Bernd Wingert
Bernd Wingert, born in 1944, studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, graduating in 1972. He then joined the “Studiengruppe für Systemforschung,” and in 1976, the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis, now a part of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). After working on a project of Computer Aided Design, he formed a research group at the institute to work on topics in the field of ICT such as electronic publishing, hypertext, electronic books, multimedia, e-commerce, reading research and others. After Flusser’s death in 1991, he became a member of the Flusser network and helped establish the Vilém Flusser Archive, located since 2007 at the University of Arts-UdK, in Berlin. The author retired in 2009.
Articles of Bernd Wingert
Flusser hören – lesen – studieren. Der "Flusser-Hypertext" – von der Nachgeschichte zur Vorgeschichte
On March 2, 1989, Vilém Flusser gave a lecture at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis. At the time, the Institue was part of the former Research Centre Karlsruhe, located in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, and today it is part of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology—KIT. The topic of the lecture was “Writing for Publishing” and fitted well into the research project under study at that time: Electronic Publishing. In a subsequent project on Electronic Books, we took this lecture as the basis of a hypertext offering users three modes of getting acquainted with Flusser’s ideas: Listening to his recorded speech, reading the transcript, and studying in detail his arguments by following the links into an extended system of explanations, ordered in three layers “beneath” the text. There is a publication (in German) that describes this hypertext and two other prototypes (Böhle et al. 1997). The author goes back to the old files and tries to unfold the obvious and hidden rational of this prototype. At the end, he dares to dream of a science fiction in which Vilém Flusser is a member of the research project, therefore exploring (and suffering) with colleagues, new writing and reading technologies. What kind of Flusserian philosophy would have emerged then?