Intersubjective Games: Vilém Flussers Dialogically Synthesized Technical Images
Comment sections and livestream chats implicitly present themselves as a means of entering into a dialogue with the author(s), and, by extension, the form of a digital work. However, these interactive media, with their bot-inflated like-counts and screen time-focused moderation, produce an illusory direct democracy of sentiment. For Flusser, these participatory software features are not dialogue: they do next to nothing to challenge sender-receiver relations. At the end of Into the Universe of Technical Images, Flusser envisions a different technical mediation of dialogue, one that is modeled after the recombinatory play of chamber music and jazz improvisation, except using “telematic, dialogically synthesized images.” This article develops its argument through a software proposal that meets the criteria for what would produce dialogically synthesized images, investigating adjacent questions of technically mediated intersubjectivity in the process. In putting Flusser in conversation with thinkers such as Henri Lefebrve, as well as contemporaries like Aden Evens and Wendy Chun, I locate actualizable responses to the objectifying forces of technical images’ “fascistic, totalitarian circuitry.” I attempt to think through technical images’ connotative nature and the possibility of resignifying them cooperatively with an other, through the careful instrumentalization of the black box operations of software. The goal is thus not only to make the apparatus snitch on itself, but to then also use its confessions as a means of undoing that which produces “isolated, distracted, key-pressing human beings.”