The Society of the Screen

How a lifelong engagement with experimental art informed the brilliant Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser’s early vision of a world dominated by glowing screens.

Predicting the importance of technology and images for the twenty-first century as early as the 1970s, Vilém Flusser warned, “the basic structure of our thinking is about to experience a mutation.” The bewitching images and screens that surround us could lead toward a centrally programmed, totalitarian society—or to another, better one characterized by dialogue and collaboration among humans and new forms of intelligence.

In this book on the idiosyncratic and prescient Czech-Brazilian philosopher, Martha Schwendener explores the profound effect of art on Flusser’s thought. The Society of the Screen reveals how Flusser’s lifelong engagement with experimental practices—from abstract painting and concrete poetry in Brazil to video, cybernetics, and photography in Europe and the United States—as well as his extensive involvement with the São Paulo Biennial informed his belief that we were moving from “history”—a civilization informed by linear writing—into “post-history,” dominated by technical images.

Schwendener documents the importance of Flusser’s correspondence and collaboration with artists like Mira Schendel, Fred Forest, Wen-Ying Tsai, Harun Farocki, Louis Bec, and Karl Gerstner for the evolution of his ideas.ENDORSEMENTS

“Smartly illustrated and beautifully written, Martha Schwendener’s timely book provides a deep dive into the work of a thinker about images and visual information who has never seemed more relevant than right now.”
—Geoffrey Batchen, author of Negative/Positive: A History of Photography

“A highly innovative book that overcomes the still widely held reductive view of Vilém Flusser as a media theorist by bringing his lifelong interest in art to the forefront.”
—Rainer Guldin, Editor-in-Chief, Flusser StudiesMartha Schwendener is an art historian and an art critic for The New York Times. She is a visiting associate professor at New York University and a researcher in residence at the Vilém Flusser Archive, Berlin. She is the editor of Vilém Fusser’s Essays // Artforum, and her criticism and essays have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Critical Inquiry, The New Yorker, October, and many other publications.