Weather Stations
Yesterday, I set out to add a weather report to a friend’s website. She is serious about gardening, and her garden is in a seriously windy location. In short weather — especially wind — is always...
Fear of Facebook
Does anyone else find that once you have had to change something about your habits, patterns, rituals — whatever you want to call them — a lot of others come up for questioning? I like...
Writing with Robots
I seem to be learning to write again, this time with a machine reader in mind. Since the software — in my case, Boldgrid — IS an algorithm, it performs the function of a robotic...
Competing with Computers
From his first encounters with game theory, or decision theory in the 1960s, Flusser was concerned with the way human beings were different from “apparatuses”. As far as I know, he never used the...
Image and Imagine
The German verb “einbilden” is ordinarily translated into English as “imagine.” But at one point in Into the Universe of Technical Images, Flusser calls attention to the difference between “einbilden” and the cognate “imaginieren”. Expressing his gratitude to Kant for...
Science and Sentimentality
Flusser translated the title of his essay “Geste und Gestimmtheit” as “Gesture and Sentimentality”. I didn’t. I found, and to some extent still find that particular word misleading at best. Its equivalence to “Gestimmtheit” is almost...