Virilio and Visual Culture

John Armitage is Emeritus Professor of Media Arts at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK. He is the author of Luxury Philosophy (Bloomsbury 2025) and Luxury and Visual Culture (Bloomsbury 2020), and is on the editorial boards of journals such as Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption, and Luxury Studies: The In Pursuit of Luxury Journal. 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).

The diversity of the contributors in this collection testifies to Virilio’s rich life of intellectual engagement, from the 1950s and his writings on architecture through to the 1980s and his more celebrated contributions to debates on the sociocultural effects of cinematics, vision technologies, surveillance and the role of accelerated cultural developments in advanced societies ... There is much in these essays to satisfy the high theorist and researcher, and also the museum curator, painter and student of visual culture. As Sylvère Lotringer claims, this work is a ‘breakthrough in Virilio Studies’. I agree and it is long overdue.

• Acknowledgements; List of Figures; 1. Aesthetics, Vision and Speed: An Introduction to Virilio and Visual Culture, John Armitage and Ryan Bishop; 2. The Illusions of Zero Time, Paul Virilio; 3. Towards a New Ecology of Time, Joy Garnett; 4. Strangers to the Stars: Abstraction, Aeriality, Aspect Perception, John Beck; 5. Desert Wars: Virilio and the Limits of ‘Genuine Knowledge’, Caren Kaplan; 6. Light Weapons/Darkroom Shadows: Photography, Cinema, War, John Phillips; 7. History in the ‘Mis-en-Abyme of the Body’: Ranbir Kaleka and the ‘Art of Auschwitz’ after Virilio, Tania Roy; 8. Spectres of Perception, or the Illusion of Having the Time to See: The Geopolitics of Objects, Apprehension and Movement in Bashir Makhoul’s ‘Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost’, Ryan Bishop; 9. The Event, Jordan Crandall; 10. The Face of the Figureless: Aesthetics, Sacred Humanism and the Accident of Art, John Armitage; 11. What We Do is Secrete: On Virilio, Planetarity and Data Visualisation, Benjamin H. Bratton; 12. Relics of Acceleration: A Field Guide, Gair Dunlop; 13. The Production of the Present, Ian James; Notes on Contributors; Index.