Center for a new imagining of society

At Swedish universities, artistic research has been conducted for around two decades.
– This research will become the basis for the center moving forward. In order to make this work, we have identified four important areas of inquiry: the ways of imagining and understanding climate change, historical change, democracy and technology.

The imaginary need to be understood in the right way in this context, explains Mick Wilson.
– Imaginary should not be interpreted as something that is unreal or untrue. Instead, it is about examining how the imaginary plays a role in how we perceive and experience the world. One example is the system of nations, which is of course a real phenomenon. But even if we like to think that many countries have always existed or at least have a long history, the world being divided into different nations is a very new way of seeing things. It is a kind of collective imagination and one of the most important challenges of our time is to change and refine this imagination so that it becomes useful instead of harmful.

Climate change and the new AI technology also require a new collective imagination in order for us to build better understandings of these, explains Mick Wilson.
– How will AI technology change the economy, change education, change culture, change employment? These kinds of question were already being asked in the 1960s when the first computers we made, back when they filled an entire room. The questions were repeated when the internet, laptops and mobile phones were created. The technology is “new” but the way we think of these technologies, for example as something that creates change out of itself, is old. We imagine that the technology is the driver of change, rather than seeing it as a product of how different players, scientists, technologists, capitalists, economists, and others imagine and understand the world. We need new ways to imagine and to understand change which does not give all the power to one element in our world such as the commercial development of new technologies. The forms of technology are shaped by human actors and other forces not simply by an internal drive of technology itself.

The research developed at CAPIm will be closely linked to education, explains Mick Wilson.
– Next year, for example, we plan to organize a traveling summer school, where we will not lock ourselves in any classroom. Instead, we will conduct a walking school, where we learn together through the process of following in the footsteps of the great scholar and thinker Walter Benjamin on his last journey attempting to escape the fascist forces of Europe. We will continue to develop existing experimental courses and also develop new intensive workshops where the researchers and students  build the curriculum together from shared research instead of working with already fixed knowledge  

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CAPIm is a collaboration between the University of Gothenburg and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, says Mick Wilson.
– They are two very different institutions, where one is a large university, the other a small, specialized academy. These differences lead to great opportunities: Perhaps we will realize that in the experimental space between the two we don’t need to do as in Stockholm or Gothenburg, but in a third or fourth way that we invent together.
The center will invite both national and international researchers and artists but also have several events open to the public.
– We want to discuss complicated ideas in a way that is accessible to most people but without losing the complexity. To reach different kinds of audiences, we will be in different arenas: the opening of CAPIm took place at Mejan in Stockholm, but the first annual symposium is planned for Kulturhuset Bergsjön here in Gothenburg.
Another important goal is to increase funding for artistic research, says Mick Wilson.
– For example, EU funding is very difficult to get if you don't already have government support, so there’s a lot to do there.

So, will CAPIm solve any of today's big problems?
– Perceiving problems as something you have already identified and know clearly in advance will not push research forward. We want to introduce new ways of looking at society, which might make these problems appear in an entirely different light.