This view of ourselves in a situation (this “reflexive” or “critical” vision) is characteristic of our being-in-the-world: we are in the world, and we see it, we “know” about it. But to say it once more: there is nothing “objective” about this. The gesture with which we release ourselves from a particular role and which is just as available to the man with the apparatus remains bound to a “place” from which we can assert that we are experiencing the same situation twice. This “place” is the basis for a consensus, for intersubjective recognition. If we encounter the man with the apparatus on this basis, we don’t see the situation “better”; rather, we see it intersubjectively, and we see ourselves intersubjectively.

—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

“A fish simply belongs in water and I belong to a life of solitude.”—Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1901

“[T]o observe a situation is to manipulate it, or to put it another way, observation changes the observed phenomenon. To observe a situation is, to the same extent, to be changed by it. Observation changes the observer. … The objectivity of an image (an idea) can only ever be the result of manipulation (observation) of one situation or another. Each idea is false to the extent that it manipulates what it takes into consideration, and in this sense, it is ‘art,’ which is to say fiction. Nevertheless, there are ideas that are true in another sense, namely, in really grasping what is under consideration. That may be what Nietzsche meant when he said that art is better than truth.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

“It is banal to regard the cinema as the archetypal womb, that windowless cave that means both birth and death, even though the similarities between cinema and Plato’s cave, with the moving shadows on the wall, are so striking that it’s impossible to read Plato’s myth without thinking of films. Banal as the archetypal connection may be, then, the thought that Plato was the first film critic is a provocative one.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

“There are two levels of history: the four-dimensional one of daily life and the three-dimensional one of the Cartesian basilicas. Complex feedback links the two levels, but the tendency is to prefer the three-dimensional level, trompe-l’oeil as it is, over the four-dimensional, which resists, presents obstacles. We cannot dismiss the possibility that in the future, existentially significant history will play out before an audience on walls and television screens rather than in time and space. That would be authentic posthistory. That is why film is the “art” of our time and the filmic gesture is that of “new people” with whose being we are not entirely in sympathy.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

“Listening to music is the gesture that defeats the skin by transforming it from a boundary into a connection. It is the gesture of ecstasy.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures