Desert
The desert is a significant node in a metaphorical
network of concepts through which Vilém
Flusser contemplates the potential ramifications
of new technologies originating from the
computer. His aim is to render imaginable the
impending technological, social, and existential
consequences. He uses the metaphor of the
desert to consider not only alternative worlds
projected by the computer and the status of reality,
but also the radically different existential
conditions by which these are accompanied.
Some of the network’s other nodes are nomadism,
tent, wind, cloud, sand, dune, scattering,
gathering, and computing. It also includes the
communications revolution and the zero-dimensional,
dot-like, calculatory universe of numbers
made possible by that revolution. The dot-based
pixel worlds made up of bits which appear on
computer screens are compared by Flusser
to grains of sand that give rise to scatterings,
which can then be condensed by a process
of computational gathering. The desert wind
whirls grains of sand through the air, swarms of
zero-dimensional particles that accumulate in
heaps, ceaselessly rearranging the sand in the
wandering dunes.
Flusser also describes numbers as having emigrated from the alphanumeric code, thereby alluding to the Exodus of the Jewish people and their many years of wandering in the Sinai Desert. With the beginning of the communications revolution, we have broken free of sedentism and entered a new, second phase of nomadism, one characterized by open roaming. Those who make their homes in the desert live in a state of rootlessness (Bodenlosigkeit) – they do not live in a fixed, self-contained house with walls and a roof, but in movable tents. Solid, immobile masonry walls have given way to shifting tent walls, canvas screens that make everything seem less material. Tent walls are wind walls. Sails uttering in the breeze. The tent wall billowing in the wind collects and processes the information streaming in and transforms the tent into a nest of creativity.
Original article by Rainer Guldin in Flusseriana