Künstliche Intelligenz(en) denken mit Vilém Flusser
In 2024, my article “Artistic Intelligence versus Artificial Intelligence” on the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence published in the Art Nodes issue no. 34 on Materiology and Variantology: invitation to dialogue – already with references to Vilém Flusser. In the following article, I will supplement the considerations presented there with topics related to AI in relation to work, education, culture, and humanity. The topics of AI and creativity, AI and culture, and AI and work point to a problematic current state of affairs, while the topics of AI and education and AI and humanity can be read as recommendations for dealing with AI in the future. Among others, Flusser's essays “Hochschulen“ (Universities), “Ästhetische Erziehung“ (Aesthetic Education), and “Rückschlag des Werkzeugs auf das Bewusstsein“ (The Backlash of the Tool on Consciousness) are cited.
Quand les machines créent : musique générative et obsolescence du sujet créatif à l’exemple d’Andrew Frelon
This article examines the emergence of fully artificial musical groups, exemplified by the project of Andrew Frelon (The Velvet Sundown), through the philosophical lens of Vilém Flusser’s media theory. While Flusser’s work is often interpreted as visually oriented, this study highlights his conception of music as a non-representational structure of thought and a model for understanding technical apparatuses. The analysis traces the historical shift from computer-assisted music, where technology extended human gesture (as seen in Kraftwerk), to generative music created by artificial intelligence, where the human subject is increasingly displaced. Frelon’s work is presented not merely as a technological hoax but as a form of sociological art that exposes the mechanisms of the information society. By utilizing AI to generate identities, discographies, and synthetic audiences, Frelon demonstrates how cultural narratives can be industrialized. Drawing on Flusser’s concepts of the "alphabetical society", "programmed imagination", and the "functionary of apparatuses", the paper argues that generative music accelerates the transition from a material culture to a world of "non-things". In this new paradigm, music ceases to be an embodied, intersubjective event and becomes a circulating flow of data optimized for private consumption. Consequently, the traditional concert space and the possibility of genuine dialogue are threatened by a closed loop of algorithmic production and bot-driven reception. Ultimately, this study posits that AI-generated music reveals a critical anthropological crisis: the risk of the creative subject becoming redundant in a system where machines converse only with other machines, reducing human agency to the mere management of pre-existing models.
Versuchsreihe zur Auslotung ästhetischer Möglichkeiten K.I.-generierender Mittel in bildgebenden Verfahren anhand von „Rotkäppchen“
As early as the 1980s, Vilém Flusser described the transition from writing culture to image culture, in which technological images displace texts. This prediction is coming true today, as images disguised as data packets are decisively shaping our actions. They increasingly originate from AI-based image generators that translate language into synthetic images in highly complex, latent spaces, thus re-ordering the relationship between text and image. The artistic experiment titled Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood) was created by “feeding” AI with original prose sequences of the Grimm Brothers and editing the resulting sequences into a film. The project sheds light on the machine-based translation of language into pictures, and understands itself as critically distanced “art about AI” that, in the sense of Flusser, addresses the functioning and power logics of the apparatuses.
Robots. A Speculative Compendium
Andreas Müller-Pohle’s Robots. A Speculative Compendium, of which Flusser Studies publishes an extract and three separate pictures, contains an introduction, an afterword and altogether fifty-five images each preceded by the name of a bot and a short explanatory text as to its functions and abilities. The sequence is alphabetical leading from the Anatombot to the Xraybot. Most of the bots look human or human-like, insofar as they have arms, legs and a head. Beside the Gastrobot, a waiter, there are also the paired system of the Couplebot, the cello-playing Stringbot, as well as a dandy, (Hubbybot) and a nurse (Medbot). Some have a recognizable human face like the Musebot, an embodied contemplative figure, and the Mimicbot, a humanoid robot that replicates postures and gestures. The Phantombot is a “semi-transparent humanoid robot capable of penetrating solid barriers through phase shifting.” Some bots reminded me of science fiction movies like the cyborg-warriors Warbot and Riotbot from Robocop, the Neptunebot from Alien or the Rocketbot from Ironman. Some bots are based on single parts of the human body like the Graspbot an “orbital manipulator” that looks like a gigantic flying hand (from the review published at the end of this issue of Flusser Studies).
Humanization of Objects and Objectification of Humans. Vilém Flusser’s Philosophy of Apparatus and AI
This article examines two major trends in human civilization, namely the humanization of objects and the objectification of humans, through the media philosophy of Vilém Flusser. Here, objects broadly refer to all human-made items, but primarily indicate means of production (tools, machines, apparatus) in a narrower sense. Specifically, this article traces the historical tendency of objects increasingly resembling the human body and brain since the advent of humanity, and conversely, humans progressively resembling the objects they create. Among these tendencies, it particularly analyzes in detail the trends of the artificial intelligence era driven by apparatus: the intelligentization of objects and the robotization of humans. As specific examples for this analysis, the article presents photographic apparatus as the first apparatus, and apparatus-humans (photographers and spectators, all of us). Through this, the article aims to uncover the fundamental meanings of recently emerging academic paradigms such as artificial intelligence and robot, and reveal the deep-seated causes underlying contemporary human robotization.
O destino da imagem técnica: uma proposição de classificação / The Destiny of the Technical Image: A Classification Proposal
The starting point for this reflection is the realisation that Vilém Flusser’s work on technical images has become disconcertingly relevant today. This relevance becomes even more evident when we examine images produced by artificial intelligence. Such images are now pervasive across digital platforms, social networks, search engines, creative work environments, advertising, cultural consumption interfaces and, increasingly, in all spaces where visuality has become a dominant mode of communication. To analyse these AI‑generated images, I begin by proposing a classification of three generations of technical images, organised according to their modes of conception. I then outline a comparison between synthetic images and generative images. The aim is to understand their forms of life and to probe their nature and origins, which remain opaque - almost magical - to the naked eye. My approach consists in deconstructing the processes through which these images are generated, while seeking in Flusser’s thought anticipations and prophetic resonances that can help us develop critical perspectives on these emerging technologies. It is also a matter of situating these images within the broader category of technical images. Finally, I suggest that AI‑generated images constitute a new generation of technical images, whose most distinctive structural feature is the logic of sampling - that is, the statistical recombination of vast sets of visual data, replacing direct visual references to the world with a process of probabilistic synthesis.
Vilém Flusser's Media Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
In his philosophy of media, Vilém Flusser offers profound insights into the transition of human communication from a “writing civilization” to a “programmed civilization” through key concepts such as “programmed thinking,” the “apparatus,” and “artificial intelligence.” He argues that the linear, historical, and critical characteristics of traditional writing are being replaced by the programmed and functional logic of symbolic encoding. Among these, the “apparatus” serves as the operational matrix of programmed thinking, devouring history to generate post-history (technical images) and transforming humans into “functionaries,” ultimately diluting human subjectivity. Artificial intelligence, as a programmed apparatus, further intensifies this crisis by projecting and simulating human brain functions externally. Based on this, this paper examines the internal logic among Flusser’s concepts of programmed thinking, the apparatus, and artificial intelligence, synthesizes the theoretical framework of his thought on artificial intelligence as media, and provides theoretical resources for understanding the technological‑cultural dilemmas of the digital age. Furthermore, through a phenomenological‑existential “secondary translation,” this paper reframes the crisis of subjectivity as a generative issue within media ontology, offering a theoretical entry point for revisiting human subjectivity in the digital era.
Fantômes dans la machine (l’hypothèse de l’anabase). Sur le programme algorithmique / Ghosts in the machine (the Anabasis hypothesis). On the algorithmic program
The text approaches the idea of “Artificial Intelligence” in relation to its applications and its context of emergence. Using the two concepts of apparatus and program, extensively used by Vilém Flusser, we envision AI as a program pretending to be a tool, a confusion engineered to mask a structural reorganization of human activities, under the idelological principles of cybernetics. This sleight of hand uses cognitive deception and religious patterns to ensure the success of a neo-Fordist take over human brains. Within that cybernetic program and a data-driven society, the freedom of the citizen cannot rely on a play with the apparatus, as apparatus are more and more integrated into each other. Among Flusser's writings, the play with the apparatus is a local solution, as in the case of photography or computer art. To envision a wider solution, we have to resort to another hypothesis suggested by Flusser to face the rise of programs, the idea of withdrawal. We will consider the latent possibilities of this seemingly disappointing idea, envisioning withdrawal as a movement that would be both backward and forward, as in the classical example of the Anabasis. Considering there are no more outside, in which one could build and conceive an alternative to the authority of the programs, withdrawal could be a vital and preliminary move to disappear from the scrutiny of a panoptical control. Images and visibility appear as a key component of this strategy, prolonging Flusser's view on the medium and opening new possibilities.
La chambre noire : du visible au latent / The darkroom: from the visible to the latent
The darkroom, a place for waiting, revelation and manipulation of images, today finds its echo in the "latent space" of neural networks: a space where the experimental photographer can play "against the camera", according to Vilém Flusser's formula, that is to say, deflect the statistical program of the model, make it hallucinate and bring out the unforeseen within the system. How does the invisible become visible with this new image-creation tool? How can it be coerced into bringing about unthought images? Beyond the Code proposes a form of speculative mapping of the present, articulating a critical look at our relationship to signs, images, beliefs, and resources. With the exponential rise of artificial intelligence, globalized computational infrastructures and extraction technologies, this tension is reaching an unprecedented intensity, and a new paradigm is emerging, that of a world that can be fully translated into data, totally modellable, completely governable by code. Code, here, does not only designate a computer language, it embodies a totalizing paradigm of thought, a way of reorganizing the world from what can be controlled. Therefore, to think beyond the code is to try to restore to life forms their opacity, their complexity, their irreducibility to the equation.
Flusser on Artificial Intelligence
This article unfolds along five thematic constellations where Flusser’s thought enters dialogue with contemporary developments in artificial intelligence. It begins by contrasting his conception of the apparatus with Alan Turing’s model of simulation. It then turns to Flusser’s notion of variational creation and its relevance to the generative logic of AI systems. The third section engages with his idea of the black box (a system accessible at only two points, input and output) in relation to the opacity of machine learning models. The fourth addresses the epistemological problem of learning from scratch, drawing on experimental research by Gašper Beguš. The final section reflects on mediated communication across species, bringing together Vampyroteuthis infernalis and recent AI-based studies of whale vocalization. Together, these reflections offer a philosophical framework for thinking through the epistemic, technical, and ethical stakes of AI—one that resists both anthropocentric assumptions and computational reductionism.