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.