La librairie des livres interdits

Marc Levy

Description

The Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil 12 METAFLUXUS focuses on the thought of Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser. Constructed based on his way of understanding and delimiting contemporary cultural territories, this publication creates an experimental space in which different lines of thought and expression cross each other to project a hypertextual and imagetic metaflux that discusses contemporary themes from a Flusserian perspective. The concept of metaflux was born in Berlin, during a period of research at the _Vilém_Flusser_Archiv, installed at the Universität der Künste (UdK). Between 2010 and 2015, as a research fellow in the archive, I coorganized a study group that I called the Flusserian Philosophical Fridays. The group met every couple of weeks to read Flusser, according to the author's intention, who wrote his texts to be read and discussed in a group during the various courses he taught throughout Brazil and Europe.

From Flusser's work, four texts have been selected that represent different moments and facets of the development of his thought; together, they make up an arc that encompasses all the main lines of his work. On Doubt (1965) is the result of the author's first phase of production and has two versions; besides the one that is part of this edition, there is another, extended one, that would only appear as a book in 1999. On Doubt is the last text of the period in which Flusser focused mainly on the philosophy of language; it represents the beginning of the development of his philosophical project. Our Images (1979) was written when he had already emigrated back to Europe and marked the beginning of his mature phase; its focus is the theory of communication. It is at this stage that the concept of technical image emerges, with which Flusser would work until the end of his life. Originally published in the book Post-History, from 1983, this is one of the first texts in which he explores the concept. Vampyroteuthian Art (1981) is one of the chapters of the book Vampyroteuthis infernalis, a parascientific treaty on a species of squid that inhabits the depths of the oceans. For Flusser, the Vampyroteuthis is an allegory of the dialectic between the dimensions of reason and emotion, a dialectic that will never reach a synthesis. Finally, in the unpublished On Typography (1989), written at the end of the author's life, Flusser points to a new direction in his thinking, which was unfortunately interrupted by his untimely death in 1991, in a car accident in Prague.

The contributors who have written texts for this edition are artists and/or researchers with whom I have had contact during the period when I was a research fellow at the Flusser Archive in Berlin. All were invited to dialogue with the texts by Flusser selected for the Caderno. The desire was to create a space for dialogue that challenged the classical form of the academic journal. Thinking from a Flusserian point of view, some of the questions that challenged us were: How to create an academic journal in a nonlinear fashion? How can we explore and discuss the concepts contained in Flusser's work in nontraditional or para-academic ways? How to work with texts and images so that each element retains its individual strength but at the same time is part of a "whole"? How to translate the concept of metaflux into a physical--and, therefore, fixed--medium?

Therefore, the Caderno Sesc_Videobrasil 12 METAFLUXUS creates a space for dialogue between texts and images that flow into clusters, amalgams, and clots, and which disintegrate, melt, and dissolve into various metafluxes of ideas and images, thus making a space-field of indefinite times and permeable layers inspired by the thought and oeuvre of Vilém Flusser.

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