bjork/Puparia inversion edit (telematic)

In 1983, the philosopher and essayist Vilém Flusser wrote a book called Towards a Philosophy of Photography. In less than a hundred pages, he sketched out a bizarre and counterintuitive definition of photography as a kind of world-spanning artificial intelligence, using human beings as tools to realize its sole directive: the production of more, and more varied, photographic images. In later works, Flusser expanded these ideas into an account of what he called “telematic society”: a new social order organized around the circulation and consumption of digital images across a global network. For him, this was a speculative vision of the near future; for us, it sounds uncannily close to the world we know today.