Müller on Flusser

Gabriella Hileman

Adalberto Müller – Vilém Flusser Response

Vilém Flusser was born in Prague, but wrote extensively in German.  Moving to São Paulo after the death of his family in WWII , he even wrote in Portuguese. Müller, originally from Brazil and ultimately studying both in Sao Paulo and Germany, felt a personal connection to Flusser’s writing , as it became quite popular in Brazil before it was well known elsewhere.

            Flusser’s writings were much overlooked until late in his life in the 1980s, and became more widely known after his death in the early 1990s. Although his media theory is considered rather prophetic by many groups today, it’s strange to note that Flusser never lived to see the development of the world wide web.  Indeed, he viewed even men as nodes in a complex web of interactions, the relationships between them far surpassing the individual components.

                       

            In Chicago’s flourishing new media and glitch communities, these writings give artists working in these areas a reference point to build a vocabulary and a dialect to describe their growing field. These texts function as a link to the past, to a time when quantization wasn’t so complex and so incredibly large and small.

Flusser’s writings are short and compact “like a microchip,” says Müller.  They are carefully written and reveal more and more with each careful reading.

The most relatable idea that I drew from the lecture is this: the digitalization of the world lies in man’s desire to control nature with numbers. Based on my interpretation of Müller’s interpretation of Flusser, the use of languages gave insurmountable power to those capable of using and understanding the codes. The scientist, engineer and programmer become a new kind of holy scribe.

Media provides a means to store and transmit information. The difference between writing and image making is that lines communicate processes; they project rather than represent. Projecting transcended representing in that it was capable of evoking entire worlds, rather than just functioning as a mirror. “

           

Photography functioned as a new means of storage and transmission. A photograph always hides a text in its program. Programs in Flusser’s words are  “the method by which things become.” In order to create work that is “real,” we must first capture the subject in the program itself. To change the program is to escape being programmed. The program isn’t just in digitization, but in all functions of society and bodies. For example, “The Natural History of the Enigma” by Eduardo Kac a petunia spliced with DNA of the artist producing bright red bloodlike veins in the flower was an interference with the code language of genetics.

The process of changing the code might involve first its fragmentation, then it’s rearrangement, but such sacrifices must be made, for those who know how to change the code are those who will not be programmed.

Sources: Flusser, Vilem Writings, Editor Andreas Ströhl, Translation Erik Eisel, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis / London,  Selections 2002