[rohrpost] Panel discussion at Vilém Flusser Archive, Saturday 14.07.12 18:00

[Annie Goh]

Occupying the economic imaginary; technical images and their influence on economic representation, value and exchange
Panel discussion at the Vilém Flusser Archive, Saturday 14.07 18:00


Event: Rundgang (UdK Berlin)
Date and time: 14th July, 2012 (Saturday) 19:00
Location: UdK Berlin, Grunewaldstr. 2-5, Vilém Flusser Archive (Room 208, 2nd floor)

„Die gegenwärtigen Revolutionäre sind Einbildner (Fotografen, Filmer, Videoleute, Computerprogrammierer), und sie sind aus dem Boden der Revolution durch das technische Bild gewachsen.” Vilém Flusser

The aim of this panel is to present the research output of the first Flusser residency project at the Universität der Künste and the transmediale, discussing issues of representation, value and social organization through the theories and concepts related to the theory of the Czech Philosopher Vilém Flusser.The panel discussion will address the importance of technical images and the apparatuses that produce them for the questions of value and exchange. For Flusser the codification of information in technical images, their production, their dissemination, and their their antagonistic relation to writing, is central in the understanding of contemporary societies. Writing in an alphabetic code was an invention by traders 3500 years ago for commerce. In the ancient greek society otium (lat. leisure) was the supreme good for all the citizens and the society; writing had an effect on our western culture and shifted this telos in its negation to the negotium (lat. employment, business, occupation). The invention of technical images, primarily photography, marked a second fundamental turn, which will have again an effect on our way of thinking and „Dasein“. The informatization of production and value, but more importantly the reliance of the economy on imaginary representation, relies heavily on technical images and their production. Technical images are no longer mirrors of an independent, external reality, but rather models, which shape our perception and constitute our social relationships. Economic discourse is build on the seductive appeal of such images that support economic value and create the new economic imaginary.

Claudia Becker is the scientific supervisor of the Vilém Flusser Archive at the University of Arts Berlin. Her research deals with the emergence of the technical images and their effect on thinking and being. In her presentation she will focus on the deep-time relations of leisure (otium) and business (negotium) in order to bring the deep structure of our market thinking and our capitalistic system into light. We need to step back in our history and reformulate critically our social and economic values in order to go further with the development of new models to imagine another (better?) society.

Jack Henrie Fisher is a graphic designer and writer who teaches at Parsons the New School of Design in NYC. He is currently visiting the Vilém Flusser Archive. His presentation will examine a series of contemporary textual images in which the book appears as a machine-mediated material which subordinates a second-order image of human labor. These images make visible in a complex way the technical apparatuses which produces them, and thereby open a space for a critical reading of the pictorial representation of economic value.

Georgios Papadopoulos is a PhD student at Erasmus University Rotterdam, resident at the Vilém Flusser Archive. He is particularly interested in the iconography of money, and how it represents and articulates value, community and power. His presentation expands on the imagery constitution of market economy and of monetary value, and develops an analysis of the monetary system as a technical apparatus and a social system that produces a universe of technical images. Subjectivity and desire are constituted in the market via a process of identification with such images.

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Annie Goh
Assistant | _Vilém_Flusser_Archive
Universität der Künste Berlin

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