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CERN
Flusser
Lord's Bridge
Lightning Field

vilém_flusser_archiv, Kunsthochschule für Medien, Köln, 2006
(On the left is a framed photograph of Edith and Vilém Flusser)
[Photograph | Tim O'Riley]

Having worked with a computer to an almost obsessive degree over a number of years, I found that the writings of the philosopher Vilém Flusser offered a real insight into the underlying conundrums posed by such technology. In particular, his notions of the ‘technical image’ and a ‘new imagination’ propose a specific shift in thinking epitomised by photographic and synthetic computer images.

Virtual or alternative worlds – ‘digital apparitions’ as he called them – offer a means of questioning the world we are in and the ways we use to represent or project it to ourselves. The degree of ‘density’ (Flusser’s term) to such spaces or worlds – density of thought, activity, complexity – determine one’s sense of authenticity regardless of a model or image’s visual sophistication. The degree to which we inhabit these spaces makes them more or less ‘real’. This seems to me to be an important question as it reflects as much on the world we actually inhabit as it does in the alternative spaces we create.

If there is a dwindling distinction between the ‘digital apparition’ in terms of this idea of density – the density of its distribution of data or information – and the world we inhabit on an everyday basis, there is a need to establish a critical sense of this technology and the ways we employ it to reconfigure and inhabit the everyday world.

For most of his adult life, Vilém Flusser was an exile, a nomad. Born in Czechoslovakia of Jewish parents, he fled Prague soon after the Nazi invasion in March 1939 with a friend, Edith Barth, who was later to become his wife. All his family members were killed in the concentration camps. Vilém and Edith moved first to London and then to Brazil where they remained until 1975. Flusser died in a car crash in 1991, the day after he had given a lecture in his home city of Prague. It was his first visit in over 50 years.

Thanks to the vilém_flusser_archiv, Marcel Marburger, Silvia Wagnermaier and Nadine Minkwitz.