The Shape of Things: Vilm Flusser and The Open Challenges of Form.

Kevin Henry, IDSA

Columbia College Chicago,
600 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, Il. 60605 U.S.A.

Abstract
This paper re-examines the complexity behind Flussers philosophy of design as it pertains specifically to form and its overlaps with other disciplines (philosophy, science, theology, technology, etc.).
One particular passage from Flussers essay on pots from the collection The Shape of Things will be
explored in depth A pot is a vessel, a tool to be grasped and held. It is an epistemological (phenomenological) tool. For example: I take hold of an empty pot and hold it under the water fountain. By
doing this, I have given the pot content and the water form, and the water now in-formed by the pot is
included in the pot instead of flowing amorphously. This is a banal fact, but in fact no epistemological
theory, and no theory of information, has so far come to terms with it. What does Flusser mean with
this particular challenge and how does information theory or epistemology impact the form and our understanding, even desire, of an artifact or object? This paper will explore these challenging questions
in depth merging theory and practice into the presentation.
The beauty of Flussers essay on Pots, as is the case in all the essays in this collection, is its compactness. In the space of a mere 1715 words he takes the reader on an expansive tour of ideas starting
with a biblical proclamation and proceeding through much of western knowledge, albeit in a post-itnote-sized format before arriving back at the same proclamation with a much appended logic. It is a
small sermon packed full of wisdom and mystery touching on politics, science, philosophy, technology,
linguistics, crafts and even speculation about the impact of the computer. This is not to say that he got
it all right (at least as far as computer technology goes) but then he died before the logic of the internet
s first phase had clearly revealed itself. He does, however, squeeze much that is pitch perfect into
this tiny vehicle that it resonates long after an initial reading requiring one to re-read it several times.
The other beautiful aspect of this essay is its form; the material and its delivery are perfectly matched
in both shape and content and the long arc of time it describes fits the ideas susinctly. Like his countryman Franz Kafka, Flusser writes in parables using ordinary language to explain the unknown and
using ordinary imagery and experience to express complex realities.
Central to Flussers essay is the notion of hollowness. He uses what ,on the surface at least, appears
to be a simple artifact: the pot to explore this idea which, as it turns out, is the perfect epistemological
vehicle to examine the intersection of many disciplines. This ancient tool, as old as any human technology, has its origins in the cupped human hand according to Flusser. Tracing its further evolution to
the woven basket and weaving (hence clothing, carpeting, enclosure in general) he progresses on to
the logic (or was it luck) that pushed humans to add clay as an inner lining enabling the basket to hold
water. It evolved into the ceramic pot- possibly through experiment, accident, or design once subjected to the high heat of fire. From here, Flusser creatively moves around the artifact assuming a variety
of viewpoints to get inside the metaphor of hollowness while at the same time exploring the physical
reality of the pot. Hence the essay becomes more than an epistemological exploration and instead a
kind of tiny ontology. While epistemological inquiry asks what do you know and how do you know it
?, ontological inquiry steps further outside the circle of causality to ask what is the nature of knowable
things? Because we cannot know for sure how humans actually developed ceramics, it remains pure
conjecture. It is the space between epistemology and ontology that this essay occupies.
Flusser peripatetically walks around the pot taking the viewpoint of different people and thus exploring,
like a good philosopher, the complex relationships within such a simple and seemingly insignificant

artifact. For example Flusser wonders if Charles de Gaulles une certaine ide about France was
informed by a pot: Did the General perhaps go into a potters studio and look around until he found
a pot into which he could pour France? Or did he buy a particularly beautiful pot and then try to pour
France carefully into it? Or, on the other hand, did he shape a pot himself and then hold it under the
French fountain so as to catch France?1
Knowledge, according to Plato, is that subset defined by the overlap of what is true and what is
believed. Design, like religion, codifies beliefs which can prevent one from inquiring any deeper into
the realities of a given phenomena. Flusser seems to be suggesting that knowledge in design comes
through this type of intense exploration between what is true and what is believed. The evolution of
the pot, in its physical manifestation, clearly represents human knowledge in an empirical form (from
cupped hand to fired ceramics). The philosophical inquiry into the nature of hollowness reveals something else: that the pot, like many artifacts, is waiting to be informed by something which is in fact
immaterial. Human knowledge is shaped by the push/pull of empirical knowledge that must then, like
language, be codified into structured knowledge. Such a codification leads to beliefs which must on
occasion be up-ended to expand our knowledge base. He returns throughout the essay to the biblical
proclamation he begins the piece with: And the Lord spake: Like a potters vessels shall the peoples
be broken into pieces. 2 Flusser whittles away, like a good logical philosopher, the elements of what
he intends to explore: The intention of this essay is to interpret this ominous prophecy. It can be
interpreted because it says many things. Unambiguous statements cannot be; they are not open to
multiple interpretation. The sentence to be interpreted is biblical, the Bible is open to multiple interpretations, and this is what theologians live off. Hence this essay belongs to a long tradition, but it is not
necessarily meant to be read in the spirit of the theological disputes.3 In this way Flusser begins his
exploration with a quote from one existing belief system- the Judeo-Christian Bible- as a starting point
while alerting the reader that the essay is not a theological dispute. Such a densely compacted essay
full of twists and turns and alternative paths would require a full book to explore in depth all the implications, so I wish to stay focused on the idea of epistemology and information theory as they in-form
artifacts. But first a slight diversion into the surface and structural reality of products.
To the designer an artifact is the embodiment of design logic imposed through planning, development,
and execution, and, as such, it is an artificial object created in an artificial environment namely industry. It rarely elicits deeper philosophical inquiry remaining focused instead on contemporary ideas of
innovation progressing towards greater user-cognition, lower cost, and greater market penetration (the
last two are completely artificial realities). Design as a discipline, however, is the direct beneficiary of
structural and surface knowledge gathered through human interaction with artifacts and the shaping
and refining, over millenia, by crafts people or untrained individuals working in vernacular manners.

hand crafted objects of wood and wrought iron

Our designed environment therefore is a admixture of the past, as embodied by standardized types,
and the present, as understood within a commercialized consumer culture largely detached from the
act of making. The designer today is often pushed, by commercial necessity, to the perimeter of the
process focusing on mere surface creation (as embodied in functional and manufacturable form) within
narrow boundaries to define ever new products. Such a process rarely affords the designer an opportunity to question more deeply the interaction between object and the broader culture. Design in this
way creates ever newer artificial languages adding to the situation described by Italian designer and
theorist Andrea Branzi: The fact is that Western culture has found itself in an environment completely
overrun by uncultivated languages and modes of conduct produced by industry itself. These changes
are much more far-reaching, vital, and effective than the ones Western culture had itself devised. So
it was that out of this unease, of the incapacity of culture to keep abreast of the changing times, the
avant-garde was born as a traumatic recovery, as a creative spark flashing between two masses moving at different velocities.4 This avant garde recovery room is one where philosophical issues vital to
design can and must be explored if design would begin to embrace such a space.
The new designed artifact as the embodiment of information is such a starting point and one that
designers are addressing either indirectly and accidentally (like the clay-lining in Flussers basket)
or intentionally. The connection back to Flusser is straight forward. Hollowness is what has always
defined design: the artifact in the form of a chair awaits its sitter just as a shovel awaits the dirt, or a
phone awaits the ring (signal) that someone is calling from the other side. What designers do is to
encode information and possibility/capability into a product. The craftsperson imbued artifacts with
this same capability but possessed the knowledge largely in their hands through direct manipulation
of materials and tools. The contemporary designer is several steps removed from this process but the
end result is similar. The removal or distance of the designer also empowers him/her to actually imbue
and artifact with a far broader depth of capability if the context actually allowed for this to happen.
More often than not this is simply not the case.

built environment and human farming

In the age of information the product has become the embodiment of pure information. This did not
however happen with the advent of the computer alone. The history of technology is a history of ever
greater abstraction. Nearly everything humans have intervened in has been changed or transformed
from organic to geometric. One need only look around to see that the human-made world is composed
of straight lines irregardless of the human bodies geometry. We have taken material and turned it
into what Flusser describes as an immutable idea- namely a knowable, definable, and workable unit.
We have built our environment out of such units in the form of boards, bricks, shingles, etc. A quick
survey of the building blocks of our human-made environment reveals very little in the way of organic
form. Instead our built environment, up until now, has been one of immutability in the form of rectan-

gular units. The intimate artifact on the other hand has referenced the hand both in its form and in its
making because it must fit into an organic reality responding the constraints of muscle and flesh. The
immutable in the form of Platonic solids differentiates the human from the organic. The fact that such
geometry is translatable into mathematical formulas adds power and reliability in human terms.
Linearity however is a human construct not limited to building materials but instead tied to our thinking and language through the causality of grammar and syntax. Every sentence contains a small
universe of actors, actions and objects acted upon so that our very way of communicating (and thinking) replicates that linear sense of time from which history is constructed. Pre-historic knowledge- oral
knowledge- was of course less severely shaped by information (writing) and therefore more organic.
The oral tradition as Donald Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things points out did however have its own shape or form- one defined by meter and rhyme so as to encode stories in a more
memorable way for ease of re-call. The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, in his essay Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, quotes Goethe as saying Literature is the fragment of fragments; the least of
what had happened and of what had been spoken was written down; of what had been written down,
only the smallest fraction was preserved.5 In the process of transitioning out of the oral tradition
and into the new system of writing, much knowledge was simply lost. Kittler refers to this transition
(technology) as the alphabetic monopoly- grammatology. Writing is one of the first storage systems
developed by humans to transport information thereby making it more stable and reliable. This remains a vital part of technologys history- stability and mobility (transferability). In the case of written
language, the technology consists of letters (26 for the English system) and a host of rules- grammar
to shape larger meanings.
The artifactual history however has not suffered the extreme trauma suffered by the older oral system of communication. The artifact has had a relatively continuous evolution- whatever was created
and remains in existence today can be reversed engineered, recast, or otherwise recreated. Even
the knowledge of making has an unbroken lineage encoded as it was in the hand and head of the
craftsperson and passed on through apprenticeships. Whatever we no longer value, we no longer
make. Oral language and its many (his)stories that were not translated directly into language (therefore amorphous) vanished in to the ether never to return. If anything remains unclear about the object
it is its context of use rather than its richness of detail, process of making, and its materiality. The artifact stands as a partial record of its own making- often accompanied by that other storage system, the
technical drawing and its many rules and grammar from orthographic mapping to perspectival representation. In the age of information a merging of media is now impacting the design process and even
production of the artifact. Kittler again writes: All can still be described in the terms McLuhan provided.... the contents of one medium are always other media: film and radio constitute the content of
television; record and tape the content of radio; silent movie and magnetic sound that of cinema; text,
telephone, and telegram that of the semi-media monopoly of the postal service. Since the beginning
of this century, when Lieben in Germany and DeForest in California developed the electronic tube, it
has become possible, in principle, to amplify and transmit signals. The vast systems of connected media that have come to exist since the 30s can tap into writing, film, and photography- the three storage
media-and connect and emit their signals at will. 6
These storage media are in themselves hollow carriers of information. We do not engaged sensually with the ink or paper required for writing or the celluloid film required for photography or cinema.
These materials are immaterial in that sense- carriers or translators of information only. They are storage media. While this term might better describe artifacts we now use to create data (in the form of
music, images, writing, etc.) older artifacts were also informed by technology. The click of the camera
can be traced to the tick of the escapement on a clock which broke time into discrete units as opposed
to a fluid whole. The click of the typewriter or the bleep of a button is a reminder of time captured (in
this case the literal capture of oral sounds through the alphabetic monopoly of the keyboard). Kittler

claims that Neitsches writing was affected by his use of the typewriter (actually its precursor- the writing ball) which was originally designed by the Danish pastor Malling Hansen to aid the deaf in communicating. Neitszche adopted the machine because of his own failing eyesight and commented that
this new medium changed his relationship to writing (according to Kittler).

timer interface as shroud and mechanism beneath

Many of our objects can be broken down into those that interrupt time or link directly to the clock (via
the machine) and those that dont. Furniture for example may lie in wait for a user but is not defined
by time, whereas the radio and most multi media are (although this is now changing with that wonderful device called an ipod and the emergence of untethered media- podcasting). Even cooking, that
fluid process of heating, boiling, and frying which is so elemental and essential to living, in the modern
era is timed or controlled by analog switches and knobs connecting it back to the clock and the calibrated machine. The very emergence of modern design coincides with the shrouding of the machine.
Modern designers chief role in the middle of the twentieth century was to camouflage the machine into
a unified whole with the minimum of controls to suggest a singular object not dictated by the machines
logic. However, while the mechanical aspects of the mechanism might have been hidden away, the
impact of the machines logic never fully disappeared.
With digital technology much of this dynamic has now disappeared. While still based on the oppositional logic of on/off, digitalization has allowed for the long sought after integration of media. While
previously the tape deck and the record player were discrete devices playing discrete media that could
be captured by cables accompanying some type of interface, the computer and digital technology in
general has eliminated that. Gone now is the bulky shroud- the former skin off older media in the form
of a pressed vinyl record, injection molded cassette and magnetic tape, film canister and negatives,
etc. Even the discrete nature of the object has mutated. The camera was a discrete device for capturing light on film in the form of negatives which had to be printed in a lab before viewing. The Polaroid
was an attempt to smuggle the darkroom into the device thus allowing the lab to disappear. There
was however no negative and therefore no easy opportunity for reproducing the Polaroid image- its
storage capacity was severely compromised by it convenience. The current digital cameras have not
only simplified this beyond belief, they have also folded the discrete devices into variations of each
other. The current still camera has a video function while the video camera has still photo capabilities. Information in the form of digital bits has de-materialized a large portion of the camera typology
to leave us with information devices as opposed to traditional cameras (even the cell phone has
mutated into a storage device- phone book, camera, video screen). Likewise the ipod or other MP3
players have transformed the unique and static nature of storage media into a space where music,
data, video, and images can all reside without distinction. But has the pot really changed?

alpha-numeric keypad on laptop and cellphone

The pot is what informs all of these devices indirectly by suggesting hollowness. The pot as container
is the most powerful paradigm design currently has, and one it is exploiting because of the possibilities
afforded by digitalized nformation. Hollow in the sense of possessing the capability to hold immaterial
data like images, music, video, and, that most old fashioned of data, writing. But even the fabrication
of the pot has now been transformed by information in the form of G-code and the Cartesian logic of
computer aided design which allows surface data to be mapped virtually and then translated physically
to a machine through a wholly abstract language: G00-Rapid positioning, G01-Linear interpolation,
G02-CW circular interpolation, G17- X-Y plane selection, G40-Tool radius compensation off, G4-Tool
radius compensation left, G42-Tool radius compensation right, G43-Tool offset compensation positive,
and so on through its own grammar of motion. All objects are now run through the new monopoly of
digital data thus allowing new products to rush to market in a ever faster cycle. The interface of the
computer empowers the designer to build virtual models with real geometry for translation into physical tools. The bowl, plastic, ceramic, metal or any other material can be created digitally, machined
virtually, and sent to a milling machine (computer numerical controlled) cnc milling machine for production of a tool which can act as a mold. Its data can also be outputed directly, much like a printed page,
to a rapid prototyping machine for a one-off product.

data as object- rapid prototype model of Milan; cnc of pattern for ceramic casting
Flusser eludes to this reality in the essay: We have pieces of equipment that display empty, but
coloured, so-called fractal forms. This potters way of seeing, this X-ray vision, for which phenomena are fleeting veils concealing eternal forms, is equivalent to a theoretical view. And this view has

in our day developed a new pottery technology, an electronic ceramics. We have pieces of equipment
that display empty, but coloured, so-called artificial images made of algorithms on computer screens.
Anyone looking at such images has in front of them the empty, unbreakable vessels hiding behind
phenomena.7 The designer has leveraged the technology but has not necessarily thought deeply
enough about all of its implications: Empty pots are hollow vessels. Eternal Ideas are pure, hollow
thoughts. Mathematical formulae are hollow propositions without content. The purest of all Ideas, the
highest of all Forms, is the Godhead. Because pure Ideas are hollow, they are unbreakably eternal.
The Lord is eternal. And this is what the computer people, these potters of form, are beginning to see.
They are acting like the Lord (sicut Deus) when they design empty forms, fill them with possibilities
and thus create alternative worlds. They shall be broken by the Lord.8 This strident proclamation is in
the end undermined, Flussers perceived intention in this essay: Only recently have we begun to learn
what pottery is all about: about producing empty forms in order to in-form what is amorphous. About
what the Lord was doing on the first day of Creation. This is the real Big Bang: that we have finally
learnt how to make pots. And the prophecy says: We shall be broken by the Lord along with our pots,
before we are able to do it as well as, or even better than, Him. This is how it is with interpretations.
They are put forward in order to be falsified i.e. in order to provoke new, equally falsifiable interpretations. This final statement can be read as a prayer in view of the ominous prophecy that has been the
subject of this interpretation.9
Thus Flusser ends much as he began- with a provocation and an open ended interpretation. Is
Flussers prayer that design take on the ethical responsibility implied in a god-like power or is it that
design leverage the fullest potential of the empty pot paradigm? I suggest that Flusser, like Kafka,
is presenting a parable that can be read and re-read repeatedly over a long period of time and reinterpreted as situations change. The designer has the tools and the capabilities to create like never
before. With such power comes ethical and humanistic responsibility. The empty vessel like the half
empty glass are all a matter of speculation that add a different kind of depth to the design imperative.
1.Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, Vilem Flusser, Reaktion Books, Limited, 1999, p. 100
2 Ibid, p. 99
3. Ibid, p. 99
4. Learning from Milan: Design and the Second Modernity, Andrea Branzi, MIT Press, 1988, p. 56
5.Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, October, Vol. 41. (Summer, 1987), pp. 105.
6, ibid pp. 102-103.
7. Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, Vilem Flusser, Reaktion Books, Limited, 1999, pp. 101-102
8. bid, p.102
9. ibid, p.103

converged digital devices- modern pots