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.
Drafting the Techno-Imagination: A Future for Literary Writing?
Vilém Flusser paints a dire picture for the future of literary writing. He contests that it is doomed to be replaced by automated language games. In that sense, one can see literature and the image-culture as antagonistic forces. Drawing on examples from contemporary German literature, however, I show in which ways the literary imagination may contribute to the formation of the techno-imagination. The authors Ulrike Draesner and Thomas Lehr scrutinize the impact that visual media has on conceptual thinking and identity. Core ideas from Flusser’s media theory, such as the photographer as homo ludens, communication as resistance to natural entropy, and the re-conceptualization of space and time, feature prominently in the two 2005 novels Spiele (Games) and 42. In these texts, the imaginative capacity of fictional literature provides a conceptual space in which a new awareness towards technical images is drafted, tested, and reviewed.
Juego e imaginación en Vilém Flusser
In several texts Vilém Flusser argues that if we had to define some specificity that characterizes the human being nowadays it would be homo ludens, because of the multiple cultural revolutions that have occurred, which have radically altered man’s existence, especially his imagination. The argument outlined in this paper is that the category of play not only reveals a specificity of contemporary man, but also represents his philosophical gesture. It is a central notion for Flusser’s criticism of the apparatus as a technical device.