Unknown Quantity FROM THE PUBLISHER
Writer and urbanist Paul Virilio is considered to be one of the most important and incisive contemporary critics of technology and its moral, political, and cultural implications. His latest catalogue, published to accompany an exhibition he has conceived for the Fondation Cartier in Paris, examines the philosophical issues raised by our confrontation with accidents and their impact on our world.Accidents capture our attention, surprise or shock us, disrupt or ultimately alter the course of our existence. Whether significant or insignificant, benign or disastrous, accidents always reveal something about ourselves and the systems we construct. For Virilio, to invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck, to invent electricity is to invent electrocution. Accidents are consequently, in his view, inherent in all technological systems. This catalogue features over 200 illustrations, including press photographs, paintings, and engravings representing natural and industrial accidents from the past three centuries. It also contains reproductions of the works of the many artists included in the exhibit, most notably Lebbeus Woods, Nancy Rubins, Stephen Vitiello, Cai Guo Qiang, Bruce Conner, Tony Oursler, Jonas Mekas, and Jem Cohen. Paul Virilio has also invited visionary architect Lebbeus Woods and award-winning journalist Svetlana Aleksievitch to contribute texts to this catalogue. Distributed on behalf of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. 200 color illustrations.
Author Biography: Paul Virilio's many books include Ground Zero, War and Cinema, Open Sky, and The Information Bomb.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
French theorist Virilio's ideas about speed, technology, and disaster have been realized to vivid effect in this catalog to his controversial exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Its front pages are photographic collages of international accidents, from earthquakes to explosions, juxtaposed with flat prose that describes the event or asks opaque questions like "Meteorite or fragment of anti-matter?" The back of the book presents more typical catalog-style entries of the exhibition's artists and their work. Virilio's essays throughout are poetic and political, offering dizzying accounts of the connections between progress and catastrophe. At its best, the book's design resembles the provocative work of Tibor Kalman, but the oversize text, with keywords blown up and in bold, is distracting. Since this country will probably never see the exhibition, and since Virilio's output has lessened considerably in the last few years, we're left to puzzle over this book's unsettling brew of image and art. Recommended for contemporary art libraries and for those collections concentrating on technology and culture.-Prudence Peiffer, Southampton, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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