Dans l’univers des images techniques – en VF
Although a growing number of Vilém Flusser’s texts have been made available in France, where he spent the last part of his life, the decisive book Ins Universum der technischen Bilder, from 1985, is still missing. Written two years after Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie, his most influential book -- translated into French in 1996, Ins Universum der technischen Bilder is arguably one of Flusser’s theoretically most ambitious books. It aims to describe the entire history of visualization techniques. Both foreshadowing the development of digitization processes to come and harking back to the earliest moments of civilization, this book will make the full potential of the thought-provoking ideas already available in French more readily understandable than they were at the time of their publication. This French translation by Pierre Rusch will facilitate a new understanding of this crucial phase in Flusser’s oeuvre, where the insights into the automated character of the photographic images are taken to the level of a phenomenology of technical gestures, with “abstracting” and “concretizing” as their key operations.