On the track of imaginary presences

• Grant number: 12/22023-0
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): March 01, 2013
• Effective date (End): February 29, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications - Visual Communication
• Principal researcher: Lucrecia D'Alessio Ferrara
• Grantee: Eduardo Fernandes Araujo
• Home Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Comunicação, Letras e Artes. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research seeks to understand what an idea needs to be so that it can be idea in continuity. Which idea does act now in me to make me ask about their own conditions of emergency and permanence? This proposal picks up as empiric object of the investigation - and what unchained such inquietudes - the symbolic system of fantastic beings, or imaginary presences, that have been frequenting great the varietyod media cultures (vampires, werewolves, dragons, mutants, wizards, divinities, cyborgs, aliens etc.), and whose semiotic historicity seems to be an indicator or trace of a self-designing habit of our species: the desire of ubiquitous connection of the human minds in some way of "neural network". The epistemological object faces the study of the mental process that TRANSLATES a newly born idea as sign cognition (random component) in a visually perceptible implementation(image, drawing) capable to assure, therefore, its significant self-replication(selective component) for the human survival and the possible well-being in the coexistence: the random (innovation: incorporation of the chance) it demanded and filtered by the selective (conservation: intervention of the habit) of the mental process with the recursive purpose of adaptative learning, which results in laying on worldwide visual indications of its signmetamorphic biography. As hypothesis is considered that the ideas comes up from sincro-diacronic contamination in the perception and imagination processes, and for which the imaginary exists as provocation and communication of stand-by ideas, so that those ideas compete or cooperate amongst themselves heading for a technological achievement that guarantees the reproduction of their needs of visual representation and persuasive permanence. The methodological strategy begins from an archeology of the available signatures in our dialectics of the present, in other words, looking for finding abductively in our human umwelt other cases of surprising phenomena that seem to happen according to the same rules that we invented in our hypothesis, for soon afterwards to reactivate potentials binds of meaning non-named yet - already present, however still "forgotten" and not nominated - in the the trails of the imaginary, and finally provide a reinvigorated debate concerning the value of the imagination for the open of the human life in the universe.