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„Eine Wolke von Zukunft“. Zur nubigenen Einbildungskraft in Vilém Flussers Werk

This essay starts out from Flusser’s use of the metaphor of the cloud as a possible representation of our present condition. Our identity and the world around us have lost all solidity and turned into groundless swarms of particles. This vision accompanies the short history of the cloud that follows, moving from its conception as a changeable veil masking the true light of inner truth, to an assemblage with frayed and constantly changing outlines, a formless but significant stain, and a field of possibility. As Flusser points out, when dealing with present day digital technology, one has the impression that our imagination (Einbildungskraft) has emigrated from our brains and become independent so that one can have a look at one’s own dreams. One would have to enter into a kind of dialogue (Zwiegespräch) between our own imagination and the one that we have been feeding into the computer, in order to pave the way for a jump into a completely new form of Einbildungskraft.

multilayered

The computer computes. Landscapes, disaster, nature, culture, icons, explosions. Daily news. Images of events that happen far away. Pixels and quanta, one or zero. In this multilayered-series I let the computer merge hundreds of single images into each other. They are taken systematically as well as randomly from the internet (or my private collection). The titles refer to the words which were entered into the image search engines. At recurring points of the calculation process I intervene with aesthetic decisions. 

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