Vera Schwamborn
Vera Schwamborn is a photographer and art historian. She got to know Vilém Flusser in 1989 and worked 1992/93 in the Flusser-Archive in Den Haag.
Articles of Vera Schwamborn
Small Data Photography. Mit weniger Daten mehr erfahren
Everybody is snapshooting, everywhere. Flusser’s statement in his Toward a Philosophy of Photography from 1983 is even more significant forty years later in our brave new world of smartphone pictures. Is it possible to overcome the abundant redundancy of digital colour photography by using the same device, a mobile phone? In her experiments against the apparatus Vera Schwamborn developed what she calls „Small Data Photography“ as an answer. It is amazing that 480 x 640 pixel image on a small Nokia mobile can result in irritating and informative photographs opening a path to regain the world around us by small data. Flusser tried to combine aesthetics and technology as a way to bring back sensual experience into our abstract environment of calculus and computation. Together with Karl Gerstner he developed ideas of a colour code parallel to the all-embracing number codes of our time. Small Data photos also offer a reconciliation. They disclose a world of images that lie before the text and beyond the number.
MaHiPo -Vom Worte-Schlagen durch den Texte-Dschungel
Vera Schwamborn was instrumental in setting up the first Vilém Flusser Archive in The Hague in the late summer of 1992. Flusser’s son Miguel travelled every two months to the Netherlands to assist the electronic implementation of the project. Schwamborn developed a comprehensive list of 172 keywords (see Keyword-Manual February 1993) that is still of great interest for a broader understanding of Vilém Flusser’s thinking.
Materialien
Vom Worte-Schlagen
Vera Schwamborn was instrumental in setting up the first Vilém Flusser Archive in The Hague in the late summer of 1992. Flusser’s son Miguel travelled every two months to the Netherlands to assist the electronic implementation of the project. Schwamborn developed a comprehensive list of 172 keywords (see Keyword-Manual February 1993) that is still of great interest for a broader understanding of Vilém Flusser’s thinking.
Mérou
These black and white pictures of a Merou, also known as Dusky Grouper (Epinephelus marginatus) were taken in August 1990 in the Aquarium Tropical at 293 avenue Daumesnil Paris 12°. In October 1991, Schwamborn met Flusser in the Hotel Königshof near the Stacchus in Munich and they discussed her Merou project. Flusser was fascinated by the fractal analogy of the patterns on the water surface and the skin of the fish captured by the coarse-grained resolution of the photography and wanted to use them for one of his Artforum texts dealing with fractals and self-similarity. However, because of his death in November, this project was not realized.
