Table of Contents

An Introduction to Vilém Flusser’s Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future?
Mark Poster
Into the Universe of Technical Images
Warning
To Abstract
To Depict
To Make Concrete
To Touch
To Envision
To Signify
To Interact
To Scatter
To Instruct
To Discuss
To Play
To Create
To Prepare
To Decide
To Govern
To Shrink
To Suffer
To Celebrate
Chamber Music
Summary
Translator’s Afterword and Acknowledgments
Nancy Roth
Translator’s Notes
Index

About the Author

Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) was born in Prague; emigrated to Brazil, where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper colum; and later moved to France. Among his many books that have been translated into English are The Shape of Things, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, The Freedom of the Migrant, and Writings (Minnesota, 2004). Nancy Ann Roth is an arts writer and critic based in the United Kingdom. Mark Poster is professor of history at University of California, Irvine.

Reviews

"Vilém Flusser’s flashes of brilliant insight, his intuitions about the psychology of gadgets and convergences, his deeply well-read and philosophically grounded investigations of wide-ranging consequences of a new literacy, are widely admired and deserve an Anglophone audience. Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future? are of the first rank in the canon of new media studies and digital culture." —Peter Krapp, author of Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory

"Perhaps a turn to Flusser will change the disregard for media that so characterizes the cultural theory of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. For Flusser, however flamboyant and polemical his writing at times is, thought deeply about the emergence of electronic media and its implications for not only Western but truly global culture." —Mark Poster, from the Introduction