Black Box
Flusser used the phrase “black box” to describe at least two very different objects: a camera (in Towards a Philosophy of Photography) and the postal system (in “Letters,” Does Writing Have a Future?). As radically...
Author: nannyrhops
A Photographer on Mars
Opportunity Rover was a very engaging robot. It “lived” on Mars for nearly 15 years, gathering and transmitting data back to earth; it “died” or, as NASA put it, completed its mission on 13 February 2019. In...
Flusser, “Games”
This is my translation of a very brief, very early essay Flusser wrote about games, which makes homo ludens the designation for the human specie from the start. But this is not as a...
I am a functionary
I am a functionary. The phrase sounds like an admission or confession. But Flusser’s writing keeps drawing us – or at least me – back in, rewarding repeated readings, never feeling “finished” because both writer...
Automated Memory
“Apparatus” is Flusser’s unavoidably cumbersome term for the mesh between humans and devices, an interface so familiar we rarely notice. When the enmeshed devices also mesh with one other, the resulting structures shape —...
Educated and Groundless
I finished reading Educated yesterday, Tara Westover’s memoir of her survivalist Mormon upbringing and subsequent separation from it. By her account, the separation was achieved by means of formal education. Only once in the book...