Synthetic Imagination Series

A wealth of thinkers and poets have defined the imagination, written about it, praised it, critiqued it, and most importantly employed it to astonishing effect. Yet just what it is and how it accomplishes its feats remains unclear. We can recognize the fruits of the imagination, but this does not imply that we can define their origin. William Blake claimed: “The imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself," while Kierkegaard said the imagination is “precisely what the philistine fears,” and called it the “human capacity instar omnium,” being the capacity for all other capacities. Finally, Coleridge called the imagination a “synthetic and magical power” which combines dissimilar elements into an order that exceeds the sum of its parts.

Synthetic Imagination will bring together thinkers and practitioners from an array of fields to discuss the imagination at work. For our inaugural session, we plan to focus on architecture, urban design, and other “species of spaces” that both result from and foster the imagination. Well-designed human structures present a rich, inhabitable synthesis between the creative and constructive faculties. Their existence may replicate their origin and endow it with greater permanence and plastic possibility. In this sense, the poetics of space and the space of poetics may illuminate one another. 

Fittingly, these events will take place across SFI's Miller campus, a recently imagined, now actualized, space in Tesuque. With a combination of talks, panels, presentations, a film screening, drinks, discussions, and debates, we hope to straddle the threshold that constitutes the real synthesis between “airy nothing” and “manipulated matter.”

 

Wednesday, September 24

2:30 pm — Introductory Remarks

2:45 pm — Screening of Hlynur Pálmason's “Nest” (2022) in the Gurley Forum

3:15 pm — Presentations in Gurley Forum by

Anthony Eagan — "The Center of All Interest: On Bridges in Literature"

Keri Schroeder — "The Shape of Books to Come"

4:15 pm — Discussion

 

Thursday, September 25

2:30 pm — Special tea at the pond

3:00 pm — Presentations in the Gurley Forum by

Kate Joyce — "Photography as Theft of Imagination"

Jorge Almazán — "Hunting for Emergence: Design Fieldwork in Architecture"

David Krakauer — "Natural Histories of the Nomological Imagination"

4:30 pm — Discussion

 

Friday, September 26th

3:00 pm — Presentations in the Gurley Forum by

Tom McCarthy — "The Threshold and the Ledger"

Abe Schoener — "On the Role and Limits of the Imagination in Thinking about Vineyards"

4:00 pm — Discussion

4:30 pm — Ephemeral Exhibition: works by Kate Joyce and Keri Schroder in the Pequod. Book signings by presenters and cocktails in Melville House.