Imagined Spaces

In an age driven by empirical data generation, transparency and information collection, we often forget that many of our intellectual and artistic and even some scientific endeavours start with an idea kick-started by the imagination. Our everyday senses supply only a small aspect of what we "actually see" - the rest is filled in by what we think we already know or have learned from the media or other sources of information. So how much of our experience is really thought about, experienced and reflected upon? How open can we be to the unexpected, the surprising, and the excitement of future possibilities? In this groundbreaking anthology, a range of artists and writers and thinkers take on the "space" between what we understand and feel familiar with and what we might know, considering how our environment enables or imposes constraints and how we might let ourselves be altered by that knowledge. So an architect imagining his building as music might work with gaps in a wall as pauses in the flow and rhythm of his building, creating more organic and fluid spaces.So imagined communities may exist virtually, in-the-head, before they take shape in our lives. And so writing and mark making may be as much about what we try to say as much as what we are actually able to get down on a blank sheet of paper. Imagined Spaces is an anthology of new work bringing together writers, artists, critics and architects from around the world - including New York award winning essayist Philip Lopate, the playwright Duncan McLean, Australian novelist Stephanie Bishop, and critic and author Gabriel Josipovici - to reflect on the meaning of space and the imagination in a series of essays and drawings and conversations. Imagined Spaces celebrates the essay form as a means by which to experiment with ideas and thinking on the page: essay as activity, as attempting, as having a go, trying and weighing something out to test it and consider it further. In doing so, it shows us how imaginative writing might enable us to think about a variety of contemporary issues including education, mental illness, literature and reading, art practice, mortality, life writing, home and the family, the built environment... All in ways that are expansive rather than restrictive. This is the fourth publication from the independent Voyage Out Press (previous books include work by Robert Macfarlane, Dame Professor Sue Black and Brian Cox as well as a range of poets, novelists and performers) which showcases creative thinking in new and creative ways.