Projective Imagination: Vilém Flusser’s Concept of the Technical Image

A Term and Its Complexities

Flusser’s concept of the technical image must be understood as a dynamic one, a concept that he refined continuously and that is closely correlated with his biography. It emerges explicitly by 1977, ² though there are identifiable traces of it dating further back, to around the time that information aesthetics and later video art began to play a role in Flusser’s life and work. It is certainly difficult – even in the later years, as Flusser’s interest in the synthetic, computer-generated image increased – to speak of a coherent theoretical construct when it comes to the technical image, not only because of the dynamic character of Flusser’s concept formation. Generally speaking, an analytical uncertainty is legible in many of the discourses that endeavoured in the late 1980s and early 1990s to formulate theories of the new computer-generated images of cyberspace and virtual reality. According to the program leaflet of a widely received symposium on virtual aesthetics at Städelschule (Frankfurt/M., Germany) in 1991, where Flusser was a speaker, one had to provisionally locate the undertaking ‘within a labyrinth of concepts’ that, ‘like simulation, imitation, fiction, design, virtuality, appearance, hyperreality, etc., take the “agony of the real” as their starting point’. ³

Not even the definition of the techno-image that Flusser gave in IUTI, at a point where his concept of the technical image was far developed, should be taken as static, as he developed it even further in his late work on existential philosophy (Flusser, 1998). Here, however, I will take it as a point of entry. In IUTI, Flusser designates the technical image as generated by means of a technical apparatus, which in turn is based on scientific texts (in other words, scientific findings and technological developments). These images do not represent phenomena in the world – i.e. they are not signs representing a given object. Rather, they enable the projection of entirely new models and concepts into the world. They are expressions of a new imagination ⁴ which works through the calculation of an apparatus. Both domains – the new imagination and the apparatus – assume an interdependent relationship: The earliest generator of Flusserian technical images, the photo camera, as well as the most advanced, the computer, enable the models imagined to be concretized or manifested. This concretization ensues in the present in the form of images, but in the future it will ensue in the form of synthetic, three-dimensional objects that, from an ontological perspective, shall be no less real than things we originally encounter in the world. ‘That is my argument against Baudrillard’, Flusser explained in a seminar at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany) in 1991, where he taught as a guest professor invited by Friedrich Kittler: ‘If I define a hologram as well as my nervous system defines this table, then there is no technical reason to say that this table is the original and the hologram is a simulation, or vice versa. This would be metaphysics’ (Flusser, 2008: 78; cf. Baudrillard, 1981). Let us unpack the dimensions of the technical image concept touched on in this paragraph:

Flusser and the Swiss cultural theorist Felix Philipp Ingold enjoyed a productive intellectual friendship (cf. Irrgang, 2015). Their extensive correspondence between 1981 and 1990, in which both shared their working manuscripts with one another, documents the phase in which Flusser developed his explicit concept of the technical image. Ingold described this development as a ‘turn away from writing, toward the image’ (Ingold, 1988), a shift which is characterized by the subsequent publication of Flusser’s On Writing and IUTI. In a process of friendly critique, however, Ingold repeatedly questioned the consistency of the Flusserian technical image. After Flusser had sent him a first draft of IUTI, Ingold (1983) expressed scepticism of the exclusive concern of the analysis with ‘the problem of the surface’, that is, the surface thought enabled by technical images. According to Ingold, who here referred to Marshall McLuhan and the German writer and activist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, this problem had been ‘common knowledge’ since the 1960s. Flusser also sent Ingold his manuscript of Angenommen [Suppose That], where he formulates a series of ‘scenarios’ as an ‘experiment to write a text that is a pretext for synthetic computer clips’ (Flusser, 1989a: 4). Ingold criticized the manuscript as ‘conceived more rhetorically than pictorially’ as he could ‘not at the moment see how these strictly authorial texts should be transposed into images’ (Ingold, 1981). Flusser replied, rather unsatisfactorily with regards to clarifying his concept: ‘What I have in mind are precisely not traditional images (those that depict or represent what is perceived), but images that attempt to depict and represent concepts. I myself am fully incapable of imagining such a thing [. . .]’ (Flusser, 1981). Flusser’s inability to imagine technical images himself was the inspiration for Angenommen in the first place, as the book addresses video and computer artists.

I generally agree with Ingold that Flusser’s complex notion of the technical image appears odd at times (for a terminological critique see also Guldin, 2009). In fact, the concept creates paradoxes which are, in part, related to what one could call its apparatus condition: if technical images need to be processed by a black box, as Flusser stated, in cybernetic terminology, to apparatuses such as the camera or the computer, it follows that (1) images not created by an apparatus are traditional images and (2) that in order to really play against the program of the apparatus, the black box would need to be opened – in other words, its operating principles would need to be laid bare to be understood and manipulated.

The problem with the apparatus condition (1) is that images that are not processed by an apparatus do not necessarily need to be Flusserian traditional images, as in images that depict or represent what is perceived. At least since the first avant-gardes at the beginning of the 20th century who experimented with the boundaries of depiction, there exists a long tradition of artistic practices proving time and again that images are precisely not limited to representation. Even in the domain of scientific imagery depictions do not simply represent but also constitute knowledge, as particularly scholars in science studies have emphasized (e.g. Ihde, 1998; Latour, 1990). Already Charles S. Peirce had emphasized the value of diagrams as signs to construct and make graspable the structure of its objects, ⁸ a structure that in many cases is not visible to the naked eye. ‘Consequently, Diagrams are restricted to the representation of a certain class of relations; namely those that are intelligible’ (Peirce, 1976 [1906]: 316). There are certain parallels between the epistemic construction of images in science studies (particularly science and technology studies [STS]), Peircean diagrammatics and the Flusserian technical image (cf. Irrgang, 2022). In any case, Flusser himself, in a 1977 version of his technical image concept, ⁹ did not include the apparatus as a mandatory condition of technical images but explicitly allowed exceptions for ‘more or less traditionally produced images, provided they mean concepts (such as blueprints, designs, curves in statistics, or the drawings contained in the present text)’ (Flusser, 1996: 140). With the publication of IUTI and the introduction of the apparatus condition as material dimension, the concept of the technical image seemed to have in fact lost some of its conceptional flexibility.

With regard to the opening of the black box (2) there is a strange tension between Flusser’s plea to give in to the new possibilities of apparatuses such as computers and at the same time to introduce human resistance into this process. In order to play against the apparatus, one would in fact need to go beyond the practice of image making and essentially understand the functional principles of the given black box. With this, however, the black box would be ‘opened’ and lose its opacity – in other words, the apparatus would cease to be a black box. I have discussed this paradox elsewhere (Irrgang, 2020). Here I only want to point out that the black box paradigm in Flusser’s concept of the technical image seems to be inherited from his engagement with cybernetics in his earlier work (e.g. Ashby, 1956), which created a context for his interest in information theory and particularly information aesthetics (both fields are related and yet differ in their assumptions; I will return to this in the second part of the article). Certain key premises of the Flusserian technical image are comprehensible only in this context.

But before getting into information aesthetics, I would like to highlight a second influence on Flusser’s thinking, which seems to have been the cause of some confusion in the reception of the Flusserian technical image. The concept is often discussed as having derived from Flusser’s interest in the photographic image and the photo camera as apparatus (e.g. Meyer, 2015). There are probably two reasons for this confusion: (1) Flusser considered photography as the historically first domain of technical images, followed later by more advanced image processing apparatuses such as the computer. (2) Two years before IUTI, Flusser published Towards a Philosophy of Photography (German version: Flusser, 1983a; English. version: Flusser, 1984), which was widely recognized and has since been translated into 25 languages (European Photography, 2018). Even among Flusser biographers, this considerably shorter book is considered a nucleus which, with the publication of IUTI, was eventually ‘expanded towards the entire field of technical images’ (Sander, 2002: 26). But although artistic experiments in photography, which Flusser perceived through artists such as Andreas Müller-Pohle, whom he had first met in 1981 and who would become his first German publisher, were important for Flusser’s thinking, I argue that Flusser’s interest in the potential of technical images was sparked by his engagement with video art during the 1970s. In fact, Flusser himself, looking back on the genesis of IUTI, clarified this for Ingold:

What I was doing in the photography essay was essentially coming to grips with the apparatus and the program. Photography served only as a pretense, although I tried to remain true to the phenomenon of the photo. Actually, the essay came about at the behest of European Photography; otherwise I would rather have taken the video image, with its dialogic virtualities, as a model of a feature of the apparatus. (Flusser, 1983c)

In the following two sections ¹⁰ I want to show that Flusser’s interest in the technical image was sparked by experiments of the then young video art scene, mainly in France and the USA, while the theoretical framework of the concept builds on, among other fields, Flusser’s reception and adaption of information aesthetics.

Information and Abstraction

Flusser’s interest in information aesthetics was most likely inspired by the work of the German philosopher and semiotician Max Bense. In the early 1960s, Flusser’s friend Milton Vargas, a professor in the Polytechnical School at the University of São Paulo and well connected in the city’s intellectual circles, introduced him to Bense’s writing. Vargas (1992: 284) later described Flusser’s ‘studies in cybernetics and mathematical information theory’ as a profitable search for ‘evidence of his long-cherished hopes for new realities’. Already before Flusser’s first considerations of the technical image, the Stuttgart School, which formed around Bense, had begun their research into mathematical formalizations of images and text that was put into practice, for example, with the early computer artworks of Frieder Nake. Bense maintained relationships with Brazilian intellectuals and artists, many of whom moved in the same circles as Flusser (Claus, 2015). It is an open question, however, as to whether or not the two ever actually met. In 1966, when Flusser visited Europe as a delegate from the Department of Cultural Collaboration in Brazil’s Foreign Office, he tried several times to contact Bense in Stuttgart. And though he wrote in his report to the Foreign Office that they did indeed meet (Flusser, 1966), there is no related correspondence with Bense documented in the Vilém Flusser Archive. This is odd, as Flusser wrote letters to everyone with whom he could feasibly meet during his travels in Europe. In any event, a frustrated comment in Flusser’s 1973 autobiography indicates the opposite of an intensive exchange: ‘Bense’s reticence is worth mentioning since, in my opinion, it’s a symptom of the crisis in aesthetics’ (Flusser, 1992: 203).

Information aesthetics attempts to define and identify aesthetic information within a framework based on semiotics, system and signal theory, information theory and mathematics. The mathematician George D. Birkhoff (1933) laid the theoretical foundations for this in his work Aesthetic Measure, an approach towards a mathematical formulation of aesthetics (for the relevance of this work in relation to general information theory see Douchová, 2015). The analysis is performed in quantitative parameters in relation to the ‘repertoire’ of the elements used; the repertoire designating the totality of all possible elements, such as image or text repertoires (Bense, 1969: 7–9; Franke, 1974: 8–9). Given this disciplinary position, information aesthetics has been clearly under the influence of cybernetics, the meta-discourse of the 1950s and 1960s which strongly impacted Flusser and many other thinkers engaged with technology.

In parallel with, and initially independent of the Stuttgart School, the information science scholar Abraham A. Moles (1958) in Strasbourg likewise developed a Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique. Both Bense and Moles would later teach at the Ulm School of Design, which is considered the German post-war Bauhaus successor. In contrast with his failed efforts to establish contact with Bense, Flusser was able to form a working relationship with Moles. It began in 1972 and evolved into an intellectual friendship that lasted, albeit not free of conflict, until the end of Flusser’s life. ‘It is a pleasure to disagree with you’, he wrote to Moles in 1980, ‘especially if it is a profound disagreement: the whole of science, politics and the arts is involved here’ (Flusser, 1980). The impact the French cybernetics pioneer made on Flusser can be seen, for instance, by comparing Flusser’s historiographical meta-model with Moles’s remarks on the dimensionality of messages:

Messages themselves can be of a spatial or of a temporal nature and their dimensions can be categorized accordingly. Thus, a printed line delivers to our senses on its first approach a message of a spatial dimension: a sequence of linearly arranged signs. [. . .] Messages that deliver us an image, a drawing or a photo, are structured in two spatial dimensions (L2). Messages of the plastic arts, of architecture [. . .] are on the first approach aesthetic or purposive messages with three dimensions (L3). Messages like animated film or film in general have two spatial and one temporal dimension [. . .]. (Moles, 1971: 20)

The components of the model are not identical with Flusser’s historical stages (see dimension [iv] above), but parallels cannot be denied. Thus, when it comes to Flusser’s historical model, the writings of Moles – rather than McLuhan’s rise and fall of the Gutenberg Galaxy – seemed to be the main inspiration.

The meaning of images, in the sense of semantics, is barely of interest in the context of information aesthetics. Rather, given its quantitative a priori, it seeks to determine the complexity of messages by way of the level of new information they contain. In its not-unproblematic coupling of quantity with quality, information aesthetics makes the ‘value of a message for the receiver [. . .] dependent upon the relation of the quantity of the new that the message contains, and that the receiver is capable of absorbing’ (Moles, 1968: 23). In the 1980s, as the personal computer began affecting ever more private lives, Flusser would again return to information aesthetics for his concept of the technical or synthetic image. In IUTI he defines the value of a technical image by way of its content of new information. However, Flusser’s maxim – ‘the more improbable, the more informative’ (Flusser, 2011a: 17) – is in fact an oversimplification of the most important operator in information aesthetics, that of the Birkhoff quotient. In accordance with Birkhoff, Moles explains, in the passage cited above, the complexity of a message is determined by the quantity of new information; however, his subsequent specification – ‘how much of it the receiver is able to absorb’ – is equally important. For the Birkhoff quotient stipulates that every message must contain information and redundancy, the long-known and the new, in order to be absorbed and understood. ¹¹ A message containing exclusively known information is redundant, while one made up predominantly of new information cannot be allocated by the information-processing entity and is therefore lost in noise. Moles (1968: 23) even concludes from this that redundancy is ‘a more important variable within human communication than is the information itself [. . .]. Redundancy is the possibility of grasping forms, and that is what we are after.’

And yet, Flusser’s emphasis on the necessity to produce new information that makes possible a ‘changing of the world’ (Flusser, 1996: 136) should not be dismissed as simply an inaccurate conclusion. Rather, his plea was existentially motivated and tied to existential ruptures in his biography. For Flusser, who was born into a vibrant Jewish intellectual life in Prague and who lost nearly his entire family through the murderous occupation by Nazi Germany, the creation of new worlds that would be no mere variations of the same could provide a way to avoid repeating the mistakes of history – a history which in the 20th century had culminated in the catastrophes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Thus, what is at stake existentially is the ongoing realization of new potentialities for a new kind of human being: ‘We feel ourselves aware for the first time that we are not subjects – subordinated, subjected – but that we are projects, that we are projecting all this. We feel somehow that only now does the human condition begin, only now are we free’ (Flusser, 2008: 226). It is in the practices of ‘those who experiment in the new media’ (Flusser, 1974a: 9) that Flusser saw the emergence of the new human as project.

Video Experiments

It is not exactly clear when Flusser’s interest in video art began to take shape. But it is documented that in August 1972 he first established contact with the video and performance artist Fred Forest. At this time, Flusser was a member of the organizing team for the 12th Biennial de São Paulo and travelled to Europe before eventually settling in France, leaving Brazil behind where his forced migration had led him 33 years earlier. At the same time he also established contact with artists such as Louis Bec, Gérald Minkoff, Alexandre Bonnier and Wen-Ying Tsai. But it was his work with Forest, a member of the group ‘Art Sociologique’ (along with Hervé Fischer and Jean-Paul Thenot) that explored the communal or dialogical potential of video that would significantly impact Flusser’s interest in such artistic practices. The friendship between the thinker and the practitioner of the video image would result in collaborations such as ‘Video Troisième Age’ (1973), a participatory installation in a retirement home in Southern France. By means of self-produced videos, the residents could begin a video-based dialogue with one another. Forest (1977) described this work, which was exhibited at ‘documenta 6’, as social sculpture (Beuys) and as ‘stimuler l’émergence et l’expression de l’imaginaire collectif’, addressing a dialogical imagination with which Flusser (1996 [1977]) was engaged as well.

Such impressions of video as experimental image-manipulation and dialogical-imaginative practice inspired Flusser’s essay ‘Line and Surface’, which appeared in 1973 in the US journal Main Currents in Modern Thought. In this essay, the fundamental elements of Flusser’s communication and media theory are already present: the non-trivial relation between media technologies, communication practices and culture; the basic features of his historical model; the tension between writing (conceptual thinking) and image (imaginative thinking). What distinguishes ‘Line and Surface’ is its analysis of the cognitive processes occurring in the perception of writing in comparison with the perception of images. Flusser arrives at conclusions that resonate with more recent positions in cognitive science (cf. Cheng et al., 2001):

The difference seems to be that in reading lines we follow a structure imposed upon us, whereas in reading pictures we move rather freely within a structure that has been proposed by us. [. . .] In fact, this double method – synthesis followed by analysis (a process that may be repeated several times in the course of a single reading) – is what characterizes the reading of pictures. (Flusser, 1973: 101)

At this point, those new images are not yet explicitly called technical images, though Flusser already distinguishes them from traditional images. It was not in photography that Flusser identified a radical break between the traditional and the technical image; rather, he located this break in the coincidence of linear-sequential and imaginative thinking in the moving image – film, television, video and even ‘videoscopes and multimedia shows’ (Flusser, 1973: 102). The new technologies that enabled the manipulation of the image and its temporality, demonstrated, for example, in closed-circuit installations, Flusser described as the first indication of an overcoming of perception of film and television that was still predominantly linear and derived from writing culture. According to his assumption of a non-trivial relation between media use and perception, new technologies of the moving image should permit, on the one hand, a synthesis of linear, processual text-thinking with synchronic, imaginative image-thinking and, on the other, the manipulation of its temporality – ‘“surface thought” is absorbing “linear thought,” or is at least beginning to learn how to do so’ (Flusser, 1973: 102). In my opinion, Flusser’s inclusion of the temporality of video images bears a richer epistemic potential compared to his later, more known work on the (static) photographic image: Complex phenomena, ideas, or circumstances can be described or presented more easily – in terms of the variety of tools given to design and communicate a certain message or impression – when represented as moving or time-based images. They can also be perceived more ‘effectively’ in terms of the cognitive effort needed to make sense of the impression or to understand the message (cf. Sheets-Johnstone, 2010). Especially artistic positions have extensively explored experimental time-based image strategies, reaching from video essays to immersive Virtual Reality environments. ¹² In fact, by the end of his life, Flusser, in his endeavour to provide clearer examples for technical images, returned to the moving image with the above-mentioned book, Angenommen (Flusser, 1989a).

In ‘Line and Surface’, Flusser’s concept of a new imagination is not yet established. But its basic features are already there, when he describes the synthesis of ‘imaginal thought’ and ‘conceptual thought’ as a radically new form of thinking that joins the analytical precision of writing with the imaginative capacity of the image: ‘So far, concepts have been thinkable only in terms of other concepts, by reflection. Reflective thought was the meta-thought of conceptual thinking, and was itself conceptual. Now, imaginal thought can begin thinking about concepts in the form of surface models’ (Flusser, 1973: 104). In other words, the detour through the abstraction of writing’s linear code becomes unnecessary; one can instead reflect with (moving) images over images or models. This is not yet a genuinely projective capacity like the one Flusser later ascribed to the new imagination. Still, in this he saw a possibility for opposing the increasing technological abstraction of a post-industrial world, a way ‘to open up fields for a new type of thinking, with its own logic and its own kind of codified symbols’ (Flusser, 1973: 105).

The importance of ‘Line and Surface’ for Flusser’s work can hardly be overestimated; we also find it expressed biographically. The essay inspired not only Patrick Milburn, associate editor of the journal Main Currents in Modern Thought, who thereafter facilitated the publication of Flusser’s work in the United States, which Flusser had desired for a long time, but it also excited the readers of the journal. ¹³ Among them were Fred Barzyk, Douglas Davis, Gerald O’Grady and Willard Van Dyke, who responded to the essay by inviting Flusser to their conference ‘Open Circuits – The Future of Television’: ‘We are acquainted with your essay on linear surface and surface thinking in Main Currents in Modern Thought and admire its direction. We are hoping that you will enlarge upon some of these ideas with regard to the video medium’ (Barzyk et al., 1973). Barzyk, Davis, Van Dkye and O’Grady, from the now legendary Center for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo, organized the conference in collaboration with the group Electronic Arts Intermix. It took place from 23–25 January 1974, at MoMA in New York City. The conference, which was accompanied by an exhibition and resulted in a publication with MIT Press (Davis and Simmons, 1977), wanted to initiate a broad debate about the future of television and the implications of the new artistic video practices (Electronic Arts Intermix, n.d.). Participants in the conference, to name just a few, included Hollis Frampton, Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow, Harald Szeemann, René Berger and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

In the manuscript of Flusser’s lecture for ‘Open Circuits’ we find similar notions of the new images he would later call technical images. And interestingly, with respect to the television apparatus, Flusser (1974b: 1) declared: ‘The box is, to speak with Moles, a structurally complex but functionally simple system.’ Here he not only anticipated his later much-cited model of the black box as paradigmatic of the opacity of technical apparatuses; he also revealed that an assertion often ascribed to him – concerning a dialectic between the apparatus’s structural complexity and functional simplicity (see e.g. Flusser, 1983c: 96) – is in fact attributable to Abraham A. Moles, who had described it in his main work on information aesthetics (Moles, 1971: 52; cf. Irrgang, 2020).

Flusser’s experiences in New York had a strong influence on his relationship with video technology and its artistic applications. In addition to the conference, he also visited O’Grady’s Center for Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, where stellar pioneering work was being done in the field of media studies and practice (Vasulka and Weibel, 2008). Profoundly impressed by his experience, on his return to Europe Flusser (1974c) wrote to O’Grady: ‘I do not think I ever learned so much in such a short time. And let me tell you again how impressed I was by the pioneer [sic] work you are doing. [. . .] I am fascinated by your work and should like to contribute some of my own ideas.’ As far as I know, further collaborations with O’Grady did not take place. But even in 1991, during his seminar in Bochum, Flusser would still reflect on his experiences in New York, emphasizing the potential of video as generator of entirely novel images – quite the opposite of his hope in the potential of photography at that time, as ‘photography is likely nearing its end. [. . .] But possibilities are contained in video that the people do not even suspect’ (Flusser, 2008: 187).

Conclusion

Like many theories that try to grasp the cultural effects of new media technologies in terms of radical changes, Flusser also fell into the trap of assuming that the new cultural techniques enabled by these technologies would completely replace their predecessors. With the broad availability of information and communications technology (ICT) on consumer markets worldwide, the relevance of what Flusser would call synthetic images certainly increased. However, the significance of writing as cultural technique certainly did not decline but is rather accelerated by ICT, particularly with user-generated content, and constantly growing numbers in global literacy (UNICEF, 2019). Then again, Flusser’s rather binary juxtaposition of writing and technical image – taken as a theoretical abstraction – has its advantages. It ultimately allowed him to conceive technical images beyond trivial notions of representation as concretizations derived by a new – or projective – imagination. Such a perspective has come to play an important role in science studies to ‘interpret technologies, the instrumentarium, as perception-mediating and perception-transforming devices’ (Ihde, 1998: 185). When discussing this instrumentarium, Flusser’s repeated plea to resist its programming can be read as a political or activist dimension of his work, a dimension which is today similarly embraced by certain fields of STS (e.g. Haraway, 2016) or by technology-based artistic practices that critically intervene into power relations inherent in ICT infrastructures in order to unveil ‘how our increasingly engineered environment engineers us’ (Oliver et al., 2016: 201). Combining his image heuristics stemming from information aesthetics with his experiences of critical technology-based artistic practices enabled Flusser to discuss the potential value of the novel imaginary worlds for societies increasingly governed by ICT, while acknowledging the effects those technologies have on our way of thinking and living together. In a time where machine learning algorithms seemingly shift the power relations between the apparatus and its users in favour of the black box, shielding (automated) decision making from critical intervention while maintaining and reinforcing the all too human weight of inequality through biases inherent in their training datasets (O’Neil, 2016; Harvey and LaPlace, 2021), Flusser’s critical but yet optimistic attitude towards a technologically conditioned human condition remains highly relevant.