Re_g(u)ard_e
ARTICLE - IMAGINATION AS A MORAL EVENT, A PRACTICE OF EMPATHY TO ESCAPE THE ALGORITHM
Link
May 19th 2022
Sofia Baldi Pighi
Irene Biolchini
Sergio Giusti
Re_g(u)ard_e is a book published by Gamma Publishing that combines the various critical and poetic contributions to the show with photographs of the works on display.
According to English critic John Berger, how we observe the world around us is constantly influenced and determined by what we believe, by what we are or think we are (Ways of Seeing, 1972). In the society of image, advertising, from a strategy of capitalizing on the sale of a product, becomes a fundamental narrative structure of contemporaneity. Thus advertising slogans are transformed into daily interludes, commodified bodies become impossible stereotypes to reach, and increasingly, an algorithm shapes and predicts our needs in the light of our purchasing power.
In turbo-capitalism, even how we observe the world directly depends on our spending ability. What if this is only one part of the story? What if there was another way to look at the world around us? Could we escape the algorithm if we understood emotions as moral events that qualify living beings? What if, after two years of the pandemic, spent hiding behind masks, the gaze had become an instrument of empathy? According to the philosopher Laura Boella, in the era of multi-species crises and wandering entropy, imagination is understood as a moral organ and responds to the needs of ethics every time there is a break, an interruption to the automatic progress of our lives. What would happen if we thought of love and imagination as tools of concrete reaction to the technological determinism in which we live? If we need imagination to survive in a world without a future?