Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

I ask: Do digital technologies pose any challenges or open up any fruitful prospects to appreciation and the imagination in the arts, sciences, or humanities? If so, what should we do about these challenges and prospects and what would be the role of the imagination in the inquiry aimed at dealing with these challenges and pursuing these prospects? I argue that digital technologies’ challenges to appreciation and the imagination in the arts, sciences, or humanities are demanding but do not pose existential threats to human imagination and appreciation and, though digital technologies’ prospects are promising, so far an in the foreseeable future, are limited to tasks. The paper then discusses the branches of philosophy within which this discussion belongs; characterizes the imagination as it is involved in inquiry; discusses different senses of “appreciation” focusing on its epistemological sense—an estimation whether simply perceptual or through judgment-forming reflection of the features, relevance, and significance of a situation being faced and of their proper value in the context– and briefly explains how, in this sense, appreciation involves imagination; and analyses the history of electronic music and argues for various theses, most salient among them, that to develop appreciation, like humans, art performing machines would have to develop three capacities: first, to be aware of and appreciate art; second, to aim at increasing their capacity to appreciate art; and third, to aim at undergoing the educational process of developing art appreciation so as to improve themselves in judging art and producing instances of it.