NOWs: The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes

01. März 2016 / Nows

Originally written in both English and French, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communicationis 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Unpublished for almost forty years, The Surprising Phenomenon of Human Communication, now published for the first time, edited from Vilém Flusser’s original English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.

Rodrigo Maltez Novaes is an artist, translator, editor and designer. He has translated and published several titles by the philosopher Vilém Flusser. Rodrigo is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Metaflux Publishing. Metaflux Publishing is an independent project that aims to publish both fiction and non-fiction works from a variety of fields and cultures.

Metaflux is open for collaborative projects.