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The Vision Machine
"Virilio offers a cool, precise look at an impending future in which reality shall simply cease to exist. Highly recommended." ―Choice
Surveying art history as well as the technologies of war and urban planning, one of France's leading intellectuals provides an introduction to a new "logistics of the image."
Surveying art history as well as the technologies of war and urban planning, one of France's leading intellectuals provides an introduction to a new "logistics of the image."
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
About the author
Paul Virilio
127 books284 followersPaul Virilio was a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 15, 2014
A view into how our perception of the world has been radically altered by technology and the potential ramifications of our current quest for virtual reality that come at us at the speed of light. Beginning with the advent of the gas lamps that brought day to the night in Paris in the 1800s through to the photograph, movies and now computer/digital animation, Virilio warns that this may create a crack in reality that is beyond our ability to control.
This quote from Jean-Pierre Vernant seems to sum it up, "To behold the Gorgon you must look into her eyes and when your eyes meet, you cease being yourself, cease living and become, like her, a power of death."
To add to the irony of life, I read this book on an electronic device...
This quote from Jean-Pierre Vernant seems to sum it up, "To behold the Gorgon you must look into her eyes and when your eyes meet, you cease being yourself, cease living and become, like her, a power of death."
To add to the irony of life, I read this book on an electronic device...
September 29, 2026
Virilio is a hard man to understand. While the book is short, it's meaning is grand. Sometimes it seems like gospel, other times like ramble. I was tiptoing between 3 and 4-stars, but ended on four - the fault is properply on my shoulders for not understanding every part of the book.
The Vision Machine (Synsmaskinen // la machine de vision) is a work about pictures, and vision. How what we previece define our world. And while it might seem dated, since we today have SoMe and way more screens with pictures and "moving pictures" I think that makes the book all the more relevant.
A short relevant read. I read the danish translation from Rævens Sorte Bibliotek, translated by Orla Vigsø & Niels Brügger, and it gets the job done, with a nice list of wierd words in the back.
The part that stuck with me is on the first page: Art wants to be perceived. I'd say the same is true for the world as a whole.
The Vision Machine (Synsmaskinen // la machine de vision) is a work about pictures, and vision. How what we previece define our world. And while it might seem dated, since we today have SoMe and way more screens with pictures and "moving pictures" I think that makes the book all the more relevant.
A short relevant read. I read the danish translation from Rævens Sorte Bibliotek, translated by Orla Vigsø & Niels Brügger, and it gets the job done, with a nice list of wierd words in the back.
The part that stuck with me is on the first page: Art wants to be perceived. I'd say the same is true for the world as a whole.
August 5, 2009
Simply one of the best reads about culture since the Enlightenment era to now. Some of the propositions that Virilio makes inspired me to think past how I saw process art and conceptual art notably in terms of how I can contribute to the the process of art work of story/photography.
October 29, 2026
“Edward Steichen took over the direction of the American Expeditionary Force's aerial photographic operations in France. Approaching forty, with a background as a painter-photographer, Steichen was one of the masters of pictorialism. He was also a true francophile, and had visited France numerous times from 1900 onwards to meet Rodin, Monet and a few of the other greats. With a force of fifty-five officers and 1,111 enlisted men, Steichen was to organise aerial-intelligence image production 'like a factory', thanks to the division of labour (the Ford car assembly lines were already in operation in 1914!). Aerial observation had in fact stopped being episodic from the beginning of the war; it was not a matter of images now, but of an uninterrupted stream of images, millions of negatives madly trying to embrace on a daily basis the statistical trends of the first great military-industrial conflict.”
“With topographical memory, one could speak of generations of vision and even of visual heredity from one generation to the next. The advent of the logistics of perception and its renewed vectors for delocalising geometrical optics, on the contrary, ushered in a eugenics of sight”
“But what does one see when one's eyes, depending on sighting instruments, are reduced to a state of rigid and practically invariable structural immobility? One can only see instantaneous sections seized by the Cyclops eye of the lens. Vision, once substantial, becomes accidental. Despite the elaborate debate surrounding the problem of the objectivity of mental or instrumental images, this revolutionary change in the regime of vision was not clearly perceived and the fusion-confusion of eye and camera lens, the passage from vision to visualisation, settled easily into accepted norms.”
“We have all had enough of hearing about the death of God, of man, of art and so on since the nineteenth century. What in fact happened was simply the progressive disintegration of a faith in perception founded in the Middle Ages, after animism, on the basis of the unicity of divine creation, the absolute intimacy between the universe and the God-man of Augustinian Christianity, a material world which loved itself and contemplated itself in its one God. In the West, the death of God and the death of art are indissociable; the zero degree of representation merely fulfilled the prophecy voiced a thousand years earlier by Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, during the quarrel with the iconoclasts: if we remove the image, not only Christ but the whole universe disappears.'”
“The age of the image's formal logic was the age of painting, engraving and etching, architecture; it ended with the eighteenth century. The age of dialectic logic is the age of photography and film or, if you like, the frame of the nineteenth century. The age of paradoxical logic begins with the invention of video recording, holography and computer graphics ... as though, at the close of the twentieth century the end of modernity were itself marked by the end of a logic of public representation. Now, although we may be comfortable with the reality of the formal logic of traditional pictorial representation and, to a lesser degree, the actuality of the dialectical logic governing photographic and cinematic representation,' we still cannot seem to get a grip on the virtualities of the paradoxical logic of the videogram, the hologram or digital imagery. This probably explains the frantic 'interpretosis' that still surrounds these technologies today in the press, as well as the proliferation and instant obsolescence of different computer and audiovisual equipment. Lastly, paradoxical logic emerges when the real-time image dominates the thing represented, real time subsequently prevailing over real space, virtuality dominating actuality and turning the very concept of reality on its head. Whence the crisis in traditional forms of Public representation (graphics, photography, cinema ...) to the great advantage of presentation, of a paradoxical presence, the long-stance telepresence of the object or being which provides their very existence here and now. This is, ultimately, what 'high definition' or high resolution means; and it no longer applies to the (photographic, television) image, but to reality itself. With paradoxical logic, what gets decisively resolved is the reality of the object's real-time presence. In the previous age of dialectical logic, it was only the delayed-time presence, the presence of the past, that lastingly impressed plate and film. The paradoxical image thus acquires a status something like that of surprise, or more precisely, of an 'accidental transfer'.”
“If real time prevails over real space, if the image prevails over the object present, to say nothing of the being, if the virtual prevails over the real, we need to try and analyse the fallout from this logic of 'intensive' time on different physical representations. While the age of 'extensive' time continued to justify dialectic logic by drawing a clear distinction between potential and real, the age of intensive time demands a better resolution of the reality principle, one in which the notion of virtuality would itself come in for a bit of tinkering.”
“With topographical memory, one could speak of generations of vision and even of visual heredity from one generation to the next. The advent of the logistics of perception and its renewed vectors for delocalising geometrical optics, on the contrary, ushered in a eugenics of sight”
“But what does one see when one's eyes, depending on sighting instruments, are reduced to a state of rigid and practically invariable structural immobility? One can only see instantaneous sections seized by the Cyclops eye of the lens. Vision, once substantial, becomes accidental. Despite the elaborate debate surrounding the problem of the objectivity of mental or instrumental images, this revolutionary change in the regime of vision was not clearly perceived and the fusion-confusion of eye and camera lens, the passage from vision to visualisation, settled easily into accepted norms.”
“We have all had enough of hearing about the death of God, of man, of art and so on since the nineteenth century. What in fact happened was simply the progressive disintegration of a faith in perception founded in the Middle Ages, after animism, on the basis of the unicity of divine creation, the absolute intimacy between the universe and the God-man of Augustinian Christianity, a material world which loved itself and contemplated itself in its one God. In the West, the death of God and the death of art are indissociable; the zero degree of representation merely fulfilled the prophecy voiced a thousand years earlier by Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, during the quarrel with the iconoclasts: if we remove the image, not only Christ but the whole universe disappears.'”
“The age of the image's formal logic was the age of painting, engraving and etching, architecture; it ended with the eighteenth century. The age of dialectic logic is the age of photography and film or, if you like, the frame of the nineteenth century. The age of paradoxical logic begins with the invention of video recording, holography and computer graphics ... as though, at the close of the twentieth century the end of modernity were itself marked by the end of a logic of public representation. Now, although we may be comfortable with the reality of the formal logic of traditional pictorial representation and, to a lesser degree, the actuality of the dialectical logic governing photographic and cinematic representation,' we still cannot seem to get a grip on the virtualities of the paradoxical logic of the videogram, the hologram or digital imagery. This probably explains the frantic 'interpretosis' that still surrounds these technologies today in the press, as well as the proliferation and instant obsolescence of different computer and audiovisual equipment. Lastly, paradoxical logic emerges when the real-time image dominates the thing represented, real time subsequently prevailing over real space, virtuality dominating actuality and turning the very concept of reality on its head. Whence the crisis in traditional forms of Public representation (graphics, photography, cinema ...) to the great advantage of presentation, of a paradoxical presence, the long-stance telepresence of the object or being which provides their very existence here and now. This is, ultimately, what 'high definition' or high resolution means; and it no longer applies to the (photographic, television) image, but to reality itself. With paradoxical logic, what gets decisively resolved is the reality of the object's real-time presence. In the previous age of dialectical logic, it was only the delayed-time presence, the presence of the past, that lastingly impressed plate and film. The paradoxical image thus acquires a status something like that of surprise, or more precisely, of an 'accidental transfer'.”
“If real time prevails over real space, if the image prevails over the object present, to say nothing of the being, if the virtual prevails over the real, we need to try and analyse the fallout from this logic of 'intensive' time on different physical representations. While the age of 'extensive' time continued to justify dialectic logic by drawing a clear distinction between potential and real, the age of intensive time demands a better resolution of the reality principle, one in which the notion of virtuality would itself come in for a bit of tinkering.”
November 28, 2021
Mweh. Ramble ramble brr brrrrr. Sum interesting grains within. Mweh
March 10, 2026
“With topographical memory, one could speak of generations of vision and even visual heredity from one generation to the next. The advent of the logistics of perception and its renewed vectors of delocalizing geometrical optics, on the contrary, ushered in a eugenics of sight, a preemptive abortion of the diversity of mental images, of the swarm of image-beings doomed to remain unborn, no longer to see the light of day anywhere”
A book from 1994 that anticipates the very condition we live with today, Virilio takes on the ocularcentric problems that emerge in a moment of rapidly proliferating images. Incredibly cogent and aware of what is at stake.
A book from 1994 that anticipates the very condition we live with today, Virilio takes on the ocularcentric problems that emerge in a moment of rapidly proliferating images. Incredibly cogent and aware of what is at stake.
November 8, 2018
A lot to take in, and in such a small book … information dense; had to read the first chapter twice, but worth it
July 3, 2024
هذا الكتاب ليس لي
Want to Read
March 27, 2025Nella versione italiana edita "Sugarco Edizioni"
- La macchina che vede. L’automazione della percezione;
- La macchina che vede. L’automazione della percezione;
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 6, 2014
It was definitely interesting and thought-provoking, but I think I would have gotten more out of it if I understood half of the references Virillio makes (That's not the book's fault though). I would recommend reading it with Wikipedia open.
March 3, 2008
دارم ترجمه اش میکنم. از ویریلیو تا حالا متنی تو به فارسی کار نشده
Read
December 23, 2016i wnat to read this book
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews