Critical Paper Responses

Critical Response

Villlem Flusser’s writing is very conceptual very philosophical. He begins by talking about an image, what exactly is an image. He describes an image as an abstraction of the world, an image takes all of the dimensions of the world and reduces that into a two dimension representation or abstraction of that particular part of the world. He then talks about what we as humans get out of an image, what can we pull from it and how do we do that. We scan the image, we recreate it in our minds so that we can come as close as possible to reliving the moment it was created. Flusser then goes into the digital image and how it is different than a painted image, etc. He discusses the change from the human being the constant and the tools being the variable to now the tools being the constant and the human the variable. The last part of Flusser’s paper that we read was on the apparatus. What the apparatus is and how humans interact with it. 

            I believe that the most significant aspect regarding digital photography that he talked about is the idea that we don’t see shooting a photo as an image. We see it as looking through a window; we are looking through and capturing a moment. When really we are creating an image similar to a painter creating an image. As an industrial designer I wonder why is that, why does the camera make us have this emotion and think this way. And I realize its because how the modern day camera is designed. Think about a digital camera, when you take the picture through the view finder its designed in such away that it is like looking through a window. What about taking a photo using a live view setting on a modern camera, still that is like you are looking through a window. This is partly due to that its glass and it is square like a common window usually with a frame of some kind. It is also due to the way these features are marketed, the way they are named. Listen to the names, viewfinder, live view. The common word there is VIEW. A view as we know is something that has a strong connotation with a window.

            I found the paper to be very interesting. I never had thought so in depth about an image. The claims that Flusser was making make a lot of sense, and I do agree with his claims. When he talked about how there was a shift from humans being constant and tools being a variable to tools being constant and humans being a variable I was intrigued. And I think that concept has a lot to say about our society, and about our advancements in technology.