Climbing out of the Abyss: On Tearing Objects, Injecting Values, and Automating Work
This essay is an expanded discussion following Vilém Flusser’s unpublished essay On Being Subject to Objects in which he argued that the human is split between what is and what should be, living in the abyss between phenomena and values. By turning branches into sticks and rare minerals into data centers, the human makes a vain attempt to produce things to climb out of its abyss while increasingly becoming subject to its own cultural objects. Following a media materialist approach, the essay highlights the material dependencies of seemingly immaterial systems like artificial intelligence. The more elaborate our cultural objects become, the harder it is to trace them back to the geological conditions that made them possible, while their reliance on what the Earth can provide only deepens. Flusser identified two phases of cultural production: the first, choosing values and imagining what phenomena should become, and the second, the physical work of forcing phenomena into those values, turning them into cultural objects. His optimistic approach to automation suggested that if machines could take over the second phase, humans might finally attend to the first. Today, automation is far from what Flusser believed it would be. Rather than separating value-oriented thinking from mechanical execution, automation has made the second phase less visible but more pervasive, distributed across underpaid labor, energy grids, and extraction sites, deepening our entanglement with natural resources and pushing us further into the abyss we desperately try to climb out of.
Entre a Memória e o Abismo: regimes de hipermemória, datificação e a arte como desprogramação na cultura de dados /Between Memory and the Abyss: Hypermemory Regimes, Datification and Art as Deprogramming in Digital Culture
This essay investigates transformations of memory in the context of digital culture, datafication, and algorithmic control, proposing the notion of a hypermemory regime to describe the contemporary reconfiguration of how memory is produced, stored, and monetised. Structured in three interconnected parts, the text begins by critically examining how memory has become a strategic field of dispute in the age of surveillance capitalism. Through the commodification of data and algorithmic governance, memory is no longer merely a human or cultural attribute—it is now central to new systems of power and behavioural control. In the second part, the essay turns to Vilém Flusser’s philosophical contributions—especially the texts Ars Memoria, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, and Filosofia da Caixa Preta [Towards a Philosophy of Photography]—to rethink the technical, symbolic, and ideological dimensions of memory. Flusser’s reflections anticipate many of today’s central concerns and offer critical tools for understanding the mediating role of artificial memories. Finally, the third part explores how art, through gestures of deprogramming, can act as a space of resistance within the hypermemory regime. For Flusser, to remember is not only to preserve but also to invent—to reopen experience to imagination, criticism, and freedom.
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: l’alterità capovolta
The Vampyroteuthis Infernalis is a text that defies labels by layering scientific, philosophical, and anthropological perspectives. We should read it “lengthwise” in order to share the vision of this brilliant metaphorical story and post-human fairy tale. Flusser eradicates points of view that are rusty, ancient and anthropocentric. In this, he sheds a beam of light not only on the ideas but also on the method, and the point of view. Throughout the book, the literary device turns out to be a kind of powerful “antivirus” against the rhetoric and the morals of our “a priori”. The Vampyroteuthis emerges where we dive: it is the dark side, the sleep of reason and the monster of dreams; it is the common unconscious, the fear of the unknown, the repression of drives; it is what is submerged by science and religion; it is the black, the different, the other; it is what we would like to suppress in ourselves, but actually, if this emergence is slow and conscious, the subsequent integration will be healthy and productive. It will be the utopia of new humans who look out and see themselves.