In one of his vertigo-inducing syntheses, which Vilém Flusser was so fond of, marking the highest point that separates history from post-history, he introduces a phenomenological model of cultural history, which has five levels with ascending degrees of abstraction.

The first level is the animate universe of concrete experience where animals and early civilizations lived. The second one corresponds with the primordial gesture of hands that manipulate objects. Time was abstracted from the material world, which was converted into subject matter, turning humans into abstracting agents. On the third level, producing images turned subject matter into scenes, and as a consequence homo sapiens emerged. By abstracting the depths of these scenes, images turn scenes into two-dimensional surfaces, and hands, guided by images, begin to take action upon subject matter.

With the dawn of writing, on the fourth level conceptualization emerged as a third gesture of abstraction which turned humans into historical beings. This universe is calculable; that is, it is a universe that can be arranged according to the lines of text, when the world is conceived according to logical and mathematical linearity, which is reflected in the one-dimensionality of its texts.

On the fifth level, the lines of pebbles of the countable universe have dispersed. Once loose, these pebbles could no longer be grasped by hands and eyes; they began to be computed. Calculation and computing became the fifth abstraction gesture in the turn towards the abyss of the zero-dimension, which changed humans into players, who calculate and compute the designs they have conceived.

However, in this zero-dimension of numbers, programs, and dots, Flusser sensed there would be a paradoxical return of the concrete. From computer graphics to today’s animated 3-D images, thanks to talented designers four-dimensionality comes back to us via computer screens in the unsettling form of concrete virtuality. On the brink of the abyss of total abstraction, by calculating and concretizing the abstract into projects, we are beginning to liberate ourselves and deny the existence of this abyss.

Original article by Lucia Santaella