In the cities of the beyond: an interview with Paul Virilio

At the request of Open, the cultural theoretician John Armitage interviewed the French urbanist and philosopher Paul Virilio (b. 1932, Paris). A discussion on the future of the city

Art and Fear : an introduction.

Following the controversial reception of ‘La Procedure Silence’ (2000) Virilio felt the English translation of ‘Art and Fear’ needed an introduction to clarify his views on contemporary art, technology and the body. For Continuum, the success of output 1 made Armitage the obvious choice. Output 2 links CARcentre activities to Holocaust research at Northumbria. In 2007, the School of Arts and Social Sciences appointed Konopka-Klus (curator of the Auschwitz Museum) as Visiting Fellow, following a series of highly successful lectures on the role of art at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was organised as part of an interdisciplinary project that makes Northumbria the only UK University with formal links to Auschwitz, and with a Holocaust Studies module that offers field trips to Auschwitz as part of the syllabus. Whilst working on this output (and an associated study: ‘The Aesthetics of Auschwitz’, HTV 50, Amsterdam [2003]) Armitage helped Rowe develop a theoretical understanding of the politics of suffering, for an AHRC funded practice-led doctorate entitled: Communicating Pain: Can physical pain, especially gynaecological pain and its associated psychological effects, be communicated and understood through art? Armitage’s introduction complements studies such as Nicholas Zurbrugg’s ‘Hyperviolence and Hypersexuality: Paul Virilio’ (Eyeline, 45, autumn/winter 2001). The output led to Armitage being asked to be keynote speaker at ‘Paul Virilio und die Künste’, an international conference at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe, Germany, 2006. Armitage presented a paper entitled ‘Virilio Over Hypermodern America: On the Recent Art of Jordan Crandall, Joy Garnett, and Elin O’Hara Slavick’. The paper will shortly be published in an edited book by Peter Weibel, the Director of ZKM. It will also be entitled ‘Paul Virilio und die Künste’, and will be published in German, by ZKM, in collaboration with publishers Merve Verlag, in Berlin, December 2007

Radicalizing refamiliarization

In this short article, our aim is to consider contemporary American visual culture through a contribution to the question concerning Barack Obama. However, our article is not a work of academic philosophy, art theory, or even a description of the theoretical humanities. Rather, it is a postmodern meditation on the condition of American appropriation art

The spatial coherence of thermal light sources

Imperial Users onl

The effectiveness of fiber-filled concrete : The application of an old technique to solve a modern problem

Using an analogy between the conduction of electricity and the conduction of heat, a thermal problem has been recast in terms of an electrical circuit, facilitating the variation of physical properties. The electrical model provided an answer to the question of ‘what is the effect of different fiber additives on the conduction of heat in a typical concrete floor?’. The model used an amount of heat energy, representative of that collected during one day on a photovoltaic cell of area 1 m2 located at 45 degrees North and was applied to heating coils laid between the sub-floor and main floor. Quantitative results are presented for the case of a steel fiber (SF) additive compared to a glass fiber (GF) additive. The SF additive conducted the heat more efficiently than the GF additive but the delay in peak outputs was similar. The results are an essential first step in a cost benefit analysis

Time, space, and the new media machine of the terrorphone

In this short article, the author is concerned with how the contemporary form of the telephone, a new media machine which was of deep-rooted significance for Marshall McLuhan, promotes our obsession with forms of shared participation and social implosion. The author argues that the form of the telephone involves a complex abolition of our sense of space, interwoven with unexpected socio-cultural effects, which then create new subjectivities as well as new forms of decentralization that are intuited but not fully understood. To politicize these effects, and following the revelations of the American whistleblower Edward Snowden, the author identifies the form of the mobile telephone as a new form of media and argues that it is no longer an ‘extension of man’, as McLuhan suggested, but an extension of the US State, which is producing new forms of socio-cultural collapse. The author then explores how the remote-controlled time and space of what he calls the ‘terrorphone’ cultivates, among other things, the contemporary visualization of speech. Finally, he questions the desirability of unrelenting mobile telephone interaction as our only ‘intelligent’ choice today when such interaction is, contrary to McLuhan, not a great extension of our central nervous system, but in fact a danger to it