearly, these tools would have been impossible to design and use in the context of cooperative strategies in the absence of a solid system of mimic and gestural communication. But spoken language marked the emergence of something completely new. It was a system that could, and potentially inexhaustibly, classify not only the countless objects found in the world environment but also those properties of theirs that were transferable to other experience contexts (think again how many different tools can be obtained from just a stick): an extremely powerful system for recognizing the potential present in material reality and increasing it at the same time.

So, this technology introduced a new component into the multimodality of the imagination which, on the one hand, massively boosted the degree of cognitive specialization accessible to human life forms and, on the other, forced the imagination to increase its ability to integrate the diverse components active in its multimodal work.

This appears obvious to us today, and spoken language seems the most natural of human resources. However, not only was it very different for many thousands of years but what we perceive as something obvious is, actually, the result of a complex work of integration. From that moment on, and irreversibly so, human experience conformed to a complex entanglement model that I would like to exemplify with the image of the Borromean rings.

Releasing one of these rings also releases the other two. This means that there is a constant co-determination and co-evolution among the three elements and that the integration of spoken language into the multimodality of the imagination was the first, and by far the most potent, example of “augmented reality”: matter and inhabitable space were also hugely expanded and could be reorganized.

The requisite of co-evolution is far and away the most important of those present in the paradigm of the Borromean knot. I shall end by highlighting some points regarding the prospects of a technological imagination in the era of growing global digitalization.

Three simple closed rings of the Borromean knot illustrate the prospects of a technological imagination like the material world, linguistic technology, and sensitivity and imagination.

The principal question is: how do digital technologies interpret the co-evolutional paradigm I have just presented in the structure of the Borromean knot? We can look to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to move toward clarifying this point. We all know that one of the most prominent forms of spectacular progress accreditable to AI concerns machines capable of deep learning, namely of autonomously employing the learning processes of the ability required to execute a certain task (e.g., recognize images and their production). One of the most significant (and troubling) elements of deep learning is that, once provided with the basic instructions on the task to be performed, the machine analyzes the objects to be classified with the aid of samplings that can and usually do avail of criteria of a totally different pertinence from those in use among humans. However, although the criteria differ, these machines perform extremely accurately. Nonetheless, their most glaring limitation consists in their substantial inability to adequately adopt the element of unpredictability. As a result, the more their radius of action coincides with that of a circumscribed, self-referenced, and strictly programmed environment, the better the algorithms to which these machines respond will perform. The effective concept of envelope has been proposed (e.g., by Luciano Floridi)Footnote 7 for this type of environment. So, for example, to create an algorithm capable of driving a driverless car that offers the maximum safety guarantees we would have to design a motorway network specially devised for its performance, namely an envelope: a tendentially closed space immunized (as far as is possible) against all contingencies, filled with predictive automatisms, and therefore broadly devoid of interactive plasticity.

The design of the inhabitable spaces of our future smart cities might be based on this principle which would take to the extremes the strict channeling of sensitivity typically linked to security issues (the promise to shield against contingencies and the unforeseen) generally present in technology.

A good empirical criterion that better defines the action of a technological imagination in the digital era might consist in distinguishing between devices that support this autistic, anesthetic, and securitarian deviation and those which counter it directly or indirectly. Between those oriented toward transforming space into an envelope and those oriented toward enriching media environments via a growing and diversified integration of virtual spatiality and real spatiality.

To end, I would like to suggest schematizing this alternative by distinguishing between substitute media environments and integrating media environments. And I would like to suggest that only the latter can implement new prospects for the material culture, starting from technical spatialization practices, intended in all their breadth.

Here are some examples, chosen without any pretense of systematization, of which a future archeology of digital media might avail.

The most classic example of a substitute digital environment project was perhaps Second Life which, not by chance, actually died out in a few years. Diversely, I am by no means sure whether the same can be said of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. As we all know, Metaverse is still at the project stage, but the element of integration seems firmly present in the planned media environment. We should keep a close eye on this point.

As concerns integrating environments, here are four very simple everyday examples for our archeological outline. The first is the Hologram protest of 2015 via which a group of citizens in Madrid circumvented a government ban on demonstrations by having a virtual march pass before the Spanish Parliament. The second is the totally unforeseen therapeutic effect of the Pokémon Go game launched a few years ago. Many autistic children freed themselves from their spatial confinement without difficulty thanks to the integration of the app, which reorganized their relationship with space in a non-threatening manner. The third example, Be my Eyes, is a standard smartphone app that, via the remote assistance of a partner, acts as a guide for the spatial orientation of the blind or visually impaired. It is conceivable that the smart glasses envisaged in Zuckerberg’s project will opt for this integrating model rather than the substitute mode of VR headsets. The last example relates to robotics. Among the many possible examples, I shall mention only ANYmal, a robot designed to gain insight of and take samples of ecological changes interactively when operating in close contact with several natural environments. Lastly, in the social robotics sphere, it seems remarkable that the contrast between substitute and integrating is thematic and narratively essential in the recent fine novel Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021) which in a expert and informed manner foresees potential scenarios of our coevolutionary relationship with machines.

I shall end with the following claim: the processes that technically reorganize our spatiality result in the emergence of an opposition between the plasticity that asserts itself at the crossroads between cyberspace and real space and the anesthetic closure that characterizes the programmed envelopes linked to the optimization of AI performance. Designing the spatiality of media environments ought to take this opposition into account and put itself in a position to interpret their dialectics creatively.

Now, that is an objective for the material culture of our future.