Into The Universe of Technical Images by Flusser

created, $=dv.current().file.ctime & modified, =this.modified tags:communicationlanguagetechnologymediaflusser rel: Asemic - The Art of Writing The Technical Image

NOTE

“Communication evolved from direct interaction to being mediated through various technologies.”

NOTE

In 1983, the philosopher and essayist Vilém Flusser wrote a book called Towards a Philosophy of Photography. In less than a hundred pages, he sketched out a bizarre and counterintuitive definition of photography as a kind of world-spanning artificial intelligence, using human beings as tools to realize its sole directive: the production of more, and more varied, photographic images. In later works, Flusser expanded these ideas into an account of what he called “telematic society”: a new social order organized around the circulation and consumption of digital images across a global network.

The books used most often - (i.e. bible, the telephone book) - are not read in a linear manner.

Flusser argues history is not possible without writing:

With the invention of writing, history begins, not because writing keeps a firm hold on processes, but because it transforms scenes into processes: it generates historical consciousness.quote

Historians generally agree but based on different reasons. Historians claim that without writing, there is no material, objective basis for memory about the past, as writing keeps “a firm hold on the past.”

The difference between prehistory and history is not that we have written documents…, but that during the history there are literate men who experience, understand, and evaluate the world as “becoming.”

For Flusser, writing as a medium encourages a specific form of temporality.

If history, for Flusser is a linear mode of consciousness related to writing, today it must be considered in crisis for writing is being supplanted by images.

“Lacan has not a whiff on understanding about media” when he says “the young people have symbolically slain their parents because they have failed to recognize the authority of the gaze of the Other.” He attributes this moral transgression to television, as in tv there is a voice but no individual. But how is this different than other media (book, film, internet) which emit voice without a speaker present.

Deleuze finds in art a liberatory escape from the quotidian: “the more our daily life appears standardized, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the art must be injected into it.”quote

Warning

There are two divergent trends for the technical image.

• moving toward a centrally programmed totalitarian society of image receivers and administrators. (dystopic)
• moving towards a dialogic telematic society of image producers and image collectors. (utopic)

To Abstract

Photographs, film, video, television screens and computer terminals are taking over tasks (transmitting information) formerly served by linear tasks.

Text is linear, process oriented while these other forms are two-dimensional causing us to experience surface, context and scene.

The essay works to prove the following point as incorrect:

During pre-history (prior to writing, historical record) other media, especially pictures, carried the information. The period of linear text was only an ephemeral role in the life of human beings and history. We are now turning back to two-dimensionality, into the magical, imaginary and mythical.

It takes the position: Technical images are inherently different from early (traditional) pictures. Tech images rely on texts from which they have come, and, in fact are not surfaces but mosaics assembled from particles. They are not pre-historic but post-historic.

A model is proposed, as humanity climbs “from the concrete to higher and higher levels of abstraction: a model of alienation of human beings from the concrete”

• Animals and “primitive” people are immersed in an animate world, a four-dimensional space-time continuum. It is a level of concrete experience.
• The kinds of human beings that proceeded us (approximately two million to forty thousand years ago) stood as subjects facing an objection situation, a three-dimensional situation comprising graspable objects. This is the level of grasping and shaping, characterized by objects such as stone blades and carved figures.
• Homosapien sapiens slipped into an imaginary, two-dimensional mediation zone between itself and its environment. This level of observation and imagining characterized by traditional pictures such as cave paintings.
• About four thousand years ago, another mediation zone, that of linear texts, was introduced between human beings and their images, a zone which human being henceforth owe all their insights. This is the level of understanding and explanation, the historical level. Linear texts such as Homer and the Bible are at this level.
• Texts have recently shown themselves to be inaccessible. They don’t permit any further pictorial mediation. They have become unclear. They collapse into particles that must be gathered up. This is the level of calculation and computation, the level of the technical image.

These rungs are actions-> objects -> traditional images -> linear text -> technical images (partially analog)

Texts are concepts strung together like beads on an abacus, and the threads that order these concepts are rules, orthographic rules. The circumstances described in a text appear by way of these rules and are grasped and manipulated according to them, that is, the structure of the text impresses itself on the circumstances, just as the structure of the image did. Both text and image are “mediations.” For a long time, this was not easy to see because the orthographic rules (above all logic and mathematics) produce far more effective actions than the magic that had come before. And we have only recently begun to realize that we don’t discover these rules in the environment (e.g., in the form of natural laws); rather they come from our own scientific texts. In this way, we lose faith in the laws of. We recognize in them rules of play that could also be other than they are, and with this recognition, the orderly threads finally fall apart and the concepts lose coherence. In fact, the situation disintegrates into a swarm of particles and quanta, and the writing subject into a swarm of bits and bytes, moments of decision, and molecules of action. What remains are particles without dimension that can be neither grasped nor represented nor understood. They are inaccessible to hands, eyes, or fingers. But they can be calculated (calculus, “pebbles”) and can, by means of special apparatuses equipped with keys, be computed. The gesture of tapping with the fingertips on the keys of an apparatus can be called “calculate and compute.” It makes mosaic-like combinations of particles possible, technical images, a computed universe in which particles are assembled into visible images. This emerging universe, this dimensionless, imagined universe of technical images, is meant to render our circumstances conceivable, representable, and comprehensible.

Traditional versus technical images

Traditional are observation of objects. Technical are computations of concepts.

Traditional arise through depiction. Technical arise through a peculiar hallucinatory power that has lost its faith in rules.

To Imagine

The earliest image makers known to us (e.g., at Lascaux) fixed their observations on the walls of caves to make them accessible to others (to us as well); that is, they acted (for hands are required for this fixing), and did so in a new way, inasmuch as they used their hands not to grasp objects (e.g., bulls) but to manipulate surfaces to represent objects (e.g., bulls). They sought symbols, and the activity was about symbols, about a gesture in which the hands moved back from the object to address the depths of the subject in whom, so stimulated, a new level of consciousness was emerging: the “imaginative.” And from this imaginative consciousness came the universe of traditional images, of symbolic content, the universe that would henceforth serve as a model for manipulating the environment (e.g., hunting bulls).

Symbols that are linked to content in this way are called codes and can be deciphered by initiates. To be intersubjective (to be decoded by others), each image must rest on a code known to a community (initiates), which is the reason images are called “traditional” in this essay. Each image must be part of a chain of images, for if it were not in a tradition, it would not be decipherable.

Thought

The chain of decipherability, This concept of alienation from the community and how codes can be read reminds me of Inter-concept Image Representation

But, Because every observation is subjective, each new image brings some sort of new symbol into the code. Each new image will therefore distinguish itself to some small degree from the previous one and so be an original. It will change the social code and inform society. That is just what the power of imagination is: it enables a society informed by images to generate continually new knowledge and experience and to keep reevaluating and responding to it.

To Touch

Having disintegrated into particles, all recognizable orientation points having become abstract, the world is now to be gathered together so that we may again experience it, recognize it, act in it.

Yet the particles that need gathering are neither visible nor graspable nor comprehensible. They can only be grasped with the help of instruments capable of reaching into the mass of particles. These instruments are called “keys.” Although we’ve long been familiar with keys and use them for the most part without thinking, we’re still a long way from understanding them. If we want to gain some insight into the world in which we find ourselves when we press keys with our fingertips, we must look more closely at the matter of pushing keys.

Keys

Keys are every where.

A key can turn off a light or one flick of another switch can explode a mountain or finish humanity off.

Typing: As I run my fingertips selectively over the keyboard of my typewriter to write this text, I achieve a miracle. I break my thoughts up into words, words into letters, and then select the keys that cor- respond to these letters. I calculate my ideas.

Transition from the visible mechanical process of the typewriter to the word processor: With word processors, writing by pressing keys has long since become an opaque process, an event that occurs in a black box to which the presser has no visual access. An apparatus is not a machine, and its mechanical aspects have disappeared. By observing how images are synthesized on a computer screen by pressing keys, we can, looking back in a sense, recognize the miracle of mechanical button pressing as well: it is the miracle of calculation followed by computation, the miracles to which technical images owe their existence.

Thought

Struggling with this scheme.

The chimpanzee blindly typing is free. The stenographer represents the more controlled, and the word processor in between the two.

rel:Automatism Limits, Detecting an Edit

I will therefore ask, is there a possibility that the text written by the chimpanzee could be distinguished from mine, even if they were identical to one another, letter for letter?

I admit, my typewriter example is mischievous. It is absurd to suggest that the inventor of the typewriter is responsible for the text I am producing.

So what is the status of human freedom with respect to writing with a typewriter, with this transparent, mechanical process?

Action is the first gesture to free human beings from their lifeworld. The second is visual observation. The third is conceptual explanation. And the fourth gesture to free human beings from their lifeworld is the computing touch.

rel: On Hands

The hand makes humankind the subject of the world, the eye makes it the surveyor of the world, fingers make it ruler of the world, and through fingertips, humankind becomes what gives the world meaning.

End of History: Producers of technical images, those who envision (photographers, cameramen, video makers), are literally at the end of history. And in the future, everyone will envision. Everyone will be able to use keys that will permit them, together with everyone else, to synthesize images on the computer screen. They will all be, strictly speaking, at the end of history. The world in which they find them- selves can no longer be counted and explained: it has disintegrated into particles—photons, quanta, electromagnetic particles. It has become intangible, inconceivable, incomprehensible, a mass that can be calculated. Even their own consciousness, their thoughts, desires, and values, have disintegrated into particles, into bits of information, a mass that can be calculated. This mass must be computed to make the world tangible, conceivable, comprehensible again, and to make consciousness aware of itself once more. That is to say, the whirring particles around us and in us must be gathered onto surfaces; they must be envisioned.

To Envision

Look close at the photo and see grains. Go close to television screen, and see points. rel: Granular Synthesis

The point is that all technical images have the same basic character: on close inspection, they all prove to be envisioned surfaces computed from particles.

The wooden table I am using to write this text is, on close observation, a swarm of particles and, for the most part, empty space. Its robust wholeness is an illusion.

He compares watching opera on the television yesterday to the table. Abstract particles were made concrete because he visualized them. In effect, he hallucinated the opera.

Envision, then, should refer to the capacity to step from the particle universe back into the concrete.

Technical images are only images at all if they are seen superficially.

The theoretical scientists did not produce the image on his screen, but made it possible. The techs and envisioners made it, and he, without deep insight just mindlessly pressed the button. These are black boxes.

Envisioners press buttons that set in motion events they cannot grasp, understand or conceive. Images they visualize are produced not by them but by the apparatus, automatically.

In contrast to writers, envisioners have no need for deep insight into what they are doing. By means of the apparatus, they are freed from the pressure for depth and may devote their full attention to constructing images.

Envisioners press buttons to inform, in the strictest sense of that word, namely, to make something improbable out of possibilities.

Current Cultural Revolution:

We are the first generation to command the power to envision in the strict sense of the word, and all vision, imagination, and fictions of the past must pale in comparison to our images. We are about to reach a level of consciousness in which the search for deep coherence, explanation, enumeration, narration, and calculation, in short, and historical, scientific, and textually linear thinking is being surpassed by a new, visionary, superficial mode of thinking. This is why we no longer see any sense in trying to distinguish between something illusionary and something nonillusionary, between fiction and reality. The abstract particle universe from which we are emerging has shown us that anything that is not illusory is not anything. This is why we must abandon such categories as true– false, real–artificial, or real–apparent in favor of such categories as concrete–abstract. The power to envision is the power of drawing the concrete out of the abstract.

To Signify

rel: Manicule, Body in Books and Analysis of Love The current interest in semiotics actually confirms a rising awareness of the role of fingertips in our new being-in-the- world. What I would like to do is ask a specific question: what do technical images indicate, to what do they point?

Everything in the world is a sign of something, and a man must develop an attitude toward the world that permits him to decode this gigantic quantity of indications, signs, clues, for example, to derive so-called natural laws from the world.

Technical images are projectors. Traditional images are mirrors.

To Interact

Films are being replaced by electronic recording technologies, and cinemas will disappear. There is a tendency to reconstitute cinema in new communicative contexts to preserve a political consciousness, a public space.

Isolation: It is therefore an optimistic nonsense to claim to be free not to switch the television on, not to order any newspapers, and not to photograph. The energy required to withstand the penetrating force of technical images would project such a person out of the social context. Technical images do isolate those who receive them in corners, but they isolate those few who flee from them even further.

The current interaction between images and human beings will lead to a loss of historical consciousness in those who receive the images and, as a result, also to a loss of any historical action that could result from the reception of the image.

To Instruct

it is true even now that most of us no longer work and that, in the foreseeable future, all of us will be without work—unemployed. We will be “free,” that is, to press buttons, if only to program the machines to do the work—and so to enter fully into the service of the sender (the service sector).

Thought

This is like what is featured in “Digisprudence: Code as Law” where programs have a ruleishness to them. I’m not sure about the point here as a whole. Someone can generally be aware of the sequence of events that occur after a button press and that is a decision. Making a decision is never predicated on a complete understanding of events, despite misguided belief. I understand the point here though that we are more distanced because of these changes - hand delivering a note to someone or even using a mailbox, compared to sending an email.

Button-pressing functionaries (typists, photographers, bank directors, generals, presidents of the United States—in short, those who compute) do choose among the keys available to them, but this choice is prescribed for them.

To Discuss

The apparatuses will become more and more user friendly, and in the foreseeable future, every child will be able to play (dialogue) with any other child, just as every child can now take a picture with no idea about photographic technique.

There one could see people synthesizing images on computers, storing them in memory, and transmitting them to others in dialogue. The result is a game of program permutation, that is, empty chatter. In evidence here is a form of distraction at the intellectual, political, and aesthetic level of the nursery.

Users of gadgets are programmed to distract themselves.

The way telematic gadgets are used now, to produce empty chatter and twaddle on a global scale, a flood of banal technical images, definitively cements in place all the gaps between isolated, distracted, key-pressing human beings. Soon there will be nothing more we can say to one another, so now is the moment to talk it over.quote

To Play

For creativity, how do we get information that is unpredictable and improbable?

We no longer face a straight way forward but a path of circles superimposed on one another, linking into one another, epicycles of information that undermine themselves and one another.

We face absurdity.

The word dialogue ordinarily suggests a game of chance in which each of two or more memories (usually human brains) tries to synthesize the information stored in the other. But there can also be inner dialogue, in which one memory plays with the information it stores. When it produces new information, such an inner dialogue characterizes what is called, in common usage, a “creative individual.”

Should stream of incoming information be interrupted, the brain is irreparably damaged. This has been demonstrated in cats and rats completely isolated from the environment. One is forced to see the human brain as largely a cultural product.

The current operation of images creates a “miserable superbrain” that is operating on an out of date model of the brain: Rather than producing improbable, adventurous things, contemporary society is close to exhausting the information that is fed into it. It is a stupid society.

To Create

The person of the future, playing at the keyboard, will be ecstatic about the creation of durable information that is nevertheless constantly available for a new synthesis. We can see this ecstasy in its embryonic form in children who sit at terminals. The person of the future will be absorbed in the creative process to the point of self-forgetfulness.

To Prepare

In telematic culture, all information previously stored on paper-like supports (texts, and pictures) will be made electromagnetic.

All contemporary technical images, but also all contemporary texts, should be regarded as harbingers of synthetic computer images.

AI: This strategy has, unfortunately, an unpleasant side, for it applies to artificial intelligences as well as human beings. Telemat- ics can steadily increase the competence not only of all human beings but also of all artificial intelligences, and these artificial intelligences will also become more like geniuses. So the question of how human intelligence and artificial intelligence are related will become the center of the dialogue very soon.

We will face the unpleasant choice between humanizing artificial intelligences and making human ones more like apparatuses.

That which is called the “I” in ordinary language inevitably forgets and is forgotten if it is not part of a dialogical net.

To Govern

In the universe of technical, telematic images, there is no place for authors or authorities. Both have become superfluous through the automation of production, reproduction, distribution, and judgment.

Images are steering the telematic society in this direction: toward a continuous cerebral orgasm.

All this has a cerebral character, the character of a cerebral orgasm. Just as for ants, everything is concentrated on the brain and antennae, and the rest of the body is only a kind of intestinal extension; for telematic people, everything will be focused on the brain and fingertips. And because everything is cerebral, it is characterized by an insatiable demand for new information, new adventures. Cerebral curiosity is insatiable. And the cerebral orgasm can, because it is hardly physical, never relax.

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Summary

• abstract: what are technical images? they differ from all previous images, and not only because they are made be technical apparatuses. In fact, quite the opposite is true: apparatuses alone may make them because they arise from another level of consciousness, more abstract than the previous images.
• imagine: from what level of consciousness did earlier pictures arise? From that ancient level at which human beings first stepped back from their surroundings to observe and depict, that is to say, from a prehistoric level.
• make concrete: from what level of consciousness do technical images arise? that level at which we emerge when the world around us and even own consciousness disintegrates into particles that need to be calculated and composed, which is to say, condenses into images, that is, a visionary level of consciousness.
• touch: these particles are, after all invisible, incomprehensible, and imperceptible. How can we turn them into images? by means of apparatuses equipped with keys which begs the question of whether and how these keys control the apparatuses and how they should be set up.
• envision: if technical images are actually mosaics and not really surfaces, how can we regard them as pictures? By way of the capacity we are currently gaining of seeing something solid in the most abstract things (particles). This does require us to stop telling the real from fictional and concern ourselves with the difference between the concrete and abstract.
• signify: what do technical images, these calculated and computed mosaics, actually mean? They are models that give form to a world and a consciousness that has disintegrated; they are meant to “inform” that world. Their vector of signification is therefor the reverse of that of earlier images: they don’t receive their meaning from the outside but rather project meaning outward. They lend meaning to the absurd.
• interact: how do technical images function as models? They function by means of feedback between themselves and their receivers. People pattern their behavior according to the images, and the images pick up on their behavior to function better and better as models. This feedback is a short circuit that threatens to tip us into entropic decline and to exhaust all history.
• scatter: what does a society so fully in the thrall of images look like:? it is a fascistic society, centrally controlled by senders, in which traditional social structures have fallen apart and human beings constitute an amorphous scattered mass. The images contribute to this fragmentation.
• instruct: how are images distributed, to have such power over society? they are produced in automatic apparatuses and passed automatically through channels to their receivers. Within these apparatuses, human beings (functionaries) perform some functions, and nonhuman automata perform others. Functionaries make up the greater part of society. It is a totalitarianism of the apparatus.
• discuss: is it possible to reorganize the images’ fascistic, circuitry? Yes, the telematics could make it possible. It is a technology on dialogue, and if the images circulated dialogically, totalitarianism could give way to democratic structure.
• play: how can we make images dialogically? dialogue is an exchange of information that generates new information. It is negatively entropic. Telematics is a game strategy with the goal of steering dialogue toward the production of new information (above all images).
• create: why should anyone participate in such a dialogue, when the result is not his own work, but the work of an anonymous group? People will be drawn in by the desire to play, by the intoxication of creative play.
• prepare: So in the future is anyone potentially a creator? Yes, because the telematic dialogue is not only a strategy for producing information but, above all, a school for creativity and freedom.
• decide: in such a school, how does one learn to distinguish creativity from imitation, information from redundancy? Telematics offers criteria for such critical distinctions and decisions to favor information. It maintains a critical distance.
• govern: what would a society in which everyone was creator and critic look like? It would be a cybernetically controlled net in which the concrete elements would no longer consist of knots (single individuals) but threads (interpersonal relationships.) Along with this dissolution of the “I” into the “we” would come the dissolution of space and time into global simultaneity. It would be a society of simultaneous consensual decisions, a kind of global brain.
• shrink: how would a cerebral society cope with bodily human individuals? It can drain interest from bodies of any sort, including human bodies, redirecting interest instead to immaterial technical image, “pure information.” Such a reversal in the vector of interest would result in a strange freedom, namely, contempt for things and conditions.
• suffer: but how can we ignore the human body when we live and die with it? The economy and medicine (struggle against suffering and the delay of death) can be automated as so disappear from view. If suffering cannot be allayed and death becomes desired, the death must be decided in general dialogue. It would be decided out of sympathy for when the “I” dissolves in the “we” suffering becomes sympathy.
• celebrate: how can anyone be so removed from everything physical (all work and all suffering, all activity and passivity) anyone so focused on pure information, live and would such a life be worth a name? This is actually the first life that deserves to be called “human.” By comparison to it, all previous forms of life are merely pre-human approximations. Such a life of contemplation of self-made images, would be a life of lisure, a celebratory life with others, for others, in the presence of the absolutely other.
• chamber music: what kind of life would such a celebratory one be? It would be like a consciously self-produced dream, a consciously envisioned life; an artificial life in art, life as play with pictures and sounds; a fabulous life that means the whole essay ends in a fable, albeit one that now has become technically feasible.
• summary: can there be an overview of a fable? There can be, but it would render the tale banal and unbelievable. The informative and believable things about it are embedded in the discussion of the nineteen problems listed previously, problems that are current.