Vilém Flusser

He lived for a long period in São Paulo (where he became a Brazilian citizen) and later in France, and his works are written in many different languages.

Phenomenology would play a major role in the transition to the later phase of his work, in which he turned his attention to the philosophy of communication and of artistic production.

Vilém Flusser lost all of his family in the German concentration camps: his father died in Buchenwald in 1940; his grandparents, his mother and his sister were brought to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz where they were killed.

Further short stays in various European countries followed until they moved to Robion in southern France in 1981, where they remained until Flusser's death in 1991.

To the end of his life, he was quite active writing and giving lectures around media theory and working with new topics (Philosophy of Photography, Technical Images, etc.).

Flusser's writings relate to each other, however, which means that he intensively works over certain topics and dissects them into a number of brief essays.

His writings reflect his wandering life: although the majority of his work was written in German and Portuguese, he also wrote in English and French, with scarce translation to other languages.

Writing about photography in the 1970s and 80s, in the face of the early worldwide impact of computer technologies, Flusser argued that the photograph was the first in a number of technical image forms to have fundamentally changed the way in which the world is seen.

[5] For example, he contrasted them to paintings which he described as images that can be sensibly 'decoded', because the viewer is able to interpret what he or she sees as more or less direct signs of what the painter intended.

The photographer moves within specific categories of space and time regarding the scene: proximity and distance, bird- and worm's-eye views, frontal- and side-views, short or long exposures, etc.

Flusser developed a lexicon of terms that have proven influential and that continue to be useful for thinking about contemporary photography, digital imaging technologies and their online uses.

These include: the 'apparatus' (a tool that changes the meaning of the world in contrast to what he calls mechanical tools that work to change the world itself); the 'functionary' (the photographer or operator of the camera who is bound by the rules it sets); the 'programme' (a 'system in which chance becomes necessity' and a game 'in which every virtuality, even the least probable, will be realized of necessity if the game is played for a sufficiently long time');[7] the 'technical image' (the first example of which is the photograph, with its particular kind of significant surface that looks like a traditional image but harbours encoded and obscure concepts that cannot be 'immediately' deciphered[8]).

Communication, which are the gaps between different positions, is part of a cultural phenomenon relying on unconsciously learnt patterns at home.

The developing polemic dialog distinguishes between the "ugly stranger" who can unveil the truth (Aletheia) and the "beautiful native" who fears the otherness as it threatens their habit.

Flusser refers in this regard to Hegel's dialectic analysis between home and the unusual or generally speaking of consciousness.