The Technological Imaginary and the Cognitive Trace

Abstract

Abstract In 2000 I published the outcome of research into the invention, innovation and mutual intelligibility of the Cinematographe under the title of Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary. The study was an attempt to bridge extensive technological accounts of the beginnings of cinema with social and cultural studies of the same material. Crucial to this was a review of popular science journal in the U.S.A. France and Great Britain, and the detachment of technology from science as a professional domain of practice. Since that time the concept of the Technological Imaginary has gained some traction as a way to thicken our understanding of the historical processes but, perhaps more importantly, as a framework in which to understand the role of the imagination as a user-led determinant of the meaning of technology.

This paper will revisit the earlier study to articulate the underlying concept of the technological imaginary and argue for its virtues in understanding the technological form and transformations of media forms in the late nineteenth century. It will then report on more recent research into Hugo Munsterberg and media form on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth century in which this concept of the technological imaginary can be used to open the way for reading film and cinema as a trace of historic cognitive processes.

Keywords Early Cinema, Avant-garde, Lumière, Digitzation, New Film History, Transdisciplinarity

Introduction The second “Mode 2 characteristic is “trans-disciplinarity”, by which is meant the mobilization of a range of theoretical perspectives and practical methodologies to solve problems. But, unlike inter- or multi-disciplinarity, it is not necessarily derived from pre-existing disciplines, nor does it always contribute to the formation of new disciplines. The creative act lies just as much in the capacity to mobilize and manage these perspectives and methodologies, their “external” orchestration, as in the development of new theories or conceptualizations, or the refinement of research methods, the “internal” dynamics of scientific creativity. (Nowotny, et.al. 2003, 179)