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The Image After the Senses
journal contribution
posted on 2018-04-19, 00:49 authored by Transdisciplinary image ConferenceTransdisciplinary image Conference, Donal Fitzpatrick, Georgiana Antoce, Tracy LannonThe congruence of representation and reality has been
constructed as an accepted necessity within the
evolution and adaption of human cognition where it
functions as a key feature of human survival within the
material real. However, the adventure of contemporary
science has questioned whether human cognition is
even capable of exploring the complex traces of the
deep structure of reality. If as has been speculated by
Quentin Meillassoux in his rereading of Henri Bergson
perception itself is a double limit based on both a
biological process of filtering the stream of particles and
a cognitive process of selectivity then our
phenomenological apprehension of the real is one of
poverty not dominance. This limit not only repurposes
our relation to materiality within the multiplicity of
reality but implies a limit to the human structure of
thinking. If the structure of human interiority is exactly
composed of our limited experience of an exteriority
then the possibility arises that the structure of reality
itself gives rise to or even creates the structure of
human thinking. At the pragmatic level the structure of
human thought derives from an ideal structure of
physical reality and is capable of an imaginary
metaphysics of infinite speed, unlimited by the mere
physical constraints of light or gravity and redolent of a
dynamism unconstrained by the human sensory
apparatus. These questions have emerged
simultaneously this century within the realisation that it is an unsupported assumption that the biologically
determined human conception of reality does not mean
that reality has achieved its apex in human
consciousness. In freeing the sensory conception of
thought from that definition, the specter of
mathematical ideation and schematic artistic conception
assumes a primacy in the new representations of reality
that exist beyond both the real and the imaginary and
are conceived within a speculative possibility of new
forms conceived without the aid of the senses. This
paper seeks to address these concerns as they are
made manifest within new and emerging practices in
Art and Design.