Augmented Imagination: Thinking Technology Beyond Extension

This article seeks to unravel the relationship between technicity and imagination, asking whether the latter can be extended by technologies or whether it risks being desensitised by its contact with technical prostheses. Augmented Reality (AR) will provide an emblematic case study to showing how the activity of imagination is not merely extended through technological devices, but is rather a material process that occurs when we are actively engaged in the manipulation and exploration of the world. The analysis of AR will then allow us to put to the test the theoretical model of extension that has dominated reflection within the philosophy of technology over the last two centuries. Maintaining that technical behaviour does not precede the manipulation of objects, but rather emerges from our encounter with sensible matter, the article will argue that imagination is always already externalized, always “outside” of us, as it is constantly reconfigured in the relationship with the environment and especially with technologies and media.