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.
O último romântico: alguns apontamentos sobre a importância do romantismo alemão na formação do pensamento de Vilém Flusser
This essay is an attempt to place Vilém Flusser’s critique of the apparatus and technique within a broader context and, above all, to reflect on its roots. This approach offers an analysis of some concepts of the philosophy of the early German Romantics, specifically the Jena group, highlighting parallels in Flusser’s work: the importance of the notions of the fragment as an essential element of human thought and the cycle as its expression, demonstrating the precariousness of constructing large philosophical systems. The essay also focuses on the Romantic critique of a linear historical progress as well as on the theory of language, highlighting its poetic potential.
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.
Medienphilosophie als „Kommunikologie” – Vilém Flussers (1920-1991) Phänomenologie des Medialen
Despite his ambivalence towards the concept of “media”, Vilém Flusser is considered one of the foundational figures of media philosophy. His complex and associative thinking is highly sceptical with regard to traditional science-orientated media concepts. Flusser’s unique approach to media theory is fundamentally a phenomenology of the media. To capture these tensions the essay pursues a work-inherent interpretation. The essay delves into Flusser’s “Communicology” focusing on his ideas about texts, codes, symbols, and the interplay between media and human thought. One main thesis of the paper is that Flusser emphasizes in his work the need for a nuanced understanding of media philosophy, considering diverse methodological approaches and the evolving nature of media in contemporary society.
Retreat from Nihilism
This article attempts to elaborate Flusser’s “logic of freedom” as related to nihilistic strains of thought found in his early writings. I suggest that Flusser conceptualizes freedom as partial and narrow, responsive, and negative. Freedom is only possible within, with regard to, and in opposition to the “apparatus” or a coercive order. Underlying this reconstruction is the question about the connection between this logic and the nihilistic strains of thought found in his early writings. I show that the nucleus of the later logic can already be found in these same early writings. Consequently, I argue, the “logic of freedom” should be read as an answer to, and a retreat from, the nihilistic orientation.
Sabonetes / Verseifung von Fetten / Saponification des graisses / Saponification of Fats
In the early 1980s, Flusser wrote a Portuguese, a German, and a French version of “Saponification”, in which he combined a satire of a totalitarian political ideology with a satire of pseudo-scientificity. The narrator is a fictional Commissioner from the Planning Department of Justice writing on behalf of the Minister of Justice in Mexico City on March 7, 2001. The addressee is the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry in the Global Institute for Technological Research. They are all functionaries in an anonymous political superapparatus. The political ideology which in this future dystopia has conquered the whole world is vaguely Marxist. As the narrator points out, the differences between the industrialized western world and the poorer parts of the globe need a quick effective global response in order to achieve a fair distribution of the goods. In attempting to quantify the inter-worldly and inner-worldly relationships a single parameter has been chosen: the amount of fat stored in the human body. In the first of the four worlds that make up the international situation, one can make out a secondary tendency to lose weight, which, however, cannot override the basic tendency towards obesity. The second world is in a transitional stage between lack of fat and obesity. In the third world, the majority of the bodies stores only the minimum of fat which is needed for their functioning on the lowest level. And finally in the fourth, the bodies are skeletal and do not dispose of the necessary energy for any movement. The international trade relations cannot be used as a model for a global redistribution of fat. The excess fat of the first world is undigestible, the second world only focuses on the absorption of fat from the third and fourth world and the excess of fat of the third world is drained by the fat bodies located there. This basically means that there is no actual fat to be redistributed and that the whole argumentation is to no avail. Despite this, the narrator suggests a series of possible but ultimately useless solutions leading the whole argumentation ad absurdum.
Von Vilém Flusser’s Gesten ausgehend. Zur Phänomenologie des Entwerfens und seiner Werkzeuge
This essay draws on Vilém Flusser’s phenomenological approach and speculative thinking to envision a theory of architectural design. It focusses particularly on the last book he published during his lifetime, Gesten (Gestures) 1991. Based on a series of lectures held in São Paulo and in the mid-seventies in France, Gesten offers a sequence of 18 essays reflecting upon everyday activities as “movement(s) of the body or of a tool attached with the body, for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation” (3-4). The book culminates in the call for a general theory of gestures. Starting from a close reading of some of these chapters, this essay examines the relation between gestures and thinking, between gestures and the future, with a particularly close look at the gesture of making. Gestures are discussed in terms of primary means of visual expression, which in many ways become starting points for design processes. Flusser's general theory of gestures facilitates a theory of architectural design based on a phenomenological analysis of its tools and processes. By going back to some of Flusser's writings on tools, machines and apparatuses and their unforeseen repercussions, new design practices and digital design tools can be understood as ways of simulating and anticipating the consequences of design decisions, permitting us to better understand and deal with them.
Técnica, espaço e abstração: uma visão do Instagram em perspectiva Flusseriana
This study attempts to mobilize Flusserian propositions as a means of reflecting on contemporary phenomena such as Instagram. It begins with the issue of photography and its relationship with technique. Because both Walter Benjamin and Vilém Flusser treat technique as a mediator in the production of symbols in photography and cinema, the essay will engage the work of both.The concept of apparatus will also be revisited in this article. Linked to the concept of the apparatus, the ideas of program, employee and programmer will also be taken into consideration. In addition, Lúcia Santaella’s idea of cyberspace will be used to position Instagram as part of a universe that reconfigures the notions of the here and now, enabling news of places visited and moments experienced to be published in real-time. Instagram is then seen to be an apparatus and part of a broader escalation of abstraction, toward a space of zero dimension.
Auschwitz as Philosophical Device: An Adornian Heritage in Flusser’s Thought?
This essay traces the use of “Auschwitz” as a philosophical device in Vilém Flusser’s thought, from History of the Devil and The Last Judgement, to Posthistory and his later media theory. Throughout Flusser’s oeuvre, the Nazi regime and the brutality of the concentration camps (condensed in the figure of Auschwitz) articulates for Flusser the relationship between progress and Western culture. Taking a detour into Adorno’s own theorization of “Auschwitz” – and especially his maxim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” – the essay investigates how modern thought has interpreted Auschwitz not as a glitch in the fabric of modernity, but as a programmed step in the march of progress toward hell. After meeting Adorno, Flusser’s thought on Auschwitz matured and he developed his theory of modernity considering the event of the Holocaust as something integrated in the “program” of Western civilization. Flusser often applies an almost cybernetic conception of the operation of a computer system to understand the functioning of our present reified societies, Auschwitz being a paradigm of the transformation of institutions into “apparatuses” and the metamorphosis of human beings into “functionaries” by means of an automatically playing program.
Jogos / Spiele / Games
In this essay, Flusser identifies human beings as homo ludens, the playing animal, asserting that the capacity to play is their defining feature. He notes at the outset that it is no longer the difference between humans and animals that is at issue, but a difference between humans and their apparatuses. In supporting his claim, he defines a game as system of elements that regularly combine, then goes on to describe categories of games within which the whole of human communication can be aligned. He focusses on three examples -- chess, language (he chooses Portuguese), and science, using them to introduce terms, e.g. “elements,” “competence,” “repertoire” and “universe,” that apply to games in general but also facilitate comparison and contrast. Above all, he underscores the need for human beings to be aware of the games in which they participate, for only in such an awareness is it possible to actually play a game -- that is, expand and change it, create something new -- as opposed to being played by it, caught in the operations of a fixed, stolid, apparatus. First published in German in 1968, the text introduces terms that Flusser developed further in subsequent writings.