Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK) and Research Associate at Witwatersrand University (South Africa). His most recent book projects are Cold War Imaginaries: Technology, Temporality, Culture (co-edited with John Beck forthcoming 2026 Edinburgh University Press) and Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (co-authored with John Beck, Duke University Press 2020). Bishop is lead editor of the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP) and the book series associated with the journal (Duke UP) and the series “Technicities” (co-edited with Jussi Parikka, Edinburgh University Press). John Phillips is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Contested Knowledge: A Guide to Critical Theory (Zed, 2000), co-editor, with Ryan Bishop and Wei-Wei Yeo, of Beyond Description: Space Historicity Singapore (Routledge, 2004), co-editor, with Ryan Bishop and Wei-Wei Yeo, of Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes (Routledge 2003), and co-editor, with Lyndsey Stonebridge, of Reading Melanie Klein (Routledge, 1998).

• Section 1: Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics; 1. The Slow and the Blind: Unhinging the Senses to Harness Them; 2. Sighted Weapons and Modernist Opacity: Aesthetics, Poetics, Prosthetics; 3. We Make it Beautiful; 4. We Don't Make it Beautiful; Section 2: Broadcast, Hinge, Emergency; 5. Ventriloquism, Broadcast and Technologies of Narrative; 6. The Curious Logic of the Hinge; 7. Manufacturing Emergencies; 8. Among the Blind and the Delay; Section 3: Surveillance, Targeting, Containment; 9. Strategies and Technologies of Containment: Unmanning the Homeland and Containing the Political; 10. Scoping Out; 11. Satellites of Love and War.