Imaginary Lab 4 Sensations: Ineffable Archaelogies

In this examination, we take further the Stoic principle – hexis – the cohesive bond of unified bodies, the knot that binds human and animal bodies qua bones and sinews with the elemental in nature. A nature in constant inter-elemental change and transformation of coming to be one to the other. Water condensing and turning to stones and earth; the same thing dissolving and dispersing, turning to wind and air, and air, when ignited, turned to fire. This processual state of matter (events) is addressed within a phenomenological frame as understood by Merleau-Ponty: a phenomenology though [that] “is not, in the end, either a materialism or a philosophy of the spirit,” but a science that overcomes both “idealizations” by unveiling their “pretheoretical stratum.” Returning to ancient sites, refreshing old concepts.

Revisiting Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura through Michel Serres’ The Birth of Physics, we explore the poet’s meteorology and his topology where atoms flow at uncertain places and uncertain times – a paradigmatic chora space of potential visual and poetic images. The research group grants priority not only to the visual, but to the poetic as well, and to all imaginative aspects of language, sound, and soma-aesthetics. In our theoretical system, imagination plays a crucial role. We privilege the material imagination over the representational imagination as in Bachelard’s elemental imagination, and in Deleuze’s logic of sensation. Inspired by The Poetics of Space and The Poetics of Reverie by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, we explore spaces where image becomes the place for poetic and ideating intersections, for temporal ruptures and suspensions. We seek to explore the energies and the forces of the image; the rhythm and the resonance that penetrate it, by which new imaginary opportunities are opened to image in circular movement. Time no longer flows horizontally, but it leaps up.

Homo imaginans is the logo of our identity, the premise of our research, and the belief in the inner capacity of human imaginative creativity. But as in Greek the words for men and stones resemble one another, we consistently follow the old adage according to which men grow from stones. It is then just natural that our imaginary field of vision should not cover the human alone, but every imaginative aspect of life that grows and grants access to “imaginary creation” and “imaginary vitality.”

Nicoletta Isar is Associate professor Art History and Visual Culture Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University. She holds the title of docteur ès lettres in Byzantine studies from the University Sorbonne – Paris IV. She has long been involved with the theory of image as a scholar equipped in Classical studies, which enabled her in seizing the paradigm shifts of image throughout time, and in conducting comparative discussions around new phenomena in contemporary visual culture. Her research reflects her academic formation, as well as her intellectual horizon of all-embracing propensity for eclecticism within the comparative cultural studies, focusing continuously and consistently on themes reflecting the patterns of imagination and poetics, as they emerge in the visual, the acoustic, and lately in the sensory studies.