On Vilém Flusser, Augmented Images and Site-Specific Apparitions

The 12th Bienal de São Paulo in 1973 is not an easy event to retrace or understand. It took place during Brazil’s military dictatorship, a time of censorship and political control, and in the shadow of the 1969 call for international boycott. Against this backdrop, this edition of the Bienal holds many fragmented attempts at structural rethinking and creative resistance, as Isobel Whitelegg points out.¹ One of the loose sections of the Bienal was “Art and Communication,” proposing a format that moved away from traditional white-cube exhibitions. Behind this attempt was, among others, Vilém Flusser, a Czech-born philosopher who emigrated to Brazil in 1940 to escape the rise of Nazism in Europe. Flusser spent several decades in Brazil, developing a far-reaching and at times polemical corpus spanning language, communication, and cultural studies rooted in existentialist and phenomenological theory. In 1972, just before the Bienal opened, he fled once again—this time back to Europe—to escape the oppressive military regime of President Emílio Garrastazu Médici.

Flusser was part of the team which developed the thematic framework of the Bienal, suggesting “a new system of organization whereby ideas related to specific artists would be used to create interdisciplinary teams involving Brazilian participants.”² This ambitious and hard-to-finance project was ultimately reduced to a list of themes following his resignation from the project. Nonetheless, traces of his ideas—such as incorporating real-time audience participation—could still be sensed in some of the installations that came to inhabit the Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo. Works like Grupo Segurança’s Faixa de segurança [Safety Strip] staged a pedestrian crossing within the Bienal’s Pavilion, transforming it into a bustling and challenging space that reflected urban and political tensions. Similarly, Vera de Figueiredo’s Visite o Inferno e encontre você [Visit Hell and Meet Yourself] invited participants to climb into an open mouth and follow the “tongue” inside the installation, where they encountered a mirror reflecting their own image. Under impossible conditions, this edition of the Bienal and Flusser’s suggested modules introduced experimental elements that challenged the regime and presented alternative ideas of art and exhibition-making. It emphasized processes over finalized objects and encouraged new forms of interaction between artists and audiences.

More than half a century later, Apparitions is an experiment that seeks to continue down the same path. For the 36th edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, which similarly places its thematic weight on processes, an augmented expansion of the Bienal expands copies, echoes, archival sources and other digital apparitions relating to the artworks presented in Brazil to site-specific locations around the world. Each day of the Bienal, a new apparition is revealed in its chosen context, adding to the exhibited work a contextual anchor elsewhere. Using Augmented Reality (AR) and GPS localization tools provided by the nonprofit WAVA platform, these digital artworks are made accessible solely on-site and appear as part of their environment and respective contexts. Below, I will briefly trace the structure of the augmented image—both in relation to the technology itself and to the environment it inhabits, drawing on Flusser’s mapping of the technical image––and discuss the potentials and urgencies of such virtual apparitions. 

To Unvail 

Unlike a simple overlay or projection, AR seamlessly integrates virtual components into the immediate physical environment, making them appear as tangible objects within the space. By turning on the camera mode (live-view) of handheld devices—smartphones, tablets—the surrounding is being translated into a technical image in real-time (to already borrow Flusser’s term). Into this computed surface enters the augmented element—be it in 3D, 2D, or even solely sonic—in which it appears in relation to the other elements around it. This effect is generated by the device’s capacity to analyse, map, and process its surroundings in milliseconds, enabling precise placement of virtual elements within the hybrid scene. What seems to be a flat representation is in fact a composed three-dimensional virtual space. 

Elsewhere, I argued that when a virtual artwork emerges into the “real world,” two things happen simultaneously.³ First, it engages with the site where it is placed, challenging and transforming that space in a manner similar to how, say, street art, graffiti, or performance art reshape their surroundings. Secondly, the augmentation unveils the underlying infrastructure—the vast and complex network that sustains the illusion of AR. This dual effect is similar to the double function of a screen, which both opens a window into a space (a world) and simultaneously blocks (screens) whatever is physically behind it. The AR image is hence both transparent and opaque, present yet absent.

In his book Ins Universum der technischen Bilder [Into the Universe of Technical Images], written in 1985, Flusser argues, rather counterintuitively, that technical images such as photographs or videos have nothing to do with representation of reality. “All technical images are visualisations,” he claims, as they result from a machine processing raw data and transforming it into a visual format.⁴ With a digital camera, for example, light data is converted to electronic signals that the software translates into an output that we, as viewers, can comprehend visually. Following this logic, we can see that technically produced images are not mere reflections of reality but rather about abstracting, converting and displaying information through processes of computation. These are no seemingly passive, neutral tools with which we can see the world “objectively” as is but active processes of mechanic interpretation. 

For Flusser, this correlates to a more profound shift in our being-in-the-world. Technical images are no longer created by humans who make intentional choices about what to represent, how, or why. Like a painter would do. Instead, they are generated by machines that process data according to pre-programmed algorithms, often without any human intervention beyond setting the parameters of the machine. In that sense, for Flusser, a painting of a house would be more representative than a photo of the same house, even when the latter pretends to be more objective.⁵ Being an abstract visualisation of data, the technical image is no longer a sign or symbol of something beyond itself (today, with the rise of AI-generated imagery, it is much easier to follow and comprehend Flusser’s logic).

The live-preview/live-view function is a fascinating case study and a crucial component of the augmented image. Introduced in digital cameras in the mid-1990s, live-preview allows real-time imaging by displaying what the camera’s sensor sees directly on a screen. On smartphones, for example, where the screen is the device, this mode creates an illusion of transparency, as the screen “vanishes” to become a seamless window into the world. Here, the magic trick is double. First, the technical image created by the smartphone processors in real-time masquerades as a representation and not a visualisation and, secondly, the disappearance act of the device itself. When the screen becomes “transparent,” the entire apparatus, i.e. the device itself, with its bolts, nodes, cables, and processors lying behind it, vanishes. Moreover, it is the entire plant-wide infrastructure—server farms, satellites, underwater cables, and transmission networks working invisibly to deliver instantaneous feedback—which is rendered invisible. This “motion blur” of immediacy hides the physical, environmental, and ethical underpinnings of the technology. As the frame of the smartphone becomes thinner and thinner in the hands of the designers, so does the immersion of these devices into our lives, to the point where it’s hard to tell when one ends and the other begins. 

Then, like frost on a window or a crack in the screen, when an augmentation appears, it renders the screen visible as such. It reveals the surface it inhabits, exposing the illusion of seamlessness on which the entire apparatus depends while at the same time disturbing the seemingly neutral space of the live-view image. How can this complex augmentation appear within this flat, simple “window to the world”? Upon closer inspection, it reveals the live-view image as what it is—real-time processed visualisation of data rendered to be recognised by us as a continuation of our surroundings. 

To Augment

When placed site-specifically, an augmented artwork does not simply reveal the opaqueness of the device itself (a screen that screens, a computer which processes). It simultaneously activates the immediate environment (a world, a space). Elsewhere, I referred to this phenomenon in Arendtian terms as the augmented space of appearance, emphasising the relevance of the work to the site it inhabits and within which it (uninvitedly) manifests.⁶ According to Flusser, the technical image has transformed public space from a central arena for communication and assembly into a domain of programmed disinformation. It’s through his analysis of cinema and film that we can get a glimpse of the augmented space of appearance and its political potential. 

The technical image keeps its receivers away from each other and has weakened, if not disassembled, the political power of the public space. Flusser argues that the market, the school, and the public square are no longer places where one goes to inform oneself, as one gets all the information directly into the private space. Even as people still assemble, it is not a political assembly, as even “the goal of the political demonstration is not to change the world but to be photographed.”⁷

The one exception in Flusser’s argument could be, in his words, film, as cinema appears to still draw people from the private into the public and create a collective, reflective space. Yet he suggests that this public nature is merely incidental—rooted in outdated technology that requires receivers to gather in one place to access the sender:

“One could claim that in film, a technical image makes a political gesture, drawing people from the private into the public. And if cinema were in fact a theater, that is to say, a place of visibility, of “theory,” then one could say that film is a case of a technical image showing its viewer how to see through appearances and liberate himself from the image. Unfortunately, this is a mistaken view. Film is shown in cinemas not to awaken a political and philosophical consciousness in its viewers but because it relies on a technology from the nineteenth century, when receivers still needed to go to the sender.”⁸

Site-specific AR, curiously, has the potential to fulfil this promise in ways cinema cannot. Unlike film, public space virtual interventions do not rely on a fixed, disconnected black-box location to summon a shared experience. Instead, it integrates virtual content directly into real-world environments, enabling technical images to exist within technical images—an augmentation on a live-view surface—and interact with the space itself. These augmentations recontextualize the physical space, making visible layers of relations often kept hidden. At the same time, it destabilises the technical image by making it reflect within itself, like the mirror at the end of de Figueiredo’s installation. In so doing, localized AR engages viewers in active processes of participation and interpretation, potentially awakening political and philosophical consciousness that paves the way to an augmented space of appearance. 

To Appear

Not unlike Flusser’s ambitions for the 12th Bienal de São Paulo, Apparitions seeks to challenge conventional notions of exhibition-making and art’s place in the public sphere. By anchoring virtual works to specific sites, Apparitions enables communal experiences rooted in immediate socio-political contexts, blurring the borders between sender and receiver and bridging different localities and temporalities. With numerous site-specific interventions worldwide, it fosters gathering and active participation in spaces where technical images no longer dominate passively but invite interrogation. Each virtual apparition acts as a spark—a transient yet meaningful encounter that transforms public space into a site of visibility and reflection, where appearances and technical images are questioned, and political or theoretical consciousness can emerge.

Reading Flusser today, one cannot help but feel a sense of melancholia when confronted with one of his greatest blind spots—his inability to foresee how effortlessly for-profit companies and individuals could seize these digital spaces and claim them as their own. Indeed, in a moment defined by the rise of tech oligarchies, feudalists and the dominance of cloud capital, our shared digital and physical spaces are increasingly shaped by the priorities of a few powerful corporations. Leaving these spaces entirely in the hands of tech giants suggests that there is no escape from zones of control, surveillance, and profit-driven disinformation. Instead, maintaining openings for artistic intervention within these same technological frameworks is vital—not only to reclaim these tools as platforms for creative and critical engagement but also to destabilise the apparatus itself, resisting the monopolisation of narratives and ensuring spaces for dialogue and dissent remain accessible to all.

Apparitions invites us to rethink where art belongs and who has the power to present it—and where. It trespasses into unexpected spaces, appearing vivid and defiant yet remaining hidden from plain sight. By linking artistic interventions to specific localities while connecting them to a global network, Apparitions provides a dynamic means to sustain critical conversations across distances, fostering new tools for assembly and dialogue. It is an experimental blueprint for reclaiming our already-hybrid public spaces and expanding exhibitions beyond their traditional space-time limitations into specific contexts and communities around the world.