New images are articulations of thoughts – not reproductions, but rather projections or models. A new imagination (neue Einbildungskraft) opens the way to these projections, for the traditional concept of the image has passed: it has now become the raw material for this new imaginative force like any other object that the subject perceives, imagines, or reflects on. The resulting paradigm shift rearranges our familiar concepts and redefines all of our previous categories – indeed, all of culture: “[…] instead of ‘true and false,’ we have to put ‘probable and improbable.’ Instead of ‘real and fictitious,’ ‘concrete and abstract.’ And instead of ‘science and art,’ ‘to formulate and to project.’” (“Change of Paradigms,” in: Writings, 2002, p. 90) Essentially, this operation is to concretize the intangible, digital, utterly abstract world of zero-dimensional coded information via a series of subjects, each forming its own project – and the subjects themselves thereby become projects. This gives rise to alternative worlds whose creators are also its actors – malleable elements of virtualness. What had previously been known as a subject becomes the nexus of intersubjective networks, while the collective, always malleable projection may become a dialogic form of art.

We have no previous experience to tell us how to get out of this abstract zone – represented through numerical codes – and back to the concrete. So we must invent new models. This act of the new imagination is just the opposite of the creation of traditional images, of stepping from the world into the image – of imagination. The forms of concrete intersubjectivity do not only mean reconstruction of a world that has become interminably reductionist, abstract, and zero-dimensional; rather, it opens the way for the creation of new parallel worlds. Every projection is a creation in its own sense, offering anyone a variable ad hoc model of “0” and “1” signs, endlessly repeatable and accessible almost everywhere.

Original article by Miklós Peternák