Edited by one of the leading Virilio authority's, this book offers the reader a guide through Virilio's work. Using the interview form, Virilio speaks incisively and at length about a vast assortment of cultural and theoretical topics, including architecture and `speed-space', `chronopolitics', art and technoculture, modernism, postmodernism and `hypermodernism', the time of the trajectory and the `information bomb'. His thoughts on Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, the performance artist Stelarc, the Persian War and the Kosovo War, are also gathered together.
Cutting-edge introduction to and extension of the work of Paul Virilio and it's current directions. Contains contributions by the world's leading Virilio scholars, as well as a newly-translated text by Virilio.
Cyberspace and cybertechnology have impacted on every aspect of our lives. Western society, culture, politics and economics are now all intricately bound with cyberspace. Living With Cyberspace brings together the leading cyber-theorists of North America, Britain and Australia to map the present and the future of cyberspace.Presenting a guidebook to our new world, both the theory and the practice, the book covers subjects as diverse as androids, biotech, electronic commerce, the acceleration of everyday life, access to information, the alliance between the military and the entertainment industries, feminism, democratic practice and human consciousness itself.Together, the essays--divided into separately introduced sections on society , culture, politics and economics--present a systematic and state-of-the-art overview of technology and society in the 21st Century.Contributors: John Armitage, Verena Andermatt Conley, James Der Derian, William H. Dutton, Phil Graham, Tim Jordan, Wan-Ying Ling, David Lyon, Ian Miles, Joanne Roberts, Saskia Sassen, Cathryn Vasseleu, McKenzie Wark, Frank Webster.
Theology, Ethics, and Technology in the Work of Jacques Ellul and Paul Virilio examines biographical and textual connections between sociologist-theologian Jacques Ellul and philosopher-phenomenologist Paul Virilio. Through an examination of their embeddedness in the socio-historical context of postwar France, Michael Morelli identifies a relationship between these critics of technology that bears the marks of a nascent theological tradition. He shows from various vantage points how Ellul and Virilio’s nascent tradition exposes technology as modernity’s primary idol; and, how these thinkers use multiple disciplines—including history, sociology, philosophy, phenomenology, theology, and ethics—to resist the perilous consequences of the modern world’s worship of power and the kinds of technologies this misdirected worship produces. Jacques Ellul’s death in 1994 and Paul Virilio’s death in 2018 may have prevented the maturation of this nascent theological tradition, but this book will aid in this tradition’s ripening through the presentation of an illuminating way to read these two unique, prophetic intellectuals.
The first reference to literary and cultural representations of war in 20th-century English & US literature and film.Covering the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the War on Terror, this Companion reveals the influence of modern wars on the imagination.These newly researched and innovative essays connect ’high’ literary studies to the engagement of film and theatre with warfare, extensively covers the literary and cultural evaluation of the technologies of war and open the literary field to genre fiction.Divided into 5 sections: 20th-Century Wars and Their Literatures; Bodies, Behaviours, Cultures; The Cultural Impact of the Technologies of Modern War; The Spaces of Modern War & Genres of War Culture.Key Features: * All-new original essays commissioned from major critics and cultural historians.* Reflects the way war studies are currently being taught and researched: in the volume’s approach, structure and breadth of coverage.* For scholars: core arguments and detailed research topics.* For students: Historically grounded topic- and genre-based essays, useful forstudying the modern period and war modules.
Paul Virilio is known as the high priest of speed. His discourses on speed, military technology, and modernity are highly influential among urban and cultural theorists, but he has influenced the work of many in other fields as well, including media theory, international relations, art history, cultural politics, architecture, and peace studies, to name a few. The first authoritative study of the life and work of Virilio, Steve Redhead's Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture explains and analyses Virilio's work, correcting many mistaken interpretations that have surfaced in the literature over the years. Although now retired from his position at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris, Virilio remains an active political and cultural thinker and commentator with a significant catalogue of work stretching back to the 1950s. Redhead reviews Virilio's intellectual career, from his days hanging out in an architect's office in the 1960s to his recent creation of a major art foundation exhibition on 'the accident' in the wake of 11 September 2001. Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture is a rigorous and accessible introduction to Virilio that places him in the pantheon of critical thinkers in today's accelerated culture.
From the Renaissance idea of the painting as an open window to the nested windows and multiple images on today's cinema, television, and computer screens: a cultural history of the metaphoric, literal, and virtual window. As we spend more and more of our time staring at the screens of movies, televisions, computers, and handheld devices—"windows" full of moving images, texts, and icons—how the world is framed has become as important as what is in the frame. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg examines the window as metaphor, as architectural component, and as an opening to the dematerialized reality we see on the screen. In De pictura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti famously instructed painters to consider the frame of the painting as an open window. Taking Alberti's metaphor as her starting point, Friedberg tracks shifts in the perspectival paradigm as she gives us histories of the architectural window, developments in glass and transparency, and the emerging apparatuses of photography, cinema, television, and digital imaging. Single-point perspective—Alberti's metaphorical window—has long been challenged by modern painting, modern architecture, and moving-image technologies. And yet, notes Friedberg, for most of the twentieth century the dominant form of the moving image was a single image in a single frame. The fractured modernism exemplified by cubist painting, for example, remained largely confined to experimental, avant-garde work. On the computer screen, however, where multiple 'windows' coexist and overlap, perspective may have met its end. In this wide-ranging book, Friedberg considers such topics as the framed view of the camera obscura, Le Corbusier's mandates for the architectural window, Eisenstein's opinions on the shape of the movie screen, and the multiple images and nested windows commonly displayed on screens today. The Virtual Window proposes a new logic of visuality, framed and virtual: an architecture not only of space but of time.
The first genuine appraisal of pioneering French art and technology critic Paul Virilio's contribution to contemporary art, photography, film, television and more.
This book analyses some of the key problems explored in Paul Virilio’s theorising on war and security. Paul Virilio has developed a provocative series of writings on how modern societies have shaped the acceleration of military/security technologies – and how technologies of security and acceleration have transformed society, economy and politics. His examination of the connections between geopolitics, war, speed, technology and control are viewed as some of the most challenging and disturbing interventions on the politics of security in the twenty-first century, interventions that help us understand a world that confronts problems that increasingly emerge from the desire to make life safer, faster, networked and more efficient. Security, Technology and Global Politics examines some of the key concepts and concerns in Virilio’s writings on security, society and technology: endo-colonization, fear and the war on terror; cities and panic; cinema and war; ecological security and integral accidents; universities and ideas of progress. Critics often point to an apocalyptic or fatalistic element to Virilio’s writings on global politics, but this book challenges this apocalyptic reading of Virilio’s work, suggesting that – while he doesn’t provide us with easy solutions to the problems we face – the political force in Virilio’s work comes from the questions he leaves us with about speed, security and global politics in times of crisis, terror and fear. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, political theory, sociology, political geography, cultural studies and IR in general.
