Chamber Music
Chamber music is Vilém Flusser’s utopian model
for dialogic, telematic communication. He sees
it as a network of interconnected people and
machines, who make up a cybernetic superbrain,
with the function of producing new information.
Flusser’s definition of catastrophes as
the creation of new information, is central: true
catastrophes are as unpreventable as they are
unpredictable, they can only arise out of “improbable
situations” (Into the Universe of Technical
Images, 2011, p. 161). Each player, akin to the
figure of homo ludens, is at once a sender and
receiver of information in the network with the
aim of synthesizing “new information” through
dialogue and “new imagination” (neue Einbildungskraft).
Its significant position as the last chapter of
Into the Universe of Technical Images* shows the
extent to which this musical metaphor plays a
crucial role in his thought. Flusser breaks with
the hitherto absence of the aural and oral in his
thoughts in Into the Universe of Technical Images,
and defines the character of technical images as
audiovisual. With reference to Renaissance and
jazz ensembles, rules are determined by consensus,
yet improvisation is demanded, in the process
of which the rules are collectively changed.
Flusser synthesizes the two positions of Arthur
Schopenhauer’s alignment of the world of will
as music, and the world of representation as images,
with his assertion that technical images
are “audiovisual images”; not simply mixed, but
elevated to a new level. In the universe of technical
images, “[c]ompose and compute are synonyms”
(ibid., p. 164). In his overarching thesis
of the step into a “zero-dimensional” world of
technical images, “pure” art is possible, “free
of any semantic dimension” (ibid.), which was
previously only realizable through music. Therein
he places his hope of a new level of consciousness,
“that makes music with visionary power”
(ibid., p. 165), with imagination (Einbildungskraft).
* The English edition, with nineteen main chapters, differs from the German edition, which has twenty chapters, and the Portuguese edition, which has sixteen chapters.
Original article by Annie Goh in Flusseriana