p4 “In effect, he is voicing a doubt previously felt by him in The Art of the Motor and The Information Bomb: that, under the influence of new information and communications technologies, democratic institutions are disappearing as the key locations where political representation operates (…) He argues that instead of producing a merciless art of presentation, with its live TV images of genuine torment and aggression, its wretchedness, self-destruction, disfigurement, extinction and abhorrence, contemporary artists should reclaim the evacuated space of the art of representation, the space of symbolic yet crucially sympathetic images of violence.”

p5 “Hence, when Virilio considers the aesthetics of disappearance, he assumes that the responsibility of artists is to recover rather than discard the material that is absent and to bring to light those secret codes that hide from view inside the silent circuits of digital and genetic technologies”

p7″In our day, however, the question according to Virilio is whether the work of art is to be considered an object that must be looked at or listened to. Or, alternatively, given the reduction of the position of the art lover to that of a component in the multimedia academy’s cybernetic machine, whether the aesthetic and ethical silence of art can continue to be upheld”

p8 “for Virilio, present-day sound art obliterates the character of visual art while concurrently advancing the communication practices of the global advertising industry, which have assaulted the art world to such a degree that it is at present the central dogma of the multimedia academy.”

p49 “postmodern art’ is in effect contemporary with the INFORMATION revolution – that is, with the replacement of analogue languages by digital: the computation of sensations, whether visual, auditory, tactile or olfactory, by software. In other words: through a computer filter. After the like, the ANALOGOUS, the age of the ‘likely’ – CLONE or AVATAR – has arrived, the industrial standardization of products manufactured in series combining with the standardization of sensations and emotions as a prelude to the development of cybernetics, with its attendant computer synchronization, the end product of which will be the virtual CYBERWORLD.”

the introductory material reads, to me, as if virilio is confounding issues of making (art) anything under colonial / extractive capital with art itself?

The actual text reads as unhinged to me. There are worthwhile consideration of toxic masculinity and problematic connections to fascism in the avant-garde, but the art scene feels like a straw man here. I stand by my previous question. I think Virilio may mostly be upset at computers for reasons I do not understand.