Paul Virilio

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  print November 1995

  CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

  ONCE THERE WAS AN “AVANT-GARDE.” It started in Europe, and came to the United States; some say it got “stolen.” But today we need new formations, new geographies, new styles of thinking, different from those of the avant-garde group with its popes and manifestos, even from the more “acephalous” group that attracted Georges Bataille. We need to think of “the city” in new ways, hence of how artists or thinkers fit into it—we need a new urbanism. Perhaps that’s the project Paul Virilio has been pursuing now over many years, through many passages and trajectories, as an author/critic as well as the

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  print Summer 1989

  TRANS-APPEARANCE

  Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.
  —Christ (John 20:29)
  

  RESEARCHERS AT NASA AND at the ophthalmological institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have created a revolutionary pair of eyeglasses. Through fiber optics, two miniature lenses affixed to a frame transmit images to two miniscule video cameras worn around the waist of a person with poor or impaired vision. An electronically processed image is sent back to the glasses, in which the old type of corrective lens has been replaced by screens. The optoelectric system automatically “reads” the wearer’s particular