ties of communication, and especially of artificially
created worlds.
Flusser was born in 1920 in Prague into a Ger-
man Jewish family. He began studying philosophy
at Charles University in Prague in 1939 but fled
Nazi occupation to England in 1939. He continued
on to Brazil in 1941. There, Flusser enrolled at the
University of Sao Paolo. He managed an electro-
nic transformer factory while establishing himself
as a philosopher. In 1963, he was appointed a
Professor of the philosophy of communication at
the University of Sao Paolo. In 1976, he settled in
France and taught in Aix-en-Provence and Arles,
while giving lectures and serving as a visiting pro-
fessor at various European and American univer-
sities. He died in 1991 in a car crash near the
Czech-German border after delivering his first
public lecture in Prague.
Flusser tried to conceptualize the semiotic, com-
municational, and aesthetic implications of the
photographic medium by focusing on its technical
specificity. Nevertheless, a photograph is not for
him ‘‘a message without a code,’’ as Roland Barthes
put it, nor a transparent image of an objective rea-
lity. Rather, it is defined as a way of transcoding,
that is, re-writing, the scientific formulas which
made possible technological progress and, there-
fore, photography itself.
According to Flusser, the transition from the
prehistorical to the historical period was parallel
to the substitution of magical thinking, dominated
by images, by rational or linear thinking. Flusser
believed that in the late twentieth century humans
entered a transitional period between historical and
post-historical thinking. Linear thinking—based on
writing and essential to history—is about to be put
aside by a new form of thinking that is much more
complex: thinking which is multi-dimensional and
visual, based on algorithms, and inspired by system
and chaos theory.
In that sense, traditional images are pre-historical
and technological images post-historical; the former
signify visual phenomena, the latter the scientific
concepts which made them possible. Photography,
by transforming linear equations to images, re-
injects magical thinking into modern societies, intro-
ducing the postmodern era. Flusser’s questioning of
contemporary culture joins in that point the neces-
sity, expressed by Walter Benjamin, of a dialectical
form capable of linking together the modernist ratio-
nalization of the culture and the simultaneous revival
of magical or mythical models of behavior.
Flusser was intensely interested in the potential
of virtual reality to enable human beings to create
and manipulate their environments. In the cultural
logic of post-modern societies, the technological
potential available to humans brings about a rup-
ture with the humanist traditions of the past and
the forms of subjectivity associated with them. The
autonomous subject has been decentred and trans-
formed into a product of his own creation, a fairly
consistent theme in postmodern thinking.
Flusser postulated that the invention of photogra-
phy was the starting point of a technological and
cultural process in which the mechanical structures
introduced by industrial revolution give place to
cybernetic ones, based on algorithms. In this context,
the increasing dominance of electronic means of
communication is the most distinctive feature of
post-industrial societies. Photography is thus regar-
ded as the last step before the complete demateriali-
zation of the image and its transformation to pure
information. What is important in a photograph is
not the object itself but the information of which it is
the vehicle. In Flusser’s perspective, there could be
no such a thing as an ‘‘original photography.’’
The extreme mobility and general equivalence of
information make photographic images volatile,
nomadic, and uncertain, easy to manipulate: their
final meaning depends much more on their context
than on the images themselves. For Flusser, visual
images, unlike verbal information, are multidimen-
sional symbolic structures open to interpretation.
Through a feed-back effect, photographic repro-
ductions of reality influence and transform reality
itself, attempting to conform it to pre-programmed
and standardized stereotypes. In that way, photo-
graphy tends to generalize its own range of techni-
cal possibilities to the large scale of social exchange.
As Flusser observes, the operating model of photo-
graphic vision is not one of causal but of functional
thinking. The difference is that in the latter, the
result is programmed in advance and not analyti-
cally deduced. In that way, Flusser considers the
social implications of photography as an integral
part of its meaning.
Electronic media of communication and their
imagery absorb and recycle their objects, dissolving
the historical dimension of reality in a series of
redundant reproductions. As artist Alfredo Jaar
puts it: ‘‘Images have an advanced religion. They
bury history.’’ For Flusser, no meaningful distinc-
tion can be drawn between reality and representa-
tion, for they differ only in degree of probability,
not in essence.
Like the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard,
Flusser addressed media images as representations
of a radically new kind, calling not for the tradi-
tional aesthetics of production but for a historically
relevant aesthetics of reception. Such aestheticsFLUSSER, VILE ́M