Ernst Gombrich is the author of the famous work, Art and Illusion, which became widely known in the early 1960s and continues to be reprinted to this day. On the one hand, readers and modern thinkers are interested in the story of art, told through its relation with illusion, and on the other hand, they do not use its concepts to assess the processes occurring in today’s social, ontological, and artistic spheres, especially when the question of artistic skill has been relegated significantly to the background in the modern debate.

This research re-evaluates Gombrich’s theory of illusion in relation to the techno-social and political environment of today’s image-making. It is hoped that detecting and building connections between the ideas of Gombrich and contemporary philosophers of mind will allow us to be better equipped to attend to the novel features of the art world and its practices in a post-computational society.

Bogdan Chernyakevich is a researcher, architect, and designer. He is also a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Interior Design at the State Stieglitz Academy of Art and Design in Saint Petersburg, and a member of the Artists Union of Russia in the Department of Graphics. Since obtaining a Master’s Degree in Spatial Design at The University of Art and Design Helsinki, Bogdan has worked as an architect at several companies in Finland, France, and Russia, including his own company. In recent years, he has focused on academic activities, teaching at several institutions of higher education, and research, which has resulted in several publications including an article, “Alteration of visual representation of space in different historical epoques.”
His interest lies in the sphere of understanding the image as a constructive basis of our today’s objectivity–subjectivity debate, where the conceptual comprehension of reality is complicated by imaginal spaces, imaginal objects, and imaginal politics.