Vilem Flusser Quotes

#1. For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable.

Vilem Flusser

#2. Custom is a shroud that conceals everything. Not without first encountering the uncustomary will we be able to recognize what is customary and, more importantly, to change it. Such is the impulse behind our conversation with the vampryoteuthis

Vilem Flusser

#3. He who writes must master the rules of grammar. He who shoots photographs needs only to follow the instructions as given by the camera ... This leads to the paradox that the more people shoot photographs, the less they are capable of deciphering them.

Vilem Flusser

#4. With every (informative) photograph, the photographic program becomes poorer by one possibility while the photographic universe becomes richer by one realization.

Vilem Flusser

#5. The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one indivisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information.

Vilem Flusser

#6. Communication is an artificial, intentional, dialogic, collective act of freedom, aiming at creating codes that help us forget our inevitable death and the fundamental senselessness of our absorb existence.

Vilem Flusser

#7. All incoming bits of information have, simultaneously, a tentacular, optic, and sexual dimension. Its world is not doubtful, but surprising; vampyroteuthic thinking is an unbroken stream of Aristotelian shock.

Vilem Flusser

#8. Photographers, it is true, do not work but they do do something: They create, process, and store symbols.

Vilem Flusser

#9. Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.

Vilem Flusser

#10. Our thoughts, feelings, desires and actions are being robotized; 'life' is coming to mean feeding apparatuses and being fed by them. In short: Everything is becoming absurd. So where is there room for human freedom?

Vilem Flusser

#11. Changing the question 'free from what?' into 'free for what?'; this change that occurs when freedom has been achieved has accompanied me on my migrations like a basso continuo. This is what we are like, those of us who are nomads, who come out of the collapse of a settled way of life.

Vilem Flusser

#12. Photographers encode their concepts as photographic images so as to give others information, so as to produce models for them and thereby to become immortal in the memory of others.

Vilem Flusser

#13. Human beings forget they created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images: Imagination has turned into hallucination. This

Vilem Flusser