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tags:imagesflusser
rel: Into The Universe of Technical Images by Flusser
Our world is colorful.
Planes such as photographs, TV, cinema screens and shop windows have become the carriers of information. The dominant media are now images and no longer text, as a powerful counter-revolution of images against text is underway. But the images that this revolution faces are now post-alphabetic.
Linear writing emerged as a revolution against images. Writing was invented when the concealing and alienating function of images threated to overshadow the orienting function. Or when images threatened to transform men into instruments instead of serving as instruments for men.
The first scribes were iconoclasts. They sought to break and pierce the images that had become opaque, in order to turn them again transparent to the world. So that images could once again serve as maps instead of being “worshipped.” They demythologized images.
The gesture to read and write text happens at level of consciousness that is one step removed from the level in which images are ciphered and deciphered. For image consciousness the world is a context of scenes - a bi-direction mediation or surface. For text it is a context of process - a linear mediation of lines.
Printing Press
The inventing of the printing press and the increase of general literacy through compulsive schooling dramatically increased this dialectic. Text became cheap and accessible first to bourgeoisie and then the proletariat. Historical images, and above all the scientific ones became unimaginable. Texts became “purely conceptual.” Thus texts betrayed the intention that created them. They no longer explained or demythologized images.
Text, obey an internal dialectic. They represent the world, and conceal the world, they are instruments to orient but form opaque walls in libraries.
There was a crisis of historicity when historical consciousness gradually lost the ground that supports it, the contact with the the text that established the world of concrete images.
Technical Images
Here technical images are invented: photographs, film, videos and holograms etc.
Technical images are essentially different from traditional images. Traditional images are produced by men and technical images by apparatus. The painter places symbols onto a surface in order to mean a particular scene. Apparatus are black boxes that are programmed to devour symptoms of scenes and to spew out these symptoms in the form of images. Apparatus transcode symptoms into images. The apparatus’ program derives from texts: for example from chemical and optical equations. So that apparatus transcode symptoms into images in function of texts. They are boxes that devour history and spew out post-history.
History turns faster than before. History transcoded into program becomes eternally repetitive.
Technical images here, do not mean scenes but events.
If we do not manage a step toward “nothingness” absent structure, we will never emancipate ourselves from thoughts and actions which are programmed by technical images.