This brief essay traces the evolving role of the screen in the writing of high-speed theorist Paul Virilio. In Virilio’s writing, the screen serves as the locus of lost dimensions of space and technological transformations of time; it modifies our relation to space, is a surface-mount for its ‘accelerated virtualization’. If Virilio does not theorize the technological differences between film, television and the computer, I argue, it is because, for him, the screen remains in a metaphoric register, a virtual surface which overrides any specificities of its media formation.
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(1991a) The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e) .
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(1988) ‘The Third Window: An Interview with Paul Virilio’, in Cynthia Schneider and Brian Wallis (eds) Global Television, trans. Yvonne Shafir, with a preface by Jonathan Crary, pp. 185-197. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
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(See also Feher, Michel and Kwinter, Sanford [1984] ‘The Overexposed City’, trans. A. Hustvedt in Zone 1/2. New York: Urzone .)
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(1989) War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso .
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(1994b)The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose. Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press/British Film Institute .
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(2001a) ‘Interview with Jerome Sans’, in John Armitage (ed.) Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, trans. Henry Martin, pp. 113-120. London: Sage .
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(2001b) The Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener. London: Athlone Press .
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(1995) The Art of the Motor, 1995, trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press .
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(1998) John Beckman (ed.) The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture, pp. 176-187. New York: Princeton Architectural Press .
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(1997) Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso .
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(2001c) ‘The Time of the Trajectory: Interview with Andreas Ruby’, in John Armitage (ed.) Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, trans. Patrice Riemens, pp. 58-65. London: Sage .
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(2000) The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso .
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Virilio, Paul (2001) ‘From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond: Interview with John Armitage’, in Patrice Riemens (ed.) Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, pp. 1-47. London: Sage .
Benjamin, Walter (1969[1936]) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Harry Zohn (trans.) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books .
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Friedberg, Anne (2003) ‘CD and DVD’, in Dan Harries (ed.) The New Media Book, pp. 30-39. London: BFI Publications .
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Giedion, Siegfried (1991[1940]) Space, Time, Architecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
20.
Valéry, Paul (1964[1928]) ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’, in Ralph Mannheim (trans.) Aesthetics. New York: Pantheon Books. ‘La Conquète de l’ubiquité’, first published in De la Musique avant toute chose. Éditions du Tambourinaire, 1928; in Pièces sur l’art (1934) in Oeuvres II, 1960. Paris: Pleiade; trans anon. ‘On Music’, The Commonweal(15 October 1930).
