Collectively imagining new worlds – For great visions it requires more than knowledge and facts. It takes imagination and dreams.
As artists we are thought to think (or in other words to produce concepts) beyond the matter of what already exists. This capability to imagine is inherent to all artistic disciplines, and an artistic action is seldomly a solitary experience, but thrives in the collective audience.
The political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that the ability to imagine collectively was crucial for a healthy human condition and therefore for the connection between us humans and the world. The more we reduce the collective dreams to mere individual (consumerist) desires, the more we alienate ourselves from this world, and the further we drift from this connection to our home, the less we will be able to relate to its destruction.
Dr. Søren Rosenbak from the Umeå Institue of Design in Sweden reflects this phenomenon beautifully through the lens of design in a chapter of the book: «Designing in Dark Times - An Arendtian Lexicon» Here is a short excerpt:
Design furnishes the world. At its best, it helps us make sense of our environment by shaping it back to us, whether it be a suspension bridge, a healthcare service, or an app for staying in touch with our loved ones. However, in addition to, or better precisely through all these material things, design also furnishes our imaginaries, relentlessly showing us how things could be different (as opposed to a given) as one of its unique offerings to the world.
When discussing imaginaries in a Western context, an important distinction is necessary. In this day and age it seems straightforward to relegate imagination to the domain of our individual dreams and desires. In Hanna Arendt’s terms this private space, decisively cultivated by capitalism, is characterized by a relentless metabolistic process of consumption and laboring. In this never-ending ebb and flow, there is only so much space for imagination to begin with. Arendt theorizes that in a harmonic human condition, where the public realm ceased to play a key role in individuals’ life, imagination has been relegated to the private sphere. This led to a mutilated idea of imagination, as it excludes the public.
Further, capitalism has largely succeeded in superseding with an individualized inventory of tamed consumerist desires and aspirations: in other words, how this shrinking of imagination translated in capitalistic societies. Here, the degree to which our lives could be different is measured by the degree to which we are able to consume ourselves into slighter brighter futures. Thus, Arendt defines alienation as «the atrophy of the space of appearance and the withering of common sense»[...].
Of course, imaginaries should extend way beyond this particularly claustrophobic space of capitalist aspirations. Notably, they are able to cut across individuals ad act as nourishment for our public discourse, with its collective dreaming and future making: how could things be radically different for «us», i.e., for all human and nonhuman living in the world?