Most-historical Apparatus : “AI” and the Crisis of Linearity
This paper analyzes machine learning-based services such as LLMs and AI-image generation through Vilém Flusser's account of linearity, causality, and rationality as historically specific cultural techniques. It argues that these technological applications do not suspend linear thinking but operationalize it at scale through ramified, sequential procedures that remain strictly causal. The apparent non-linearity of probabilistic generation of media artifacts such as text, image and video belongs to the level of experience, not to the functioning of the apparatus. Rationality persists within these technological media as program. The contemporary crisis of rationality is therefore not its disappearance but its withdrawal from conscious critique into automated systems controlled by institutional power. The paper argues that the foundational democratic intuitions which emerged with the development of linear writing and linear rationality have been historically constrained by extra-rational exercise of power. Only through the radical democratisation of that power can the emancipatory potential promised of hyper-rational so-called “AI" be realized.
The Generative AI Factory
This article examines generative artificial intelligence not as a disembodied, cloud based phenomenon, but as a planetary factory. It is a vast and material infrastructure rooted in geological extraction, logistical networks, and asymmetrical labor relations. Drawing on Vilém Flusser's premise that to decipher an era one must decode its factories, the analysis traces the production chain of contemporary AI across multiple sites. These include rare earth mining, semiconductor manufacturing, data centers, submarine cables, surveillance systems, and space colonization. The text also presents the art pieces of Trevor Paglen and Elisa Giardina Papa to shed light on two crucial matters: how humans are being trained by AI systems, and what invisible infrastructures support the entire edifice. Beneath what appears as immediate and seamless mediation lies a complex metabolic process of ingestion, digestion, excretion, and re-ingestion of data. This is a logic that Kate Crawford terms the "metabolic image." The article concludes that the AI factory is not an inescapable fate. Rather, it is the crystallization of specific political and economic choices. Demystifying its material and operational logic is a necessary condition for reclaiming human agency, imagining alternative futures, and reopening the apertures that, in Flusser's warning, are rapidly closing off.
Thus Spoke a Strange Computer / Paths – Programmes – Permissiveness
This contribution forms part of a larger work exploring the telematic culture in which we now live. It is both essay and programme (a complex system of inherent virtualities that will inevitably be realised via components of chance). It is concerned with freedom and the human spirit (matter and mind as energy in flux). It is a meditation on the unique form of thinking we call writing. Its ideas are both explicitly and implicitly communicated (though it is undoubtedly imperfect and at times contradictory). And in the interests of freedom and beauty, I shall say no more about it…
Flusser's Take on Media Pedagogy
There is no non-medial perception. However, the apparatus producing techno-images tends to make us believe in something like an immediate perception. It suggests that we do not have to learn to decipher the programs behind those images. There is no possible revolution against this mechanism within the world it has created. We need to learn how to analyze these programs and to use them ourselves. Therefore, we need a pedagogy that is also - but not only - media pedagogy and exceeds the conventional realm of media literacy. Can any kind of pedagogy afford to exclude an aspect of the world as central as mediality? Media pedagogy should not be an addition to pedagogy but rather one of its integral parts. It has to teach a critique of images. We have to learn to distrust our own eyes. And we have to realize the slumbering potential for dialogue in the communication structures. We all have to become programmers. Otherwise society will decompose into factions of producers and recipients. And all of this will have to take place in our schools that otherwise will become obsolete and leave our children without the tools of understanding, criticizing and changing the world. Then, democracy would be no longer tenable.
Appareil et caméras chez Vilém Flusser, objections et critique
For Vilém Flusser, apparatus is a term of primary importance. Key to the post-historical age, it tends to designate a programmed functioning within which the players or functionaries, that we will be from now on, are activated. The problem is to define such a notion, Flusser relies on a questionable conception of photography and of the “photographable.” The point of this paper is not to consider, as Flusser puts it, what can be “left for us,” but to consider more optimistically what can be done “with” the new recording devices. Considering that history is not finished, we will propose, following the suggestions of Walter Benjamin, to think of technique as open to a less regulated, freer and potentially more critical understanding.