Originally written in both English and French, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication is a series of twelve essays that Vilém Flusser delivered as lectures in Aix-en-Provence, France, on several subjects ranging from communication media, memory, symbols, meaning, models, art, cybernetics, the Bible, and Brigitte Bardot.
Although written in 1975, this early phenomenological study of changing aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological models, and of the current fundamental revolution in the structure of human communication, is a visionary and provocative polemic that can help us understand, or at least, gain a better view of what is happening in the world around us today: big data, centralised media power, mass media conglomerates, political aesthetics etc.
Unpublished for almost forty years, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication, now published for the first time, edited from Vilém Flusser's original English typescript, is not only an important work from the author's mid career, just before the development of his seminal theories on technical images and technical imagination, but it also forms a continuous link with his other titles of the same period: Natural: Mind, Gestures, Mutation in Human Relations, Post-History, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and Towards a Philosophy of Photography.
Author Biography:
The philosopher Vilém Flusser was born in Prague in 1920 but emigrated to Brazil, fleeing from Nazi persecution, at the outbreak of war in 1939, arriving in Rio de Janeiro at the end of 1940, with his wife and parents-in-law, after a short stay in London. The Flussers settled in São Paulo during the 1940s, where they lived for thirty two years. In the early years of the 1970s they moved back to Europe, settling first in Italy, and subsequently in Robion, France, where they lived until Vilém Flusser's untimely death in 1991 after a car crash, as he left Prague at the end of a symposium. During the years he lived in Brazil, Flusser wrote for several Brazilian periodicals and taught at different academic institutions, among them, the University of São Paulo, the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy, and the Institute of Technology and Aeronautics. His first two books, "Lingua e Realidade" and "A História do Diabo," were published in Brazil during the 1960s. In the late 1970s, and throughout the 1980s, Flusser travelled most of Europe lecturing and participating in conferences and symposia, during which time he published his most well-known titles. He came to prominence in the field of Media Philosophy after publishing his seminal book "Towards a Philosophy of Photography" in 1984, shortly followed by "Ins Universum der Technischen Bilder" in 1985, and "Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? in 1987. As a polyglot, Flusser wrote in four different languages, German, Portuguese, English, and French. The Metaflux // Vilém Flusser collection aims to present to an international readership, high quality translations of Flusser's Brazilian writings, including courses, monographs, essays, and letters, as well as works originally written in English by the author. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes is an artist, translator, editor and designer. He has translated and published several titles by the philosopher Vilém Flusser. With a BA from the University of Gloucestershire and and MA from the University of the Arts, London, Rodrigo is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Metaflux Publishing.
