The shorthand, at this point, might be familiar to you. You’ve read about the grating questions from classmates about the “stinky” packed lunches, about Chinese School and where we are “from.” You’ve stood behind our moms and watched them cook through our eyes, hands covered with flour from wrapping dumplings, rolling dough, perfectly portioning filling. You’ve asked for family recipes and heard the responses—measure by taste. Measure with your heart. Measure until your ancestors tell you to stop. (It never tastes the same when you make it, and naturally you wonder what this says about your authenticity, your identity, your belonging and selfhood.) There are sliced fruit apologies and plastic bags under the sink, symbolic of tenacity and survival. You’re familiar with the language barrier that separates us from our grandparents, how guilty we feel wrapping our tongues around languages we may have known as babies but since lost.

To Flusser, the technical image functions more than it describes. The technical image becomes a map, or model, that contains far more information about the program which produced it (what we might call the apparatus) than it does about the subject of the image. According to Flusser, an apparatus is not just a machine, as we might imagine (like a camera), but rather a system that functions automatically using a feedback loop between itself and the functionaries of the apparatus—the people who operate within the system and are programmed by it. In this case, the program is the writing; the functionary—myself.

connect

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substrate