Vilém Flusser

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When it comes to creating things,” Flusser writes, “one is faced with the question of responsibility (and thus with freedom).” In terms of design, his definition of responsibility is deceptively simple: “openness to other people”. (4) It is openness to and responding to others; it is dialogue, the goal of which is simply to lose oneself in the design process: “If I am responsible for another,” he says, I “open myself to him and forget myself in the process, this self-forgetting with another person over some matter, because one doesn’t lose oneself in the other, and one doesn’t speak with another person, but with him about something.

from a lecture by Chadwick Truscott Smith

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"Comparing for example a technical product like a phone with a painting from Pablo Picasso, “one must be impressed, how poor in regard to inventionary imagination the painting is whereas the phone is full of amassed creativity."

"In a proposal he wrote for an AICA-conference [conference of art mediators] that took place in Paris in December 1972, Flusser describes the present situation of art as one of a “decaying consensus”, because as the codes of art become ever more elaborate and difficult to learn, it leads towards a division of society into two classes. On one side there evolves an elite capable of understanding the elaborated codes of art and science and on this basis supplies the entire society with models for the experience of the real – models which tell us who we are and what kind of world we live in. On the other side there are the masses, whose culturemes are based on mass consensus, like posters, gadgets and mass products. The communication between these two groups is a discoursive one that flows from the functionaire towards the consumer mainly through the use of mass media, and since there is hardly any feedback possible, Flusser calls it a totalitarian structure."

"...new information is only a combination and variation of existing information.

"In this sense the dialogue also takes on an ethic quality in the sense that if two players work together instead of against each other, something happens that Flusser calls a “mutual recognition”, because in such a dialogical situation it is not about ruling the other person or gaining power over him. Following Martin Buber, Flusser thinks that only through the appreciation of the other person that mankind finds to itself and is led to a humane existence."

from a lecture by Marcel René Marburger