Vilém Flusser develops his concept of creativity in a paradoxical exaggeration. On the one hand, all we can do is manipulate information that has already been acquired or is already available. In the strict sense, this is not creativity at all, much less strong authorship. On the other hand, the explosion of information in the computer age has forced an “explosion of creativity” (Kommunikologie weiter denken, 2009, p. 28; translated from the German) because ever-new aspects of evaluating and recombining, reading and rereading information need to be established. It is clear that creativity does not have any sectorial privilege. Above all, it does not occur in art – neither predominantly nor exclusively. Creativity is thus no longer a wondrous resource or proof of the brilliant self-assertion of the artist-subject, but instead promotes the self-perception of an expansive process, open in all directions, of the ubiquitous dialogues between people, things, apparatuses, data, objects, situations and issues, propositions and projections. An unfailingly superior poetic virtualization of the real is the reply to the putative utopian realization of the virtual. The age of creativity is distinguished by the fact that invariably a polylogue of interpretations, projections, processes, and experiments arises, time and again, and forces the virtual to be given priority over the real in a truly ontological way.

Original article by Hans Ulrich Reck in Flusseriana