Technical Images, Operational Images: Vilém Flusser and Harun Farocki’s Philosophical Dialogue

The dialogue between Vilém Flusser and Harun Farocki was captured in a thirteen-minute video that featured the two men sitting in a café on Leipziger Straße in Berlin, analyzing the cover layout of Bild Zeitung . However, Flusser and Farocki’s conversation extended far beyond this single video. Flusser is best known for his technical image trilogy: Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), and Does Writing Have a Future? (1987), and Farocki often cited Flusser in his writings. Both were interested in the 1989 Romanian revolution, which was largely televised (Flusser lectured and wrote on the subject and Farocki and Andrei Ujicǎ made the film Videograms of a Revolution [1992]). Later Farocki works are infused with Flusser’s ideas. Both shared the conviction that philosophy can be done in images, as well as text, and that technical images shape rather than merely document or represent political and cultural events, an idea that has become increasingly accepted in the age of social media, the internet, algorithms, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence.