We live in the age of cognitive capitalism where imaginary becomes a strategic power of the improvement process, and Art seems to lose that subversive function and that corrosive critical skill which modernity assigned to it. The Digital is transforming all the images into emanations of the mind “creative power” which abolishes the difference between Art and (for example) Advertising; moreover the Digital seems to take away the mark of reality from Photography and Cinema. Nevertheless the so-called new media are the instruments through which new artists’ generations produce ideas, formats, process and works unthinkable without the Digital.
There are only a few topics proposed by Techne 05. A selected number of critics, historians and philosophers presents in an original way the fundamental matters on Art functions, its relationship with social process and its role in the debate about reality and imaginary which characterize our age.