Ludic Imagination: Playing with Knowledge

Imagination is a peculiar cognitive faculty that is linked to the artistic gaze. The artist’s ability is not simply a gift, rather a complex skill which enables one to find new connections between things. I call this function ludic imagination, because I have discovered deep ties between it and the play sphere. Playing seems to be the way in which man understands his relationship with the world through a process of cognitive dislocation, displacement from the literal sense, in order to embrace a sense of poetry such as metaphor, irony and hyperbole. Poetic modalities are full of agon, alea, ilinx, mimicry (Caillois). What unites playing and poetry is the symbolic attitude and the ludic imagination and this mode is rooted in a ‘cosmic childhood’ (Bachelard) not just because man's way of being starts in playing, but because it is the symbolic child that could remain throughout the various stages of the individual's life span. Ludic imagination is a kind of knowledge, an imaginative knowledge. It is the tension that allows you to innovate, taking things back to their potential forms. This kind of knowledge is described by Huizinga who presents it as the oscillation between ‘believing’ and ‘not believing’—but it is necessary to train this skill. A player engaged in ludic activities, an expert involved in the practice of performing arts or eastern disciplines knows how to combine the attitude of listening: with a sensitive and passionate receptivity with learning techniques and a mastery of his body, mind, will, memory and perception as a result of constant and rigorous practice, as described in the theory of flow as optimal experience (Csikszentmihalyi). With exercise and passion you can engage the ludic imagination to set off a transformative and revolutionary creative tension, with the spirit of a player.
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