Games and Play
On New Year’s Eve, the postman delivered a copy of a new book from Bloomsbury, Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism. It contains my essay, “Games and Play: Being Human in the Universe of Technical Images”. ...
Tagged: Flusser
Czech-born philosopher, teacher, critic and writer, 1920-1991.
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...
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...
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 —...
The Devil and Time
The History of the Devil is the title of the second of three books Flusser wrote when he lived in Brazil (1940 – 1970), recently translated from Portuguese into English by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes...