Anne-Laure Oberson

The fundamental purpose of this essay is to infect others with the feeling of adventure.¹
Vilém Flusser

I have always had a particular relation to images and apparatuses. Don’t we all. Some of us are more curious, less obedient, more or less willing to look under, aside, astray, prone to follow suit or not. It took me years to rediscover early oblique behaviors now that I have acquired the terminology to name them. I have always been fascinated by images and curiously disobedient of apparatuses. At around eight years old, I could not wait to capture semblances of the world around me, so I built a paper mockup of the camera (a Kodak instamatic for 110mm film) that I was not yet allowed to use as a child. It had a small paper sleeve stuck at the back in which I could store tiny hand drawn “captured” images. Once I got to use the real camera, it wasn’t long before I dismantled it, along with bits and pieces, watching other apparatuses crumble around me: marriage, religion, security. Decades later, equipped with philosophically inquisitive tools, I can relate my desire to understand the world of the image to these early forays.

Looking closely at what is seemingly irrelevant but has complex structures and living patterns is a metaphorical way to illustrate the importance of the marginal, the unobserved, yet the exemplary. Lichens and saxifrages are very meaningful in this way. “In nature, there are tiny plants […] whose particularity is to be born and develop in the cracks of stones and by their imperceptible insistence to impose on the most compact and resistant materials the fracturing order of their presence… they are called saxifrages.”²


Fig. 1 & 2: Author’s own photographs of lichens and saxifrages found in Robion, May 2023.

Lichens have the particularities of being neither one nor another but a mutualistic relation of two or three different organisms – an alga and a fungus and/or a yeast – that forms a composite living metabolism whose complexities surpass its modest abode. During the Flusser Summer School in the open-air theater of Robion, our daily proximity and shared attentiveness as well as the stimulating prompts given by our mentors allowed us to evolve, at times, just as a composite organism would, especially when we subjected ourselves to games and creative processes. I like to think that we formed an heterogenous thinking body that was more than its parts, a sort of multiple organic intelligence that would rearrange itself to form imaginations. I illustrated some of these arrangements because they complement and provide an interesting framework to my inquiries.

Fig.3: Possible trajectories (and my own position*) between practice and theory, art, politic and technic during Ulrich Richtermeyer’s lecture “Playing against the apparatus?” and collective games, Flusser School, Robion, May 8, 2023.
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Fig. 4: The “Lexicon of Basic Concepts” provided during the school’s first session was mapped according to scales ranging from probable to improbable and subject to project, as well as in regards to the term apparatus, set by default in the centre. The initial hand-drawn sketch served as the basis for my project asking the participants to position these terms, and any others of their liking, on coloured post-its on the ground of the amphitheatre. I have then redrawn this map on the collective board for further interactions, possible modifications, additions, etc.

The question of the image, beyond its typical denotative shiny surface, is always more critical and complex because it too belongs both to the infinitely intimate and the universal. On one end, there is the personal question of the primary image on which the entire edifice of a person is built, as all the other successive images respond and partake: an invisible, unique yet composite, image at the basis of human nature. On the other end, the self-image that allows for one’s development and awareness of oneself in the world, for being and existing with others: a double bind of invisibility (the image in one’s internal gaze) and visibility (the image in the gaze of the beholder).

Images as visibilities have always been intensely mediated by technologies of appearance. Yet today, in the age of what is called Artificial Intelligence, these technologies offer such ease of fabrication, distortion and simulation as well as extensive possibilities of generating image-like visibilities, that a step aside for tracing the genealogies of these mechanisms is called for. (Fig. 8 & 9 below)

The ubiquity, versatility, and immateriality (I should say technicality) of images surrounding us have redesigned our contemporary visual landscape. Within this context, it is a concern to appreciate how these changes impact our perception, hence our understanding and representation of the world. Especially since a new type of image has entered our cultural and social arena namely the AI generated image – to discuss anew the fundamentals of what an image is (its ontology), how it makes sense (its epistemology), and how it operates (its agentivity) has become a pressing necessity. No doubt, the best companion in this endeavour is Vilém Flusser, as indeed very much in anticipation, he provided some substantial critical framework to understand these articulations. Repeatedly in his writings, Flusser has asked his readers to come up with a new imagination³ that must happen by and with the image, the calculable image, his technical image. “To imagine it, he said, we must mobilize a power of imagination that rests upon calculation.”⁴ And also to attempt to overcome the crisis of our models and be in a position not just to propose alternative models but to comprehend them, he further proposed “a collaboration between philosophers and those who experiment with the new media.”⁵


To accomplish this, I too believe in deconstructing current models, laying them out and singling out all the pieces, before reconstructing them anew. The term ‘image’ has been a carryall denoting a vast range of different ‘things’ (cultural artifacts, mental projections, figures of speech, etc.) whose meaning varies greatly between people and disciplines.

Fig. 5: This diagram shows in a synthetic way the multiple facets of an image, along with references to scholars in fields art, neurology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, physic, etc. These facets are not excluding, on the contrary, all together they compose the multifariousness of what an image is. 2011-2018.

I have taken this disconcerting polysemy as the necessary key characteristic that must be attentively referenced and mapped if one wants to comprehend how the diversity of material and immaterial surfaces it refers to contributes to forming our thinking being. I have taken into consideration the etymological, historical and philosophical origin of the term image and looked into various examples or types of images – aesthetic, mental, technical, engrammatic, to name just a few – to open up our conception of what an image is and how it functions. These various types were represented in a radial arrangement according to the principle of best neighbor and to their authorial references to provide a comprehensive overview of the multifariousness of the image.

To be useful as a source for further inquiries, it needs to be completed and rearranged according to different criteria such as disciplines, applications, degrees of in/ visibility, of in/visuality, etc. As it served the purpose of elucidating a first foray into deciphering the relation between texts and technical images, its reconfiguration and further elaboration could help make better sense of a next set of relations to grasp the role of generative images. Are they just a more sophisticated type of synthetic images or something altogether different?

Therefore, I would like to make the following two steps proposal:

First, to open the original map (Fig. 5), now transposed onto a shared digital board, to collective participation in the project of fur ther mapping the term ‘image’ by inviting contributions from Flusserians – contributors and readers of this publication – as well as scholars that I have been contacting in my own ongoing research.

Second, to share the various diagrams inspired by Flusser’s texts and arguments for comments as they lay out and connect Flusser’s theory of the 4 types of images, developed in his article “Images in the New Media,” with his analysis from another article titled “A New Imagination” and from other variants on same the topic found in manuscripts in his archive.⁶ (Fig. 8-10 below)


As a collective practice, it will be interesting to further Flusser’s various analysis of the technical and the synthetic images into a preliminary analysis of newly generated images according to his logic, as well as further our understanding of the latest advancement in synthetic image generation from current AI technologies.

What I am trying to stimulate here is perhaps what Flusser calls play, the interaction in a dialogue, a telematic dialogue, that he envisioned and that technology offers us today in a very simple manner. The form of the diagrams is an attempt to move away from the convolutions of languages, it is a compromise between words and images, one that can help us hold on to a critical stance, together, to resist, and this is why the images – both metaphorically, mentally and visually, that is in all their multifariousness – of the lichens and the saxifrage are so important: intuitively they are showing me a manner of researching that is more organic and fueled by co-construction.

Ultimately, the goal of this research is to contribute to a better understanding of the ontology – if any – of the generative image, and all the images that lay behind it. Indeed, on a philosophical level but also in very practical terms in our daily lives, it is key to grasp the paradigmatic changes happening currently in media and technology. Producing simple maps that can be layered and combined could contribute to constructing interdisciplinary hermeneutical bridges over the epistemological gaps that have surfaced as many formerly unrelated disciplines are now tied together by the digital.

My modest expertise in art history, critical thinking, image production and philosophy converge in the study of the nature of images today. How we form them and access them, how they modify our cognitive processes and play a decisive role in our perception and representation of the world around us – these are central questions not only to advance conceptual and philosophical enquiry, but to sharpen our critical thinking and to reclaim an awareness and power of action in face of an ever more disruptive technology.

Just like lichens and saxifrages, it is by working in combination and composition, trading efficacity for resistance and solidarity that I am hoping to advance. If we could behave more often part lichen part saxifrage, it would be our imperceptible insistence and our presence as well as the quality of our composite disposition that would provide us with a truly organic artificial intelligence – nature’s capacity to morph as an evolving composite mechanism incorporating its environment into new imaginations – to invent new gestures that would “overlap and mesh together” as “these gesture will continue to coexist in unpredictable tension and cross-fertilization.”⁷


Here is the beginning of my attempt.

Fig. 6 & 7: Author’s own photographs of lichens and saxifrages found in Robion, May 2023.
Fig. 8: Diagram of the visible and invisible status of the image in the technical process of imagination, inspired by readings of various texts by Vilém Flusser, May 2023.
Fig. 9: Diagram of the genealogy of the image in its different processes of abstraction and concretion, inspired by the readings of “A New Imagination” and various other texts by Vilém Flusser, as well as how it articulates the new generative image, AprilAugust 2023.
Fig. 10: Diagram laying out the 4 types of images as presented in Vilém Flusser’s text “Images in the New Media” and various other texts of Vilém Flusser. As a question mark, the generative image - or 5th type needs to be further investigated as part of the proposed collective research. First draft 2021, last iteration August 2023.

Footnotes:
1. Vilém Flusser, Writings, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 84
2. Marie-José Mondzain, Confiscation: des mots, des images et du temps (Paris: Éditions les Liens qui libèrent, 2019), 11. Translated from French by the author.
3. Einbildungskraft or “Flusser’s revolutionary expectation is that his readers will come to develop new cultural techniques of thinking critically through technical images” as concisely presented in the text of Baruch Gottlieb, 9.
4. Vilém Flusser, “The City as Wave-Trough in the Image-Flood,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (2005): 328.
5. Vilém Flusser, “On the Crisis of Our Models (ca. 1980s),” in Writings, 79.
6. Flusser, Writings, 70–74 and 110–16. As well as “The New Imagination”, “Imagination”, “Abbild-Vorbild” and other manuscripts in the Flusser Archive.
7: Vilém Flusser, “A New Imagination (1990),” in Writings, 116.