Flusserstudies.net

HOME / Person / Konrad Wojnowski

Konrad Wojnowski

Konrad Wojnowski (b. 1987) works as an assistant at the Jagiellonian University (Performativity Studies Department). He wrote two books: Aesthetics of Disturbance (Estetyka zakłócenia) and Productive Catastrophes (Pożyteczne katastrofy). The first is devoted to different strategies of disturbance in the cinema of Michael Haneke; the second deals with the concept of catastrophe in the context of contemporary techno-culture. His research interests span theories of performativity, philosophy of communication, and various intersections between culture, science, and technology. Currently he is leading a research project dealing with the impact of probability theory on avant-garde art and science-fiction literature in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Articles of Konrad Wojnowski

Telematic Freedom and Information Paradox

The text discusses the relations between the notions of freedom and information in Vilém Flusser’s philosophy and aims at systematizing this complex problem. Flusser’s ideas on freedom in the ages of programs are deeply indebted to modern science, in particular to thermodynamics (Léon Brillouin), biochemistry (Jacques Monod), and information theory (Claude E. Shannon). In this article I present this indebtedness, contextualize it within a wider scope of Flusser’s oeuvre, and argue that the notion of information – borrowed from the hard sciences – does not provide firm grounds for his existentialism or his philosophy of communication. On the contrary, information (understood by Flusser in a twofold and contradictory way as entropy and negentropy) introduces foundational ambivalence and ambiguity to his philosophical project. I conclude that information – as defined by mathematicians and physicists – allows us to express freedom in the technoscientific era of programs in a non-reductionist fashion.

Telematic Freedom (PDF 342 KB)

Error message

  • Notice: Array to string conversion in views_handler_argument_numeric->title() (line 89 of /var/opt/www/usi_multisite/docs/sites/all/modules/views/handlers/views_handler_argument_numeric.inc).
  • Notice: Array to string conversion in decode_entities() (line 463 of /var/opt/www/usi_multisite/docs/includes/unicode.inc).
  • Notice: Undefined variable: crumbs in flusser_breadcrumb() (line 82 of /var/opt/www/usi_multisite/docs/sites/all/themes/flusser/template.php).
TOP