On the Persistence of Hardware

In the paper I will give next month at ISEA, I am exploring the oft-espoused notion that technology is neutral. My book Gratitude for Technology argues that every manufactured thing is a record of the life-times of the people who made it; that an archaeology of the surfaces of modernity is in order to articulate the real human relationships which produced them. Through this archaeology we must come to comprehensively acknowledge the legacy of these relationships, fair and unfair, respectful and exploitative, recorded in the surface.

Because the surface on which this text appears is technical material, and all technical material is a record of human relations, it cannot be neutral, because relationships are not neutral. I would not argue that these relationships are so many and infinitesimal that they 'even out' into a generalizable history. I want to be 'Infinitely Demanding' with Critchley, applying some of the highest Nouvelle Histoire ambitions of the 'Annales' school, and attempt to attend to each one of these minute fragments of real relationships coherently, in a sort of poly-biography, or anthropology of technology. I hope this will support my central contention that since the technical material is a prerequisite for anything which appears on it, the values recorded therein frame, shape and colour every experience of it. Finally I will claim that such effects are fathomable.

Vilém Flusser does not explicitly discuss the materiality of the digital surface, but he analyzes what he calls the 'technical image' as a projection from the level of code. He exhorts us to learn about how this written code functions to generate images, or else become enamoured of the digital image and mere subject to its power. He warns us not to delude ourselves about how much agency we actually have when we are imagine ourselves as 'being creative' with technical images.

"the first photographers had no idea what they were doing. They had no idea that it is the apparatus that takes the images. That the photographer is not necessary, that you can make automatic cameras, that it is so to speak technology, and science itself that makes images."¹

¹ from an interview, made in München, the 17th of October 1991. This written text is based on the edited tape entitled The Philosopher of Photography, broadcast by the Hungarian Television in May, 1992. (45 min, FRÍZ Production, directed by Miklós Peternák, András Sólyom, Producer: Judit Kopper)

McLuminations!

What follows is a short introduction to the McLuminations series of video discussions officially inaugurated last weekend at the Retouching McLuhan Centennial Weekend event at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin. Future McLuminations are planned for October in Berlin and at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

photo Dmytri Kleiner

"At another level we have seen in this century the changeover from the debunking of traditional myths and legends to their reverent study. As we begin to react in depth to the social life and problems of our global village, we become reactionaries. Involvement that goes with our instant technologies transforms the most "socially conscious" people into conservatives.
When Sputnik had first gone into orbit a schoolteacher asked her second-graders to write some verse of the subject. One child wrote:

The stars are so big, The earth is so small, Stay as you are.

" M. McLuhan Understanding Media, Reversal of an Overheated Medium, Signet, New York, 1964 p. 49

Marshall McLuhan famously conjectured that the era of instantaneous electronic communication was going to bring about an experience of the world he termed a Global Village. Many interpreted this optimistically, as though, through the sense of universal togetherness engendered by electronic media, people around the world would shed their chauvinist antipathies, and engage together as equals. This condition of egalitarian global exchange, is, to some extent, observable today , however it is unlikely that this is much due to the prevalence of electronic media, rather, it can be seen as only a contemporary manifestation or mutation of an internationalist tendency among educated elites which has prevailed since time immemorial, which has always appropriated the latest technology. On the other hand, McLuhan's Global Village has also a dark, cautionary connotation. Rather than being a place of joyous togetherness, the Global Village may be a nightmare of intrusiveness and irrational violence.

McLuhan's work articulates a pivotal development in the consciousness of humanity, that of alphabetic literacy, which began with the Greeks, and exploded with the Gutenberg press. McLuhan often divides history, and peoples into the categories pre-literate and literate and extrapolates a period of post-literacy emerging with electronic communication.

McLuhan and Vilém Flusser coincide in their understanding that literacy generates in the literate causality, which bursts literate people out of a tribal, circular sense of time, into a linear historical sense of time. ”There is the stream of events, as it is perceived by historical consciousness. Everything flows, nothing ever repeats itself, every opportunity lost is lost forever, and everybody is within that stream of events. ”¹ Once linearity is accellerated sufficiently by industrial technology (functioning themselves based on causal rules) what McLuhan calls the era of the tribal drum is inaugurated again with satellites and television. Flusser refers to this as a recurring mythical period where we are dominated by the power of images (inaugurated with the photograph) .

McLuhan's Global Village is a retrieval of tribal structures of society, where the increased satisfaction of an intimate horizon of meaning (all phenomena have meaning within tribal consciousness) occurs under the absolute tyranny of taboo and orthodoxy, where dissent is sanctioned through social exclusion (e.g. Excommunication, exile) which, thereby deprives a dissenter of any access to the only community in which he or she has any meaning. Excommunicated into the netherworld between communities, the Global Village Exile is practically what Georgio Agamben refers to as a homo sacer², a person without any rights, who may be killed by anyone without fear of punishment.

McLuhan died at the dawn of the internet age, so he did not experience the Massively Multi-Channel communication possible today. His vision of an all-inclusive pervasive sphere of electronic information enrobing the earth was largely that of a hegemonic effect. The public was imagined in the position of receptors and interpreters of the light-speed stimula. His praise for the experiential modes unearthed in the electronic communication was then always qualified with a cautionary barb. One example of how McLuhan bemoaned its alleged anti-intellectual , anti-literate effects is in his many critiques of how jokes had changed from more narrative jokes to the then current one-liners (which today have become even one-worders, e.g. 'meh') McLuhan exhorted the audience of his day to understand how the media worked and find a way to 'turn it off', or at least slow it down long enough that we may establish some agency within the onslaught.³

But the internet, for all its whirring back and forth, is still what McLuhan would have considered a cool, low-resolution medium, therefore one which requires much physical effort (instinctively, internally, unconsciously on the part of the sensorium) in order to interpret stimuli into meaningful messages. The users of the internet are physically exhausted by this and thus have no energy for sustained reflection.

*

McLuminations, the event series, emerges out of the experience of watching television, which McLuhan described as in depth. When McLuhan said that people experience television deeply, he did not mean that they methodically explored the subject matter at hand with regard to its context (the common contemporary notion of depth we have from the phrases 'deep understanding' or 'deep reading') the depth McLuhan referred to was an emotional one. The images of the war in Vietnam, he said, would not fit on TV because the audience experienced them too deeply. This emotional depth is an intuitive unreflected one, a holistic one which is not subject to rational reflection. However, slowing down the deep process of television reception, we may observe that the emotional engrossment, this in depth experience is actually propelled along by infinitesimal bursts of rational reaction, each never quite having the time to emerge into an actual thought because of the intense pace of the communication taking place. Therefore the frustrated rationality of the viewer becomes transmuted into physical, emotional energy which, accumulating, disrupts the concentration necessary to develop arguments, thus contributing to the anti-literate, tribal effects of electronic media.

The interest with McLuminations is to develop a discursive form which would provide us the consumers a little more time to allow each individual reception-reaction to have its space and time, to allow each reflection to unfold, so that we can come to better terms with our in depth experience of electronic media Global Village. By pausing the video at our leisure and need, and freely scratching the video McLuhan back and forth purely as our contemplations compel us to, we may open a space out of our time (as McLuhan proposed), where what today are slightly reactionary approaches toward rational (linear and causal) reflection on the electronic media object may be cultivated. In McLuhan's terms, McLuminations is warming up the cool media of video, in order that themes ordinarily incompatible with video may be addressed in extenso.

-------------notes-------------

1 Flusser, Vilém, from On technical images, chance, consciousness and the individual, Interview in München, the 17th of October 1991 (38’) A shorter version of this interview was broadcasted by the Hungarian Television in 1992. (FRÍZ Production, producer Judit Kopper)

2 see especially chapter 6 "the Ban and the Wolf"

3 "I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what is happening because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Now, many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you are in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Everything I talk about is almost certainly to be something I am resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it and then you know where to turn off the button." Marshall McLuhan, from a TV interview with Robert Fulford, May 8th, 1966, available here

avant garde for every one?

What? an update? Where have the last 6 months gone? Well, financial exigencies had to be assuaged in the form of a media facade project for a 24-floor office building in Seoul. It is a beautiful building with an unusual curved black glass curtain facade designed by Edgar Bosman and Peter Couwenbergh.
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photo by Edgar Bosman

While I was in Seoul, I also got to show iMine. It was pretty well received by the digital sophisticates out there on the peninsula, and even got some sympathetic press.

At the transmediale, there was Global Village Idiots, a prototype for McLuminations, a three-part series I will do at the Canadian Embassy here this year as part of the McLuhan Centennial celebrations going on everywhere. At PIXELACHE, thanks to Susanne Jaschko, I had a chance to present a fleshed-out concept paper for my Congo Confluence project. PIXELACHE was an inspiring experience, especially getting to know so many luminaries I had only read before, and unexpectedly having my sensibility opened through encounters with Bartaku and the people from FOam. Bio-diversity was a very prominent theme at this year's PIXELACHE, some projects, like MARIN, seemed to be preparing for the techno-necessities of a post-apocalyptic condition, whereas Bartaku's photoElectric Digestopians project with its edible explorations of micro-voltages was playful and provocative poetry.


photo by Bartaku

After PIXELACHE, I immediately went to Amsterdam to meet Bas van Abel of the Fairphone project. Bas is a designer trying to do the practically impossible, researching the problematic sourcing of mineral raw materials for electronics and trying to find "fair trade" sources in order to produce a phone using materials which are extracted under 'fair' conditions, that the people responsible for exhuming the materials get an adequate wage for their work, or even that they get a communal share in the value of the minerals they extract. Those of you who have read this blog before will know about this problem at the heart of our electronics.

I asked Bas for some tips to get funding for my Smartphone Teardown^6000000 project (more about this imminently). In Holland, it seems, even the banks are concerned with conflict minerals, Bas got a lot of funding and support from Rabobank, I, on the other hand... still looking....

Next week is Operative Performances with the good people at LEAP. It is finally a chance to get back to performance-grounded work, human (and, of course other) scale, real (and, of course canned and hyper-) time, maybe even a little mimeolography. Hopefully I can be more prompt about putting up the next update.

To tide you over in the meantime here is the brilliant art historian Boris Groys with a lecture on the role of the art avant-garde in soviet Russia, with speculations on what could be considered avant-garde today. I was a bit confused by seemingly contradictory contentions in this lecture. Groys declares that the Avant Garde is always unpopular (because it assumedly makes people uncomfortable, forcing them to confront themselves in unaccustomed manners) but, at the end of the lecture, Groys speculates that people posting (art?) on Facebook might be the current avant-garde. Who doesn't like facebook "art"? The most popular works at transmediale (cutting edge? avant-garde?) the last two years have engaged with facebook: FAT lab's face book resistance and Cirio and Ludovico's Face to Facebook, I wouldn't say those works were very unpopular at all. On the contrary, they went viral, and were generally applauded. It may just be that our society has reached such a degree of militarization that the avant garde has become popular. Readers of this blog will know my position on this.

Processual Art Between First and Second Nature

image from NASA (hope they don't mind)

This is a response I contributed to a mailing list discussion on processual art initiated by Susanne Jaschko and Lucas Evers as an extension of their exhibition Process as Paradigm. Almost all the works I refer to here were presented in that show. The catalog for the show is freely downloadable here.

As far as I have understood it, with processual art, we are in a position of referring to the contemporary condition of our civilisation having reached a point where one might almost be able to declare that it is dependent on automated processes. I think there is a central question here.

This amazingly sophisticated "life-support system" we have created with the technical arts, layer upon layer of physical and virtual infrastructure (so many, so elaborate and so diffuse that we can no longer speak of layers), which engages and traverses our individual lives in so many ways, has truly become a "Second Nature" with its own meterologies and flows, as fascinating (at least in as far as it is made manifest) as the "First Nature" we used to wonder at, and fear.

The added plus with the "Second Nature" is that we have the sense that, since we built it, we can control it.

I think Processual art addresses this situation in a few ways.

a) producing analogies (literally analog counterparts) to "Second Nature", as a kind of homage to the "Second Nature" and, simultaneously, a kind of adieu to (obsolescent notions of ) "First Nature". This position I call "Surrender". E.g.van Abbema's bacterial work (see image below), and Kudla's leaves, Boredom Research's snails.

Symbiosis (2009) by Jelte van Abbema

paper imprinted with bacteria which grow over time.

b) producing generative models which allow our still-flesh-and-bones-and-eyes-and-ears meat-world beings to appreciate and enjoy the complexity of the "Second Nature". This is the aestheticising position of mastery and control. E.g. Sack, Rybn, Driessens & Verstappen, Schmidt and many others in the show

c) a reactionary approach which emphasises the aspects of human experience which cannot (yet) be technologized. This is somehow the position of identification with First Nature itself, integrating Humanity with all its talents and capacities as part of Nature (and more specifically terrestrial Nature)) I think of Willy Lemaitre's work here for some reason, and maybe, my own...?

d) others... (I hope these categories may be useful...)

again, if I understand it, processual art exists where we consider the interstices between First and Second Nature, between the Life Support System and good (?) old-fashioned 'Life'. Further, I would like to ask here if the process we are monitoring in processual art is that of our dehumanisation.

If we pretend to take the scientific rigour with which the machines around us are constructed so that they run so reliably and efficiently, and attempt to apply that kind of rigour to our ethics, we must contend that until there is a certifiably "fair-trade" computer there will be no legitimate critical position in technological arts.

So few people really want to go back to the old texts through which the foundations of our notion of humanity has been developed. Do we believe that our automated systems have, programmed into them, the humanism which enabled the science which created them? Are we in a position of letting automated processes determine what is better or worse for us as a species? Because we do not trust the individual position? (inherent in this is the stepping back from the claim of authorship).

This may be one of the central questions of processual art. If machines can decide better than we can, and it is only our responsibility to feed the machine enough data to process into enlightened instructions, we have invested in the mesh of automated processes, the 'life-support system, or Second Nature) all the agency we used to invest in worship. We will have become pagans in a polytheistic world of techno-magic and of mystical terror.

For our own good, and for the survival of the species, we increasingly see the convergence of, one one hand the improvement of automated processes and, on the other, the adaptation of human behaviour to be compatible with these. I am not sure if this is what Ursula Damm refers to when she describes processual art as pre-politically activist. But certainly, from a Flusserian point of view, this situation is decidedly apolitical.

monitoring processual art

[this is the slightly redacted text of my presentation at a panel on processual art, moderated by Susanna Jaschko on the 4th of February 2010, at the transmediale10].

Many people speak today of a global crisis. But it is not so much a global crisis as a crisis of globalism itself. Brasil, India, Korea, many developing countries in Africa are doing quite well. What has happened is not a global crisis, but apocalypse, in it's original sense of uncovering, revealing the crisis that was, is and always will be.

The Cold War provided for us in the 'developed world', as Susanna Jaschko said today "the illusion of stability". It is well known that the Cold War was very hot in many locations where proxies of the two dominant systems of the time (called ,we remember still, communism and capitalism) battled for the exotic and scarce materials which would provide the coming technological age.

After the end of the Cold War we are going though a period of apocalypse, where the true complexity and unresolvable chaos, crisis and conflict of our common lives on this planet are no longer deniable. Processual art provides many approaches for traversing the endless volumes of data flow produced by and in our increasingly real-time consciousness of this state of endless crisis.

I will attempt to provide certain Begriffe (1) and certain systemic metaphors which may serve useful in our discussions and in our contemplation of processual art.

With the ever-present spectrality engulfing us, the ghost which remind of our own mortality, our culture's response is to tell us to visit the doctor regularly, repeatedly to monitor our health.

And if the body is perceived to be in crisis it is immediately surrounded by monitors. The monitors, now form part of the cyborg medial attention, monitoring the health of the patient.

Monitor is derived from the Latin verb monere which means originally "to admonish, warn, advise". Lev Manovich in his landmark book: Language of New Media, described the first tele-vision, the first real-time monitor which was the radar screen. Here, the connotation of warning is obvious.

On the screens and monitors are visualizations of what are considered the 'Vital Signs' of the patient. By reading these signs, even the uninitiated can imagine what is going on inside the patient.

Nowadays, as society is stripped bare of its traditional, unifying beliefs & faiths, and the citizen is particle-ized by personalized and variegated media experience-spaces, we have a growing sense of the complexity of the globalized system in which we exist, and of which we are inextricably, a part.

So here, the metaphor is that, with the monitors, we are monitoring (can one say the health of) the body of society, or even that of our civilisation, such as it can be conceived to be, for signs of various kinds.

We get warnings, but we also get information we need or want or like, but most of all, the screens tell us that the body of society is still alive and being monitored.

But more significantly, there is a stand in, an avatar for the body of society and that is the electrical and, increasingly, the communications grid, the condition of which the monitors display.

This is why computer-generative art is so appropriate for public screens, it is public notice of the health of the system. The health of the infrastructure part is verified at the refresh rate of 50 or 60 times a second (the oscillation rate of electrical current), but also and implicitly, the ongoing process of civilization's complex social and economic systems, which are always incomplete and ongoing are monitored. A comforting illusion of social constancy is also thus generated.

Failing other, earlier notions of faith, monitor screens promise us we are making technological process. What appears on the monitor screen is a kind of elaborate progress bar by which we monitor trends to fruition, the anticipation of which may be just as enjoyable as is their brief consumption.

Two examples of the implementation of processual art on public media facades.
- Korea: the progress of modernity/modernization, technologies of fairness overwhelming the creeping mustiness associated with old beliefs. Fairness = equanimity. The line between art and design and social engineering is almost non-existent
- Europe: technological progress is also monitored but also our ethical and moral progress in the traditional function of art

Processual art provides visions, visualisations of civilization as an incomplete fragmented process, going on in myriad directions at once, a glorious 4-dimensional filigree of causeways of various breadths.

But underneath, and fundamental to these real-time patterns and figures on the screens, is a kind of urgency which makes this kind of processual work so compelling and also so exhausting.

It is the diminishing wegsehbarkeit (2) of the injustice on which our civilisation, and even more, of the technology of our glorified society monitoring systems are predicated.

These are unfair relations of labour, here at home, and elsewhere, the persistence of slavery & indentured labour (the Yes Men do a nice take on this), and, especially the lack of parity in the league of nations, in living standards, and, most importantly for me, this is not just in words, it is in the materials of technology itself.

Jaromil excellently described some of the problematic deep material relations of high technology utopias in a presentation at last transmediale, in the so-called conflict minerals trade.

We must acknowledge the hardware beholdenness of all our technological art. That this hard ware is produced through hard facts: where and when the materials which become the technology must be (have been) extracted from the earth somewhere before they can be refined into these exquisite processual instruments.

This extraction from the earth of metals and minerals and other necessary ingredients for high technology must be brought out of the earth by particular individuals at particular locations at particular stages of their particular lives.

At the mine head where the Bauxite comes from for the aluminum, essential for all the finest technology in this room, there are hundreds of men with parents and families doing another day's work for peanuts right now.

They have no choice. Some even work at gunpoint. Their government, in many cases has been completely bought out by ours, because we cannot and will not do without aluminum.

Dadis Camera, former president of Guinea (central to the Bauxite trade) castigates the German Ambassador
von Nzwamba

Camara was a controversial leader. Usually not my favorite type of leader, a throwback to old-school African nationalists from the early 'independence' period. For the purposes of this post, he did one thing that really got the high-tech producing countries angry, he re-evaluated all of his countries mining contracts signed by the previous west-friendly governments, for which he would suffer greatly.


I have a phrase for this "Absolute corruption corrupts absolutely."

This is why we must monitor the consequences of our abstract, hardly articulate faith in the noble cause of technological progress and its incipient industry.

The men standing around the mine from which the materials are abstracted from the earth, with their personal individual histories and needs are at work right now perpetually inside these monitoring screens.

The screen, you may, know, etymologically comes from the old French escran "écran" which was originally the wire mesh which was placed before the warming fire - to block the sparks which could set the house on fire.

So we watch this processual art like a warming fire, glorious patterns of immolation from which we derive a pleasant angenehm (3) warmth.
Standing around the ancient campfire, it is a scene reminiscent of our tribal past, a previous, pre-literate time Flusser often described where human consciousness was dominated by images and the magicians who understood and channeled their power.

Flusser described two future societal modes possibly generated from technical images: a totalitarian techno-magical consciousness dominated by techno-magicians, or a new form of literacy in the constitutive codes of technical images, a textual interpretability he might call techno-historical. Flusser would concede of course that these two consciousnesses would probably co-exist antagonistically.

To conclude, I would like to recall another etymological sense of 'monitor: "to admonish". The monitor is there to keep us in line, as a society, as a civilization. To keep us on the course. The monitor on which we enjoy (angenehm) processual art, you see, has its own agenda.

-----

(1) We don't have quite the right translation of the German word 'Begriff'. In English, we use the word 'term' which has it's roots in 'termination' i.e. 'definition'. But, Begriff is built on the word Griff which in English would be 'grip' or 'handle'. So, unlike terminating a concept in a definition, we can, in German, get a handle on the concept while it is still alive.

(2) I made up this word, which doesn't exist in English either, the closest would be 'look-away-ableness' or 'disregardability'.

(3) this is best translated as 'pleasant' but angenehm also has the connotation of acceptance 'an-nehmen', to take on.

Computational Bio-politics

"It has been clear for several centuries now that, if we want to understand the world, it is not sufficient to describe it by words, it is necessary to calculate the world. "
- Vilém Flusser (from a soon-to-be-released DVD of interviews with Miklós Peternák)


Our age is lauded for the unprecedented modes of social functionality enabled by new technologies, especially by the internet. This appears to be the realization of egalitarian Enlightenment humanist aspiration, embodied in many of the so-called Universal Human Rights. This is an egalitarianism of info-beings predicated on the de-emphasis of materiality.

Material bodies are not equal, but minds, at least, can generate such generalizing agendas. We don't hear from the UNCF that "A body is a terrible thing to waste", a body is a necessary evil. Increasingly, our age is one of a spiritual human collusion of minds, released from the fleshy shells in which they gestate. The body is becoming extensible, replaceable, expendable, redundant. All technology points to a future of the prevalence of the mind over the materiality of the body.

Of course, as McLuhan observed, as one technology becomes obsolete, society generates reactionary cultural forms. The artists, as usual, are the most sensitive to this. Stelarc & Orlan began announcing the obsolescence of the conventional figure of human form decades ago, this has since become almost mainstream. For these artists, their bodies, far from being irrelevant to their social presence, become central, this is also increasingly the case for pornographic actors, vanguard subjects of body transformation. As most of us lead increasingly discorporate social lives, our body culture becomes ever more cliinical and artificial.

The social forms generated by discorporating bodies seem unprecedented, but they are not. This is evident in how political discourse has revealed its true impotence. Vilém Flusser, at the dawn of the PC-age, warned about the coming age of electro-idolatric society. "Thinking is anti-image" he warned, the rule of images will not bring about democracy, but a new form of magical terror. A society in the thrall of the magical power of images.

The only antidote to this, according to Flusser, would be politics, based in the rational, linear processes of text. Text makes historical consciousness which is directed against the image. But the problem today is that electronic text is every bit an image as is an image. Projected from data into text-like manifestations on the screen, the text is not text in a classic sense, but electromagnetic data, which could manifested as easily as a sound or an image or a movie.

this blog post as an image

This text is an image projected by computing, cycling machines. This text is 'kept alive' on the screen at the rate of your local electrical current (50 or 60 times a second, but recently, parallel processes can multiply this). All the exciting new ways we can interact and contact eachother today are so much spontaneous swirls and algorithmic fractals, projected on beguilingly luminescent material, bound in the minerals and metals of satellites and cables, the exotic alloys of the circuit-boards and chips, as much as the tables and toilets of the factories where these were assembled with such precision, the wells and rivers which washed and wet them.

And all along the material course from gravity-sodden earth to speed-of-light peta-flop circuit, is a choreography of human bodies writhing back through history, single file and cavalcade, rhythmically and momentarily themselves — this reality of technology is flesh, bone, muscle and blood of human beings with feelings and needs throughout history.

There is a common industrial history to the text on this screen and the clothes on your back and the fibers of your seat — and here we have a possible reversal: now that text is, itself, an image. Technical images, products of textual codes,  may still provide something to fulfill the political role of text.

In this sketch from Kommunikologie, Flusser attempts to systematise his theory of meaning. In the diagram, the image alienates people and engenders in them magical consciousness, text, alienates from the thrall of images and engenders historical or political consciousness, and he is not yet clear what is engendered by the techno-image. At the end of his chapter "How the codes function", where this diagram appears, he indicates two (although not mutually exclusive) possibilities.

The first, as I mentioned before, is that we will enter into a new magical era dominated by the image, what one might call a techno-magical era, in which Flusser seems to encounter Virilio in describing as mania, madness "Wahnsinn". The second possibility is that we somehow discover how to understand the codes of the techno-images.

"Eine Möglichkeit ist, in einer bedeutungslos werdenden, sich nunmehr sich selbst bedeutenden kodifizierten Welt ein sinnloses Leben zu führen. Das ist die Zukünft als Totalitarismus. Díe Alternative dazu besteht darin, die Codes des Technobilder in der Griff zu bekommen und gemeinsam eine neue Art von Bedeutung zu projizieren." (Kommunikologie, p.110)
"One possibility is to live a meaningless life in an increasingly meaningless codified world, which, from now on, has meaning only of itself. This is the future as totalitarianism. The alternatives depend on us coming to terms with (literally gettinga handle on) the codes of the techno-images and together thereby projecting a new type of meaning." (my translation)

Flusser does not consider the techno-image an image in the classic sense, he considers it a 'project' projected from inside the technology. Thus, when he refers here to projecting new meaning, he is speaking of accomplishing this with the techno-images. The notion of meaning here is clearly Enlightenment Humanist, and the emancipation of the human spirit from the totalitatrianism of the techno-image is an imperative only possible through operations on the level of code.

"Entweder wir leben in den undurchdringlichen Wänden bedeutungsloser Bilder oder machen aus diesen Bilder Brücken zur Welt. " (ibid, p.110)
"Either we live in (sic) the impermeable walls of meaningless images, or we make, out of these images, bridges to the world" (my translation)

Here Flusser closes with the hope that the techno-image can lead us back to knowledge in the world. Paradoxically the techno-image is our greatest threat and only tool to escape this threat.

Flusser says, in a soon-to-be-released (now released!) interview with Miklós Peternak at the Osnabrück New Media Festival in 1988, "I am impressed by the fact that one of the most important dimensions of the present cultural revolution, linguistic communication, both the spoken and the written word, are no longer capable of transmitting the thoughts and concepts which we have concerning the world..it is my firm belief, that if you want to have a clear and distinct communication of your concepts, you have to use synthetic images, no longer words."


Vilém Flusser on Synthetic Images from b gottlieb on Vimeo

We must not only use synthetic or techno-images to communicate about the world, computer-based images (and by this I also mean text, video and audio) are the only possible means we have to communicate meaningfully today about images. If fact, it is at the image level itself that we can best start our discourse, a discourse into the persistent materiality of the techno-image.

History is made today, not at the level of text, but at the level of techno-images beholden to computer codes, which are bound in, and the historical documents of, globalized industrial processes. The reality of these processes, which is the reality of the material manifestation of this text on your screen right now, such as it is, is the true political reality of this age. A reality only modellable and navigable by figures of computation.