Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio (FR) is an essayist, philosopher and media critic - with a special interest in urbanism and the strategic implications of new technologies.
Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio is an architect/urbanist/writer who is Emeritus Professor at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. In his writings, Virilio criticizes the effects of technological developments on modern society. He analyzes the relations between media technology and medical or military technology, and he specializes in questions concerning military space and the organization of territory as well as describing the structural changes these technologies cause in relation to the human body, our perception and notion of reality. He has published extensively, such as The Logistics of Perception (1989), War and Cinema 1 (1984), Speed and Politics (1977), Bunker Archeology (1994) and Open Sky (1997), The Strategy of Deception (1999).
His latest projects involve working with homeless groups in Paris and building the first Museum of the Accident.
Virilio started his career as a stained glass artist alongside Matisse; he later studied architecture, then phenomenology with Merleau-Ponty. In 1963 he began collaborating with the architect Claude Parent and formed the Architecture Principe group. After participating in the May 1968 uprising in Paris, Virilio was nominated Professor by the students at the Ecole Speciale d' Architecture, of which he later became Director of Studies. Also in 1963, Virilio became director of the magazine L'Espace Critique after publishing his first philosophical essays. In 1990, he became program director at the Collège International de Philosophie. In 1975 he co-organized the Bunker Archeologie exhibition at the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris, a collection of texts and images relating to the Atlantic Wall. The research on the archeology of bunkers, led him to his theory of dromology - the science of speed, or of the human impulse to wander, travel and flee.
Speed and war, the information media and social changes are among his prominent themes.
With V2_, Virilio published two articles, The Law of Proximity in Book for the Unstable Media (1992), The Museum of the Sun in TechnoMorphica (1997), and the interview Surfing the Accident with Andreas Ruby for The Art of the Accident (1998).
http://www.egs.edu/resources/virilio.html
