Books by Vilem Flusser

First English translation of 20th century German philosopher Vilm Flusser's 1994 book, Von der Freiheit des Migranten

"Science is interesting precisely because it relates to me. It is a human function just as much as breathing is: it is an existential interest. And an entirely objective science would be uninteresting, inhuman. The search for scientific objectivity is revealing itself in its continual advancement not as a search for "purity", but as pernicious madness. The present essay demands that we give up the ideal of objectivity in favour of other intersubjective scientific methods." ---- "De te fabula narratur". Thus starts this paranaturalist treatise by Vilém Flusser. Author of the seminal Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1984) and "Ins Universum der Technischen Bilder" (1985), Flusser introduces us here to an infernal creature from the oceanic abysses, our long lost relative, who slowly emerges, not from the oceans, but from our own depths to gaze spitefully into our eyes and reflect back at us our own existence. ---- Originally published only in German in 1987, this version has been edited and translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, Ph.D. candidate at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski, from the original, unpublished and extended Brazilian-Portuguese version of the manuscript recently found at the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Universität der Kunst, Berlin. This edition is also accompanied by a selection of previously unpublished excerpts from Flusser's correspondence with Milton Vargas and Dora Ferreira da Silva, with whom he discussed the development of the present text.

In Language and Reality, originally published in S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil, in 1964, Vil\u00e9m Flusser continues his philosophical and theoretical exploration into language. He begins to postulate that language is not simply a map of the world but also the driving force for projecting worlds and enters then into a feedback with what is projected.Flusser\u2019s thesis leads him to claim, in a seemingly missed encounter of a dialogue with Wittgenstein, that language is not limited to its ontological and epistemological aspects but rather is at the service of its aesthetic. Traversing a diverse area of research and ruminations on cybernetics to poetry, music, the visual arts, religion, and mysticism, Language and Reality can be viewed as a vital transitional work in Flusser\u2019s emerging thought that will eventually lead to his works in the 1970s and 1980s concerning what we would later consider media theory, design, and digital culture.

Is there any room left for freedom in a programmed world? This is theessential question Vilem Flusser asks in Post-History. This first Englishtranslation of Post-History brings to an Anglophone readership Flusser'sfirst critique of apparatus as the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological model of present times.

An examination of the promise and peril of digital communication technologies.

Shows how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

Presents an array of essays on design by the seminal media critic and philosopher Vilem Flusser. This title includes essays on such ordinary 'things' as wheels, carpets, pots, umbrellas and tents, Flusser emphasizes the interrelationships between art and science, theology and technology, and archaeology and architecture.