An imago-ecological turn in the assessment of a technical reality

Abstract

An unprecedented turn is taking place before our eyes: the technical environment, having changed, participates in the substitution of the sphere of the imaginary for the sphere of the technical in the digitalization mode. Images bring us together and hold us, becoming the focus of the essence of the digital and material world. The article outlines the basics of the visual-ecological approach in creating a human-sized digital environment. By giving ourselves to interfaces and their technical requirements, we hope that we have won freedom, time, life. In fact, we can lose everything if the images we create quantitatively express our technological capabilities to a greater extent than qualitatively deepen our own human experience. We find ourselves in a situation similar to the archaic one, when a person, through the rituals and techniques invented by him, tamed his own dreams, his fantasies, and through them himself, pacifying the demons of imagination. Today, technical images are more insatiable than archaic demons because they claim a massive intensification of experience, but at the same time lead to an explosion of the imaginative, to burnout, chronic disinterest, to boredom. We produce images better than we know how to inhabit them. We have industrial technologies for their creation, but there are no body techniques adequate to their living. Theory should change its approach to technical images: think not about them, but together with them, about those techniques of the body and the worlds that they discover, about the criteria and requirements that they set, about where they direct our desires and where they inspire our dreams. It is assumed that, in order to understand the potential of visual ecology, one should take into account a number of methods related to the interpretation of bodily experience: (1) the method of topological reflection. The digital image apparently removes one of the fundamental interactions of the Universe -gravitational. We cannot resist the attraction of the digital image until we recreate it for understanding at the conceptual level, until we recreate the context and connect the growth of digital suggestion with the possibilities of the environment; (2) the method of somatic epistemology. The body is a graveyard of signs, it bears meta processes from which it is already culturally and technically excluded, but they continue to work, they constitute the cultural archive of the body, and new technologies do not specifically respond to practical intentions, but to the actualization of archived experience, which suddenly becomes important in a new environment; (3) the method of empirical constructivism: thinking through the evolutionary conditions of digital objects, the principle of their construction from information data in the world of algorithms and glitches, taking into account the peculiarities of human experience.