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Concretising Gesture: Flusser and the Technical Image Formalizability and computation on the one side, and intuition and imagination on the other, are two poles of the mixtum compositum [of] media art with regard to the actions of the subject. To understand these poles as two ends of a scale that can be played in both directions is an alternative to a dualistic view, which is an easy option but also fatal, if one remains trapped within this way of thinking. Siegfried Zielinksi1 The intention here is to explore Vilm Flussers notion of the technical image. This was a concept that provided a basis for his philosophy of photography, later expanded to include developments involving other (digital) media practices and technologies such as computer modelling, virtual reality and, most recently, the world wide web. His philosophy is based on an understanding that the uses of different media determine different forms of consciousness. Writing predominantly in either German or Portuguese (although he sometimes wrote in English, much of his output remains un- translated into this language), Flusser charted what he saw as a move from a magical, symbolic consciousness determined by image making to a historical consciousness made possible through writing. Scientific notation was regarded as a logical progression of writing and, in a bid to provide increasing certainty and agreement about humankinds theories and observations of the world, increasingly complex scientific texts were developed which although yielding ever more precise descriptions, had the effect of separating humans from the world they inhabited. The development of the technical image was a way to make these texts accessible but for Flusser such a development poses problems as well as opportunities, perhaps the most important concerning the distancing of our relationship to the world. Vilm Flusser came to international prominence in the early 1980s after the publication of his book, Fr eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Towards a Philosophy of Photography). This book does not offer a conventional interpretation of photography. It functions in a far broader sense, reflecting on photography as evidence of a seismic shift in human thought and experience,

1 Siegfried Zielinksi, Deep Time of the Media: Towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by

Technical Means. (trans. G. Custance), Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2006, p277. (cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

away from a historical consciousness to a consciousness characterised by computation and automation, in which written language is superseded by calculated images. Towards the end of the book, Flusser argues for the necessity to develop such a philosophy. [It] must reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed and programming apparatuses, in order finally to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom. The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom and thus its significance in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.2 When imagining, we step back from the world into ourselves. We distance ourselves from the world in order to comprehend better the context we are in, to orientate ourselves in the world.3 Pictures are a means of fixing the products of imagination. They make them communicable and accessible to others. But pictures also serve to obscure the objects they represent (or at least they jostle with the world for our attention). Pictures are surfaces over which the eye wanders as it pleases. A picture does not offer a conclusion but presents a wholeness, a synchronic totality animated by the observer. In this sense, for Flusser, images are magical. They present states of things, allowing for contradictory interpretations. If we step back from the world into ourselves in order to see the context we are in, to see the wood in spite of the trees, in doing so we lose the specific nature of the thing. It becomes hidden by the image.

2 Vilm Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion 2000, p81-2. 3 Flusser, A New Imagination, in the online Flusser seminar hosted by

Medcad/_vilm_flusser_archiv, http://217.76.144.67/unesco/intro/index.html [accessed March 2005]; a different version of this text is included in Writings, (ed. Andreas Strhl & trans. Erik Eisel), Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press 2002, pp110-6. (cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

Images are meant for people to orient themselves in the world. But when they become very strong, people use their experience in the world to orient themselves in the image An inversion of the relationship between the world of experience and the world of imagination is called idolatry.4 Throughout his work, Flusser argues that this predisposition to imagine, to think in images, and to relate to the world through images was characteristic of a symbolic, magical consciousness radically altered through the invention of writing.5 In contrast to the images open surface, the text necessitates the eyes direction along a path in order to receive a specific, coded message. Linear codes demand a synchronization of their diachronicity. They demand progressive reception.6 This results in a new experience of time, a linear time as opposed to a circular, cyclical time. With writing, history begins and with it, the consciousness of history. 7 Texts also remove us from the world but at a further level. Writing provided more certainty of observation and communication. In a sense it demystified the image, it determined it. But writing too obscures the image embedded within it and as such humans are further distanced from the world they inhabit. Their progressive reliance on the text as a means of negotiating the world effects a shift away from idolatry to textolatry (Flusser cites an over reliance on scientific, religious or political doctrines as examples of this). The victory of texts over images, of science over magic was not conclusive, however.

4 Transcription of an audio recording of Flusser, in the online Flusser seminar hosted by

Medcad/_vilm_flusser_archiv, http://217.76.144.67/unesco/intro/index.html [accessed March 2005]. 5 Pictures began to be used to denote syllables of sound and not just meaning around 3500 BC with the development of Sumerian cuneiform, although pictograms had been in use since around 9000 BC as memory aids. 6 Flusser, The Codified World (1978), in Writings, pp35-41 7 Only after one writes in a line or a row is one able to think logically, to calculate, to critique, to do science, to philosophize and to act accordingly And the longer one can write ones lines, the more one thinks and acts historically. The gesture of writing calls historical consciousness into the light [and historical consciousness leads to the increasing entrenchment of writing] It is therefore a mistake to believe that there has always been history, because something always took place. Or, to want to believe that writing only preserves what took place. Or, to equate the Historic Age with the period in history during which people preserved events in written record. This is a mistake because nothing took place before the invention of writing, everything simply happened History is a function of writing and of consciousness, which expresses itself in writing. Vilm Flusser, Die Schrift, p11-12, quoted in Strhl, Introduction, Writings, p.xxix-xxx. (cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

The linearity of written language was too uncritical when applied to the rationalising functions of an emerging scientific approach. Therefore the bits or pixels that constituted writing (that were torn from the image) had to be processed formally; they had to be calculated. Flusser saw calculation as the highest expression of historical consciousness. Only an imagination that has been thoroughly calculated can be considered explained.8 Until Newton and Leibniz, the numeric code remained tangled in the alphabetic code. Calculus was developed and refined in order to enlighten, to provide a surer means with which to grasp the world, to explain and dis-enchant the image. Mathematical notation provided a means of determining the nature of the world precisely and without ambiguity, but in time such texts become abstract to a degree that they too obscure the world. In Flussers sense, human beings become functions of this mode of thought. The digital computer is one consequence of such calculatory abstractions. It would be unimaginable without the insights of quantum mechanics, perhaps the single most successful scientific experimental theory yet developed. Language articulates thought; the invention of writing channelled thought. Thought as expressed via language in a broad sense, from text to mathematical calculation - is like a net cast out into the sea. The lines of the net correspond to language and the density of the nets weave corresponds to the measure we have of the world. The nets intersections, its knots or nodes, coincide with what is habitually referred to as real or actual. The ineffable, in contrast, is that which escapes language. It slips through the net. But the more dense the description and the more extensive our comprehension of the world, the more separated and alienated we become, the more our language intercedes between us and it. In this sense the world is constructed though language and the limits of language are the limits of the world. For Flusser, the increasing density and precision of this text obscures the world and ultimately leads to an deadlock. He regards this critical impasse as the end of history, in his terms, the end of the historical consciousness brought into being though linear writing.9
8 See Flusser, Thought and Reflection (1963), Flusser Studies, Issue 1, November 2005,

http://www.flusserstudies.net [accessed June 2010]; also, A New Imagination, Writings, p112. 9 This is reminiscent of Borges story of the tattered remains of an infamous map that was the same scale as the empire it represented, a relic of over-determination. Jorge Luis Borges, Of Exactitude in Science, A Universal History of Infamy, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1984, p131. (cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

Flussers book on photography introduces the principle of the technical image, based in no small part on these reflections on image and language. This is a key element of his philosophy that he would later develop in relation to a broader conception of the notion of media. Scientific texts construct human beings perceptions such that the world becomes understandable only through this method. If such a thing exists, a direct connection with the world becomes ever more tenuous. As a result, Flusser determines that technical images, the first instance of which was the photograph, were developed in order to illuminate the abstractions embodied by such texts. Although one can without hesitation assert the importance of the pioneering photographers visual ambitions, photography was as much a direct development of scientific knowledge, for example, optics and chemistry. Earlier technical forms such as perspective are perhaps trickier to assimilate into this model. The development of perspective involved artists visual experiments and observations as much as it did a rational, scientific approach to spatial configuration and representation. It embodied a dialogue between practice and theory and perhaps only later, as the techniques and theories of perspective became formalised did its essence as a technical form become apparent.10 Moving forward to the late 19th and 20th centuries, technical images (in the sense of an image-producing apparatus) began to proliferate and now as operators and consumers of photography, film, television, video and digital images of all sorts, we become functionaries of these apparatuses. The criticism [of technical images] is not an analysis of their production but an analysis of the world This lack of criticism is potentially dangerous at a time when technical images are in the process of displacing texts dangerous for the reason that the objectivity of technical images is an illusion.11 This critique of photography is based on Flussers picture of the shift from
10 Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, A Psychology of the Creative Eye, Berkeley:

University of California Press 1974, especially pp280-302; Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion, London: Phaidon, 1962, especially pp211-218; Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, an approach to a theory of symbols, London: Oxford University Press 1969, especially pp3-19; Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press 1986; Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, (trans. C.S. Wood), New York: Zone 1991; Maurice Pirenne, Optics, Painting, Photography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970. 11 Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography. p14. (cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

magical/symbolic thought through historical/linear thought, a thinking and consciousness effected through writing, to a new image-based consciousness reliant on scientific, calculatory thought. The photograph owes its existence to such thinking but, true to its status as an image, that is, as a surface showing states of things, it acts as a transparent window onto the world. For Flusser this is a key moment in the development of consciousness. It signals a shift from a linear to an image code once again but this new imagination is different from the one superseded by linear thought. The photograph freezes events into scenes. It signals the end of the dominance of linear thinking and effects the damming up of history. The photograph may appear to reflect the world directly. It has an indexical relation to the scene it pictures and the light or likeness it captures. Rosalind Krauss talks about the index as a sign which establishes its meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to its referent.12 Just as the cast shadow bears an indexical relationship to the object that casts it, so the photograph is physically related to or constituted by the traces of the points of light reflected by the pictured scene. But on the contrary, the vector of signification has reversed. As Strhl puts it, photographs are post-historical because they do not find their origin in a process of abstraction, but go through a process of concretisation.13 The camera is a black box with input and output. Its inner workings may remain unknown to all but the most informed user or, indeed, the user may be physically removed altogether and the camera may automatically produce images. The cameras program determines the nature of the images produced and as such it programs its user. The photographer unwittingly becomes a function of the camera apparatus which itself is a function of a broader apparatus (industrial, economic, or political). Those who program are themselves programmed by a meta-program of their apparatus, and so on. The camera is an invention, a construct. For Flusser writing in an admittedly polarised manner, it is the result of a train of thought that is conceptual, linear, and rational. Through this device, we create pictures of the world and they act like windows onto the world. But the pictures are a product of the camera, that is, they are projected out from the camera onto the world. We begin to think and see in terms of these photographs and we perform our functions as
12 Rosalind Krauss, Notes on the Index: Part 1, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other

Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT 1986, pp196-209. 13 Strhl, Introduction, Writings, p.xxv. (cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

operators of this system. For Flusser the importance of making this distinction was that as operators, as a matter of political and social necessity, we should attempt to work against the device: to program it rather than be programmed by it; to strive for the improbable as opposed to the probable.14 The technical image - photographic, televisual or digital - is difficult to decode. It is constructed from the very scientific texts to which it owes its existence but its apparent transparency obscures these texts embedded within it. The images users believe they see the world through the photograph, for example, and not the apparatus that enables it. Unlike traditional images, technical images replace things with reproductions.15 They replace a symbolic, magical order with a programmed order. However, they do not make these hermetic texts comprehensible but distort them by translating scientific statements and equations into images or states of things. By appearing to bring the world closer, this image changes the nature of the world for its users. We have stepped still further away from the lebenswelt, the world in which we live, into this new imagination. But conversely, the world of technical images is as much created by us, and by extension through these apparatuses, as it is found by us. In the years prior to his sudden death in 1991 (he died in a car accident on the journey back from Prague to Germany, after his first visit to the city in fifty years), Flusser seemed optimistic about the most recent computer-based media and his writings on synthetic, computer-generated images photographys descendants, in the sense of their status as technical images - suggest that these constructions are themselves primary objects of thought. Rather than immaterial, bodiless phantoms as is sometimes suggested, they are in fact materialising forms. Worlds are initiated, created and projected rather than received and processed. Here the emphasis shifts away from the processing of external visual data, in a more or less automatic (programmed) sense, towards the instigation and projection of alternative worlds. This is a

14 Flusser often used the terms probable and improbable, derived in relation to the physical

condition of entropy. Entropy can be understood in the move from highly organized, improbable states to random or probable ones; the tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to dissipate toward a state of inert uniformity; or the inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society. 15 The computer is a representing machine like no other. As Zielinski observes, We are all working in the realm of illusions. Zielinski, op. cit. (cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

concretising gesture.16 Formal thinking, the act of in-forming material, of acting against the program, of developing improbable forms, is key.17 There is an absolute necessity to work against uniformity, and against the programming tendency of the technological, social and political apparatuses we have developed and of which we become functions. To in-form is to materialise or concretise.18 Technical images are an embodiment of this process. But we remain suspicious of such technical apparitions as these are not necessarily captured from the world but may be created by us from scratch. Flusser, however, looks to physics as a means to invert the question: it is not so much that the artificial, technical forms are more or less real but that the idea of the real as a criterion for truth is itself problematic. If the world at the scale of the subatomic particle is constituted through relative collections of wave functions in a universal field of matter, the relative density of these accumulations determines what we experience as real. As Lev Vaidman states, If a component of the quantum state of the universe, which is a wave function in the shape of a man, continues to move (to live?) exactly as a man does, in what sense is it not a man? How do I know that I am not this empty wave?19 The resolution and exactitude of digital photographs, their capacity to represent the world transparently, will progress; the accuracy and density of computer models will undoubtedly increase. As technology develops and human beings uses of it become more and more sophisticated, the question of the nature of the real - as the

16 Flusser, A New Imagination, Writings, pp110-116, p114. 17 There is a proliferation, a flood of forms emanating from computers that we fill with

material, which we materialise. In the past, it was a matter of formalising a world taken for granted, but now it is a matter of realising the forms designed to produce alternative worlds. Flusser, Form and Material, The Shape of Things, London: Reaktion 1999 (1993), p22-9, p28. 18 This touches on an old philosophical issue, which there is not space to discuss here although Flussers reflections can be briefly sketched out. The world of phenomena that we perceive with our senses is an amorphous stew behind which are concealed eternal, unchanging forms that we can perceive by means of the super sensory perspective of theory. The amorphous stew of phenomena (the material world) is an illusion, and reality, which can be discovered by means of theory, consists of the forms concealed behind this illusion (the formal world). The amorphous world of matter, of stuff, flows into these forms. It temporarily fills them before being subsumed once again into the stew. When I see something, a table for example, I see wood in the form of a table (Flusser, Form and Material, p24). This state is transitory, the wood may be burnt or it may be transformed into something else. Yet the table-form remains constant. I can imagine it. Hence the form of the table is real, and the content of the table (the wood) is only apparent (Ibid. p24). By trying to impose the idea or form on the material, the table-maker both in-forms the wood and simultaneously deforms the idea of the table. The resulting material table falls short of the ideal table. 19 Lev Vaidman, quoted in Colin Bruce, Schrdingers rabbits: The many worlds of quantum, Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press 2004, p236. (cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

materialisation of form itself - will become paramount.20 If we are indeed convexities in a field of energy and matter, what status will these synthetic, artificial images and models have? For Flusser, it is simple: either the alternative worlds are as real as the given one, or the given reality is as ghostly as the alternative ones.21

These new forms are projections, fictions, discoveries, models and potentialities; the images derived from them are realised through electromagnetic fields and represented and reconstituted as material surfaces. They are projections, models for a future world. Through this process, a dialogue is established between the internal imagination and an externalised imagination fed into the machine. What the concept of the technical image offers is a way to rethink our relationship to machines, to see these either as objects and processes to which we are subject or as manifestations of a desire to explore a possible, intersubjective realm. By imagining and stepping back from the world into ourselves, we simultaneously project ourselves into another realm entirely. This realm is tangible and can be shared.

20 The Vilm Flusser Archive now at the UdK in Berlin houses Flussers travelling library, which

contains an extremely wide range of material, including a number of publications concerning the future. His thinking operated within a broad timeframe and it is helpful to think of his ideas about human communication, representation and consciousness projecting hundreds if not thousands of years into the future. 21 Flusser, Digital Apparition, Electronic Culture, p244. (cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

References Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, A Psychology of the Creative Eye, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Jorge Luis Borges, Of Exactitude in Science, A Universal History of Infamy, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p131. Colin Bruce, Schrdingers rabbits: The many worlds of quantum, Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2004. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion, London: Phaidon, 1962. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, an approach to a theory of symbols, London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Rosalind Krauss, Notes on the Index: Part 1, The Originality of the Avant- Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT 1986, pp196-209. Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, (trans. C.S. Wood), New York: Zone, 1991. Originally published as Die Perspektive als Symbolische Form in the Vortrage der Bibliothek Warburg 1924-25, Leipzig & Berlin, 1927. Maurice Pirenne, Optics, Painting, Photography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Siegfried Zielinksi, Deep Time of the Media: Towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. (trans. G. Custance), Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2006.

(cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

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Selected works by Flusser in English translation22 Vilm Flusser, Two Approaches to the Phenomenon: Television, The New Television: A Public/Private Art, (ed. Douglas Davis & Alison Simmons), Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1977. Vilm Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, (intro. Hubertus Von Amelunxen & trans. Anthony Mathews), London: Reaktion, 2000 (1983). Vilm Flusser, Digital Apparition, Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, (ed. Timothy Druckrey & tr. Andreas Broeckmann), New York: Aperture, 1996, pp242-245. Vilm Flusser, The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, (ed. Martin Pawley & tr. Anthony Mathews), London: Reaktion Books, 1999. Vilm Flusser, Writings, (ed. Andreas Strhl & tr. Erik Eisel), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Vilm Flusser, On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise), Leonardo, Volume 23, No. 4 1990, pp397-399. Vilm Flusser, The Glory that Touches the Stars; Introduction [to Towards a Philosophy of Photography]; Desks, (ed. Michael Wutz; trans. Elizabeth Wilson & Andreas Strhl), Wber Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Humanities Journal, Volume 14.1, Winter 1997. Vilm Flusser, The City as Wave-Through in the Image-Flood, Critical Inquiry, (trans. Phil Gochenour from Die Stadt als Wellental in der Bilderflut), Vol. 31, No. 2, Winter 2005 . http://www.flusser-archive.org/ http://www.flusserstudies.net/
22 Thanks also to Marcel Marburger at the Vilm Flusser Archive, Universitt der Knste, Berlin

for copies of Flussers original typescripts. (cc) BY-NC -ND | Tim ORiley | www.timoriley.net

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