The Philosopher Who Predicted Our Post-Literate Art Moment

About this episode

The episode discusses Vilém Flusser's theories on media and consciousness in relation to contemporary art, featuring insights from Martha Schwendener's new book.

The average metropolitan person now is exposed to more media in a single day than someone a few generations ago would absorb in a lifetime. Amid the deluge of hot takes and commentary on today’s image culture, and its effects on our brains, many people have also been looking back to an older figure for guidance, one who seems to have been something of a prophet: the philosopher Vilém Flusser. Born in 1920 in Prague, Flusser lived a fascinating life, working in São Paulo, Brazil for decades, before returning to Europe, where he died in 1991. In his writings of the 1980s, Flusser created a unique body of theory about how new genres of media were giving birth to a new form of consciousness, one defined by images over the written word. Flusser thought this transformation would reshape the world, and he developed a whole vocabulary to think about it, concepts like the “technical image,” “the apparatus,” and “techno-imagination.” These have had a huge impact on media studies, and yet remain under-known. Long in the works but now just in time to serve as a guide, Martha Schwendener’s The Society of the Screen: Vilem Flusser’s Radical Prescience, is just out from MIT Press. Schwendener…

People in this episode

Guest: Martha Schwendener

Topics covered

• media culture
• philosophy
• art theory
• image consciousness
• Vilém Flusser
• Martha Schwendener

Keywords

• Vilém Flusser
• media saturation
• art criticism
• technical image
• techno-imagination
• Martha Schwendener
• Society of the Screen

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MIT Press, New York Times

Places: Prague, São Paulo

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