Vilém Flusser
Articles of Vilém Flusser
Drunter und Drüber / Sens dessus dessous / Upside down – De cabeça para baixo
Mit dem Zufall gegen den Zufall spielen
Flusser wrote the essay “Mit dem Zufall gegen den Zufall spielen” (Playing against Chance with Chance) for the exhibition Zufall als Prinzip. Spielwelt, Methode und System in der Kunst der 20. Jahrhunderts (Chance as a Principle. Game World, Method and System in the Art of the 20th Century) at the Wilhelm Haack Museum in Ludwigshafen am Rhein that was originally planned for spring 1991 but actually took place from January 18 to March 15, 1992. Looking at an ancient frieze, he muses on the relationship between fate and freedom and between necessity and chance. Until our understanding of history is based on historical and linear causality, the word freedom has no meaning. To achieve some freedom, we must be wary of scientific explanations and favor a magical-mythical consciousness: everything in the world owes its origin to chance, to coincidence, since the Big Bang. In prehistoric times, at the time of this frieze, freedom was the vain attempt to rebel against fate: it was a sin. Today, in post-history, freedom is an attempt to rebel against coincidence and evoke the improbable. Creativity is a game attempting to prevent chance from becoming a necessity and freedom the post-historical synonym of sin.
Ed Sommer: Dialogisches Fotografieren / Dialogic Photography - Photographie dialogique - Fotografia dialógica / Fugen / Fugues / Fugues – Fugas
A New Way of Reading Called Computing (from “Does Writing Have a Future?”
In this short excerpt from “Does Writing have a Future” Flusser narrates a familiar historical-technical moment, the moment when the tradition of thinking based on linear causal arguments becomes supplanted by a mosaic form of synthetic thinking through the assembly of bits. After the world is exposed by rational science to be meaningless and all belief is rendered absurd, computation, (the synthesis of meaning through bits) is invented to re-establish meaning in the gesture of reassembling meaning itself and thereby belief. In other words, where the truth of existence is exposed by science, making criticism obsolete, criticism returns in the subjective reassembly of bits into meaning. Once again on the brink of the abyss, Flusser offers his readers an apocalyptic panacea in a renewed commitment to subjectivity.
Das Märchen von der Wahrheit: Glossen und Philosophiefiktionen / Posto Zero
Hercule Florence: un photographe avant l’appareil
Hercule Florence (1804-1879) was a citizen of the Principality of Monaco and like Niépce and Talbot one of the inventors of photography around 1830. But, since he was living in a small city in the interior of Brazil, his invention of an original technique for developing and fixing images remained unnoticed and has been totally neglected by the European historians of photography. Moreover, he was the inventor of the word “photography” in 1833, six years before the word was used in Europe. There are some similarities between his life and Flusser’s: he arrived in Brazil at the age of 20 and was not recognized by the European centers of culture. The story of Hercule Florence is thus an occasion to reflect on the importance of naming and to demonstrate the power of the apparatus (political and economic) in the development of photography from the very beginning. Florence is probably the only photographer before the apparatus.