apparatus
Flusser’s term Apparat, which can only be apparatus in English, has a pivotal position in his thinking about media. The word is not perfect, because it sounds like a machine. But it refers to a...
Author: nannyrhops
Gestures as Flusser defines them
It seems to me perfectly fair to render the German word “Geste” as “gesture” in translating Flusser’s texts. It doesn’t seem to be a translation problem per se. The problem is that Flusser not only departs...
Plausible Fictions
Suppose photographing is, as Flusser contended, an act of projecting, rather than “capturing” extant meaning. Rather than constituting records, then, photographs propose possibilities, sometimes in tremendously persuasive detail. Photographs are what comes of reaching...
Is fiction “theory”? is “theory” fiction?
Suppose Flusser is “wrong” about most things. He could only be wrong in the sense of someone working within a scientific model–probably a rather narrow one at that, someone who expects to predict something,...
Flusser the Writer
Flusser is usually described as a philosopher. By “trade,” he was a critic — of language, photography, film, art, design, and social practice. He was also a teacher and someone who wrote critically...
Art without History
In a typical contemporary art college, the range of media in active use resembles a core sample through the history of communications technology: students draw, carve, and cast; they also film, project and playback...