Notes on Adalberto Müller’s lecture on Vilém Flusser:

Notes on Adalberto Müller’s lecture on Vilém Flusser:

The main points that Adalberto Müller seems to address are that we are losing the idea of a continuous world through increasingly complex systems of technology. Müller, in his lecture, illustrates how media interferes in knowledge in the way we think and in our way of creating. Key points were:

-Thinking from the machine/media towards the human

-Process of ciphering/deciphering

-Baroque element in clearness (he did not elaborate on what "baroque" means in that case)

With regard to my own research, one of the most interesting examples Müller proposed was Eduardo Kac’s Bio-art project and the question, how can we express nature through scientific codes? As my own research is based on nature/botany and floral ornaments, I was particularly interested in Müller’s reference to “poetry of the flower”, and the “ideas and emotions that are suggested by the very existence of the flower.” He cites a poem by Pierre de Ronsard:

Les Odes: À Sa Maistresse

[…] 

Ah! See how in such short space

My sweetheart, she’s filled the place

With all the beauty’s she’s lost!

O, so unnatural Nature,

You whose ephemeral flower

Lasts only from dawn to dusk!

[…]

At the core of Kac’s project was the fusion of artist and nature ( Eduoardo and Begonia), “Edonia”, by infusing his own blood/life into the veins of the flower (with help of science) – which was not obvious by merely looking at it – for when I first saw it, it looked like any other Begonia to me. Only after one knows the context of the artwork, i.e. the infusion of Kac’s blood, I was intrigued. It brought to mind man’s interference with nature and the desire to control or take over nature , gen-manipulated foods, etc.. “The man that projects”, “Ideas and emotions that are suggested by the very existence of flower,”

While I found the overall lecture very stimulating and thought-provoking, I found many of the examples that Müller proposed not very interesting (Hockney’s polaroid works  (the “necessity of subverting technical images” did not translate for me into Hockney’s work, or Kac’s Letter being another example).  It seemed dated to me. Eduardo Kac’s Letter, “a navigational poem that presents the viewer with the image of a three-dimensional spiral jetting off the center of a two-dimensional spiral, “ seemed like another interactive version of concrete poetry – it did not make me think of program or programmed at all.

More interesting was the idea of the communication between the human and the non-human that brought to mind AI and robotics. The idea of the human robot always takes me back to Biörk’s video “ All is full of love”,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjAoBKagWQA

and the recent Japanese revelation of a human-like robot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaTfzYDZG8c

On a last note, Müller posits, “Post-historical is - Modernity that begins with Descartes- to reduce the world to numbers. Machine and man are switching position.”