Into the Universe of Technical Images (Electronic Mediations)

Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communication crisis, this work by Vilém Flusser forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. First published in German in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines the history of communication technology as a process of increasing abstraction.
Flusser charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans.

• Towards a Philosophy of Photography
• Does Writing Have a Future? (Electronic Mediations Book 33)
• Gestures
• The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design
• Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• [...After the Media]: News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century (Univocal)
• The Miracle of Analogy: or The History of Photography, Part 1
• Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War
• Post-History (Univocal)
• A Geology of Media (Electronic Mediations Book 46)