In fact, the mango, the dumpling, the mother’s hands, the mother herself—all of these meaningful symbols begin to function differently. They begin to resemble what Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilem Flusser calls the “technical image.” In Flusser’s writing, the technical image is an image produced by an apparatus, rather than a human. These technical images transmit information using digital processes that viewers/users don’t always fully understand. Caroline Busta, cultural critic, writes: Flusser’s technical images “compress and unpack information using digital abstraction, computation, and/or simulation.”

To Flusser, the technical image functions more than it describes. The technical image becomes a kind of 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.

Perhaps the stories in the first couple of scenes have become familiar to you: watching a mother cook, watching hands covered with flour wrapping dumplings or rolling dough. You know what it means to measure with your heart, you know the cut fruit apologies, the plastic bags under the sink—symbols of tenacity and survival. I can write all of these things about her. But when I speak to her and we still don’t know each other, when I think of her entire life I cannot imagine, I still feel so far away. We are two different people with two different lives.

Inside the heart of that distance, I feel myself operating as a functionary, creating the experience of nearness and knowing through the execution of a learned programming. And I think about the way the symbols, the technical images I generate, exist in an entirely different environment than my mother has access to. It’s not a bad thing—I have come to feel so close to so many others. But my mother, somehow, still evades me.

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