Vilém Flusser

Media philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

Towards a Philosophy of Photography

"This book presents for the first time in English an array of essays on design by the seminal Czech-born media critic and philosopher Vilem Flusser. It puts forward the view that our future depends on design. In a series of insightful short essays, touching on a wide range of subjects - industrial ethics; tents, umbrellas and shamans; the architecture of Wittgenstein; ceramic vessels as bearers of social meaning - Flusser emphasizes the interrelationships between art and science, theology and technology, and archaeology and architecture. Just as formal creativity has produced both weapons of destruction and great works of art, Flusser believed that the shape of things (and the designs behind them) represent both a threat and an opportunity for designers of the future."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

A Philosophy of Design

Shape of Things

Valentine A. Pakis

Louis Bec

Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) was born in Prague. He emigrated to Brazil, where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper column in Sao Paulo, then later moved to France. He wrote several books in Portuguese and German. Writings (2004), Into the Universe of Technical Images (2011), and Does Writing Have a Future? (2011) have been published by the University of Minnesota Press, and the Shape of Things, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, and The Freedom of the Migrant have also been translated into English.

A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste

Vampyroteuthis Infernalis

An examination of the promise and peril of digital communication technologies.

Into the Universe of Technical Images

'O mundo codificado' desvenda a tentativa milenar da humanidade de superar suas limitações físicas por meio da tecnologia. Nesse processo, o autor demonstra que os designers, embora tenham um papel central, caminham sobre um chão conceitual muito frágil. Flusser revela as saídas para essa fragilidade em textos curtos, claros e precisos. Dividido pelo organizador Rafael Cardoso nos seguintes temasn - 'Coisas', 'Códigos' e 'Construções' -, suas teorias destróem lugares comuns, verdades superficiais e leis não escritas, além de lançar luz sobre problemas que sequer começamos a enfrentar.

por uma filosofia do design e da comunicação

O mundo codificado

Uma Filosofia do Design - A forma das coisas

Rodrigo Maltez-Novaes

In Post-History, Vilém Flusser asks the essential question: Is there any room left for freedom in a programmed world? Written as a series of lectures to be delivered at universities in Brazil, Israel, and France, this first English translation of Post-History brings to an anglophone readership Flusser's first critique of apparatus as the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological model of present times.

Post-history

Nancy Ann Roth

A prescient exploration of the fate of the book in the digital age.

Does Writing Have a Future?

İhsan Derman

Bir fotoğraf felsefesine doğru

Hacia una filosofía de la fotografía

Komunikologija

در باب فلسفه عکاسی

O presente ensaio é resumo de algumas conferências e aulas que o autor pronunciou sobretudo na França e na Alemanha. A pedido da European Photography, Göttingen, foram reunidas neste pequeno livro publicado em alemão em 1983. A reacção do público (não apenas dos fotógrafos, mas sobretudo do interessado em filosofia) foi dividida, porém intensa. Em consequência à polémica criada, escreveu outro ensaio Ins Universum der technischen Bilder, publicado em 85, onde procura ampliar e aprofundar as reflexões aqui apresentadas.

Ensaio sobre a fotografia: para uma filosofia da técnica

Stefan Bollmann

Medienkultur

Over ten years after his death, the reputation of Vilém Flusser as one of Europe's most original modern philosophers continues to grow. This is the first English-language anthology of Flusser's work.

Writings

An imagination of possibilities, of miscalculations, of futures off-kilter "Probability is a chimera, its head is true, its tail a suggestion. Futurologists attempt to compel the head to eat the tail (ouroboros). Here, though, we will try to wag the tail." --Vilém Flusser Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the philosopher Vilém Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a collection of twenty-two "scenarios for the future" to be produced as computer-generated media, or technical images, that would break the imaginative logjam in conceiving the social, political, and economic future of the universe. What If? is not just an "impossible journey" to which Flusser invites us in the first scenario; it functions also as a distorting mirror held up to humanity. Flusser's disarming scenarios of an Anthropocene fraught with nightmares offer new visions that range from the scientific to the fantastic to the playful and whimsical. Each essay reflects our present sense of understanding the world, considering the exploitation of nature and the dangers of global warming, overpopulation, and blind reliance on the promises of scientific knowledge and invention. What If? offers insight into the radical futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with speculative fiction, with Flusser's concept of design as "crafty" or slippery, and with art and the immense creative potential of failure versus reasonable, "good" computing or calculability. As such, the book is both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may yet become and be.

Vilém Flusser

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