Daniel Irrgang
Weizenbaum Institute / Berlin University of the Arts
Daniel Irrgang is a scholar in media, art, and culture with a focus on the enactment of knowledge, e.g., in exhibitions, diagrammatic depictions, or algorithmic practices in art and design. His current main research topics are oriented towards presentation and representation strategies in climate research, as well as towards structures of inequality (algorithmic, technical, practices) in the digital sphere. He is a postdoctoral researcher within the ‘Climate Futures in Digital Cultures’ research initiative at Leuphana University of Lüneburg and associated with the ‘Design, Diversity und New Commons’ section at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin.
Articles of Daniel Irrgang
A Cartogram of Vilém Flusser’s Nomadism
This contribution presents a cartogram, a map that is altered so that the surface area of geographic entities are proportional to another kind of value. Developed by Clemens Jahn and Daniel Irrgang for the exhibition “Bodenlos – Vilém Flusser and the Arts” at ZKM Karlsruhe (2015) and the Academy of Arts Berlin (2015/16), it visualizes Vilém Flusser’s nomadism, a complex interplay of experiences of displacement and intersubjective connection. While the cartogram was initially disseminated within the exhibition context, it has not been widely published until now, making this special issue of Flusser Studies an opportunity for broader engagement. The publication is accompanied by an introduction written for this issue, which contextualizes the cartogram within Flusser’s biographical narrative and highlights its relevance in examining the ongoing issues of displacement and uprootedness in society.
Reversing the vectors of meaning. The diagrammatic language of Vilém Flusser
According to his own cultural analysis, Flusser was a man of yesterday. He, who wrote nearly every day of his life, was himself subject to the “textolatry” of modernity. A modernity, though, which would soon shift into a new epoch which Flusser and others had given similar names: post-histoire, post- modernity, information or telematic society. In this new situation, according to Flusser, written text would become a marginal code, soon to be superseded by the “technical image” as universal means of communication and information storage. Thus, Flusser described authors like himself, which would stay engaged with text, as “the new illiterates” of the upcoming age. But although Flusser was a man of the written word, I will argue that there was at least one type of sign system with which he also operated frequently and which can be linked to his image heuristics: the diagram. Scattered over his manuscripts, letters and notes, over 160 diagrammatic sketches can be found in the Vilém Flusser Archive. Compared to the thousands of documents in the archive, this seems to be a small number. But his diagrammatic sketches are not only interesting considering the nearly exclusively textual character of Flusser’s legacy; they can also be described as Flusserian technical images. According to the semiotic definition of the diagram by Charles S. Peirce, diagrammatic signs constitute a specific subclass of the icon: A diagram resembles its object not by visual but structural similarity. By drawing a diagram, one proposes a hypothesis about the structure of its object, thus manifesting an abstract concept as a concrete sign. Here we come close to Flusser’s notion of technical images as projections of abstract models. Following up on this comparison, the paper pleas for a non-trivial relation between Flusser’s heuristic of the technical image and his diagrammatic practice.
Flusser-Quellen. Teil I: Vorwort des Vilém Flusser Archivs, Oktober 2017
Flusser-Quellen (Flusser-Sources) is a comprehensive list of all of Vilém Flusser’s texts published between 1960 and 2002. It includes essays, book chapters, books CDs in seven different languages. It also contains a list of all interviews and videos directly related to his person and his work. Flusser-Quellen was developed by Klaus Sander in collaboration with the Vilém Flusser Archive and Andreas Müller-Pohle’s European Photography. The original plan was to publish this material as a volume of Müller-Pohle’s Editions of Flusser, together with a CD-ROM version. The material can be accessed here: http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/1485097/d85714e287d539db39da46f0e5198b20.pdf?1512484296
Die Briefe zwischen Vilém Flusser und Felix Philipp Ingold, 1981–1990
This article examines the correspondence between Vilém Flusser and Felix Philipp Ingold, a professor of cultural and social history of Russia, besides being a well-known poet, writer, and translator. In this extensive correspondence (1981–1990), both scholars reflect upon and criticize each other’s work, in a very productive manner. Especially Flusser, who was challenged to be more precise about central terms of his cultural philosophy, and media/communication theory. The article gives an overview of the last topics discussed by them. However, because it could not equality examine all concepts in depth, it focus upon the correspondence that helped Flusser clarify his concept of technical/synthetic image – which remains, nevertheless, an ambivalent term.