Flusser Festival 2022

Originally planned for Flusser’s 100th anniversary in 2020, the festival will finally take place on site in Robion on and around his birthday on 12 May 2022.

Flusser Festival 2022
Flusser 100+ Festival Live from Robion

sneak peek for 12 May

sneak peek for the festival week

This is also an opportunity to draw attention to the growing interest in Flusser’s work in the French-speaking world, reinforced by the recent publications of several translations.

Flusser Festival program

Monday, 9 May

  • 10:00-18:30 DAAD Flusser Summer School – Drawing
    hosted by Ulrich Richtmeyer, Katerina Krtilova, Baruch Gottlieb
  • 10:00-17:30 Flusser Terrace Dialogues – On Linearity and Non-Linearity
    hosted by Marcel René Marburger
  • 20:00 sunset encounter, city terrace
    with DAAD Flusser Summer School and FH Dortmund Design Seminar

Tuesday, 10 May

  • 10:00-18:30 DAAD Flusser Summer School – Writing
    hosted by Ulrich Richtmeyer, Katerina Krtilova, Baruch Gottlieb,
    featuring Gestures of framing – open-air workshop
    hosted by Mike Anušas
  • 10:00-17:30 Flusser Terrace Dialogues – Vilém Flusser as an Art Critic
    hosted by Marcel René Marburger
  • 20:00 sunset encounter, city terrace

Wednesday, 11 May

  • 10:00-18:30 DAAD Flusser Summer School – Photography
    hosted by Ulrich Richtmeyer, Katerina Krtilova, Baruch Gottlieb
  • 10:00-17:30 Flusser Terrace Dialogues – On Apparatuses
    hosted by Marcel René Marburger
  • Vilém Flusser’s Fluss – online screening
  • 20:00 sunset encounter, city terrace

Thursday, 12 May – live stream 10:00-22:00 CEST

Friday, 13 May

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Flusser Festival Symposium

all times are CEST, presentations are 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes dialog

  • 11:00 Marc Lenot – Flusser France, presentation FR, EN
  • 12:00 lunch break with Vilém Flusser’s Fluss, screening DE, EN
  • 13:00 re-performance of Vilém Flusser’s Fluss Spaziergang
  • 14:00 Sebastian Sierra-Barra – Subject, Project … User: Evolutionary Disruption?, lecture EN
  • 14:40 Marcel-René-Marburger – What’s next? On Flussers Media-Chronological Model, screening and talk EN
  • 15:20 Flusser project laboratory talks – FlusserWiki, Flusser Festival 2023 exhibition, Flusser Video Collection, Flusser Cloud
  • 16:00 Mario Cascardo – Mixing lives: the atmosphere of Flusser x Flexor’s dialogue according to a “post-history” of art, lecture EN
  • 16:40 Mike Anušas – Flusser, pipes and the art of misdirection, lecture EN
  • 17:20 Peter Zhang – Flusser and Khora, lecture EN
  • 18:00 Marc Lenot – On Photography, lecture EN
  • 19:00 Roundtable discussion with Ulrich Richtmeyer, Katerina Krtilova, Baruch Gottlieb, Steffi Winkler, Mike Anušas, Stephanie Holl-Trieu
  • 20:00 Flusser birthday celebration

speakers

Baruch Gottlieb & Steffi Winkler

Founders and co-chairs of Flusser Club e.V. welcome participants and viewers and introduce the day’s program.

Marc Lenot (FR)

Since 2005, Marc Lenot has written an online reference blog on contemporary art, Lunettes Rouges, published by Le Monde. In 2016, he obtained a Ph. D. from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne with a doctoral thesis on contemporary experimental photography. 2017, his book on the same subject, Jouer contre les Appareils, was published by Éditions Photosynthèses in Arles. ↑ top

Flusser France

The Flusser France website aims to publish (or reference) all the texts by Vilém Flusser that exist in French. It is part of a wider project to make Vilém Flusser’s thought known to the French-speaking public. ↑ top

Mike Anusas (Scotland, UK)

Gestures of framing, open-air activity, 1h 30m
This activity will explore the gesture of framing. We will make images with our cameras but explore what we can do — in Flusser’s terms — to ‘play with the apparatus’ of image-making, through movements and gestures of the body, playing/working with material/organic elements and working with/against ‘the persistence of the rectangle’ (Hovet 2017). Our aim will be to explore how an image is not only a technological imprint of a determinate apparatus at a point in spacetime, but that it is also a gestural expression of ongoing phenomenal life. We will also seek to explore how the creative act of (image) making is also a ‘gesture of destroying’ (Flusser 2014: 55), given that actions of creating and making are also — synonymously — acts of exclusion, obfuscation and editing-out. Thus, we will give observant attention to what we are ‘leaving out of the picture’ in the act of communication.

Please come to this activity wearing clothes you can stretch and move around in easily and please also bring: i) a camera — whether built-in to your phone or standalone; ii) any material/organic elements you can pick-up in, or on your way to, Robion — e.g. strands of in/flexible material, string, twigs, branches, etc; iii) some paper and pen/cil for note-taking — e.g. a journal. ↑ top

Flusser, pipes and the art of misdirection
In 1929, René Magritte painted a pipe, albeit stating ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ [This is not a pipe]. Sometime later, in Robion, around 19XX, Vilém Flusser wrote an essay concerning ‘The Gesture of Smoking a Pipe’ (Flusser 2014). Both of these works are precisely about pipes. And both of these works are not about pipes at all. In these works, pipes are a gesture towards grander philosophical ideas concerning artistic, ritual and religious life and ‘The Treachery of Images’ (Magritte 1929). In this talk, I wish to explore and discuss whether Flusser’s philosophical technique is rather unique in being concerned with an ‘art of misdirection’. I will argue that many of his essays — if not all — are cleverly devised misdirections, which work by pursuing a lucid, cautious phenomenal attention to mundane things and practices — typewriters, tents, taking a snapshot photo — to then refract in-and-through these mundanities to bring the reader out into an open space of philosophical revelation concerning the fundamental matters of life, the universe, and everything. I argue that Flusser’s art of misdirection is not like the (more common) philosophical techniques of comparison, abstraction, exemplar, metaphor or analogy as Flusser’s direct attention to a matter functions so as to then flip, turn away and move out to revelation, but to also coincidentally expose the philosophical apparatus itself. This talk will be a genuine exploration of Flusser’s philosophical technique and I am keen to hear from the audience — during the discussion — concerning this proposition on Flusser’s work. Please also note this outline may be a misdirection. ↑ top

Marcel René Marburger (DE)

is a Cologne based media- and art theorist and professor for design theory at the University for Applied Arts and Sciences of Dortmund. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the aesthetic relevance of Vilém Flusser writings (Flusser und die Kunst, Köln: 2011). From 2007 to 2010 he was the scientific supervisor of the Vilém Flusser Archive; starting in 2005 he has been co-editor of 18 International Flusser Lectures, in 2008 he initiated the Vilém Flusser Theory Award (now Vilém Flusser Residence Program) with Siegfried Zielinski and Transmediale. In 2017 he started kiU-Salon (with Harald Opel), discussing nonlinear storytelling and the future(s) of audiovisual media.    ↑ top

Sebastian Sierra-Barra (DE)

Professor for Organisational Development at the Evangelische Hochschule Berlin (EHB), from 2022 habilitation at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus (BTU)

Subject, Project … User: Evolutionary Disruption?
When Flusser talked about the transformation of subject to project he imagined a new path on the way of becoming a human being. Embedded in the development of media cultures, the project represented an emancipative figure overcoming the subjugation of the past. Nowadays, we have to ask: What has become of this hope? Instead of becoming a project, it seems to be our fate to become users.Some thoughts about the danger of an evolutionary disruption …    ↑ top

Mario Cascardo

Mario Cascardo is a doctorate researcher at the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Visuais da Escola de Belas Artes da Universidade do Rio de Janeiro (PPGAV-EBA/UFRJ). He is a writer, musician and researcher based in the city of Rio de Janeiro, where he was born in 1986.

Mixing lives: the atmosphere of Flusser x Flexor’s dialogue according to a “post-history” of art
Vilém Flusser’s philosophy of technoimages encourages us to adopt creative practices in the realm of the so-called Humanities.
In this research we’ve been inspired by Flusser’s “oceanic” [Vampyrotheutis Infernalis] and “drunkenness” (“embriaguez” [Post-history]) epistemologies to work on the assemblage of digital panels that speculate the dialogue between Flusser and the Moldovan-French-Brazilian painter Samson Flexor. Also inspired by Aby Warburg’s methods and Emanuele Coccia’s onthology of media, our collection aims to (re)produce moods, after-lives (Nachleben) and the atmosphericity of that dialogue, whose central figures – Flexor’s Bipeds – are prophetic of some decisive emergencies of our times. ↑ top

Peter Zhang (US)

Peter Zhang is Professor of Communication Studies at Grand Valley State University. His research is interdisciplinary in nature, spanning such fields as media theory, interality studies, techno-ethics, Deleuze studies, Flusser studies, Virilio studies, rhetorical studies, Zen, and I Ching, among other things. He has published a long list of articles in these fields. Currently, he serves as Director of the School of Communications’ Study Abroad Program in London. He has guest edited a special issue of Canadian Journal of Communication, three special section/issues of China Media Research, and a special section of Journal of Multicultural Studies of the Orient on interality studies, and guest co-edited two special issues of Explorations in Media Ecology entitled “Probing the Boundaries of Media Ecology.”    ↑ top

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