The Society of the Screen by Martha Schwendener - ISBN: 9780262051224
Paperback
Screens could enslave or liberate: one philosopher foresaw our digital future.

The Society of the Screen

Vilém Flusser’s Radical Prescience

$69.64

  • Paperback

    406 pages

  • Release Date

    14 April 2026

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Summary

How a lifelong engagement with experimental art informed the brilliant Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilem Flusser’s early vision of a world dominated by glowing screens.

Predicting the importance of technology and images for the twenty-first century as early as the 1970s, Vilem Flusser warned, “the basic structure of our thinking is about to experience a mutation.” The bewitching images and screens that surround us could lead toward a centrally programmed, totalitarian society—or to an…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780262051224
ISBN-10:0262051222
Author:Martha Schwendener
Publisher:MIT Press Ltd
Imprint:MIT Press
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:406
Release Date:14 April 2026
Weight:810g
Dimensions:28mm x 160mm x 239mm
A-Format
B-Format
C-Format
The Society of the Screen by Martha Schwendener - ISBN: 9780262051224
160 × 239 mm
A4
mm / in
What They're Saying

Critics Review

ENDORSEMENTS

“Smartly illustrated and beautifully written, Martha Schwendener’s timely book provides a deep dive into the work of a thinker about images and visual information who has never seemed more relevant than right now.”
—Geoffrey Batchen, author of Negative/Positive: A History of Photography

“A highly innovative book that overcomes the still widely held reductive view of Vilém Flusser as a media theorist by bringing his lifelong interest in art to the forefront.”
—Rainer Guldin, Editor-in-Chief, Flusser Studies

REVIEWS

“Throughout her book, Schwendener weaves together imagery, critique, and history…Society of the Screen is chockablock with many such fascinating images, all by artists who are rarely the usual suspects.”
—The Village Voice

About The Author

Martha Schwendener

Martha Schwendener is an art historian and an art critic for The New York Times. She is a visiting associate professor at New York University and a researcher in residence at the Vilem Flusser Archive, Berlin. She is the editor of Vilem Fusser’s Essays // Artforum, and her criticism and essays have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Critical Inquiry, The New Yorker, and October, among other publications.

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