"Images contaminate us like viruses"
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Virilio’s line lands like a warning label on the retina: seeing isn’t passive, it’s exposure. Calling images “viruses” is deliberately abrasive because it flips the usual liberal piety about media (“more representation,” “more visibility”) into a pathology. A virus doesn’t persuade you; it enters you, hijacks your machinery, and replicates. That’s Virilio’s real target: the way modern visual culture doesn’t just show reality but colonizes attention, memory, and even desire, then multiplies through networks faster than any reflective thought can keep up.
The verb “contaminate” is doing moral and political work. It implies impurity, involuntary contact, and a loss of agency. Virilio is skeptical of the fantasy that we can remain sovereign viewers, calmly interpreting a flood of screens. His larger project, shaped by postwar Europe, military technology, and the acceleration of everything from transport to warfare, treats speed as a kind of force that reorders society. Images are not neutral content; they’re logistics. They move, they mobilize, they preempt.
The subtext is a critique of a world where perception becomes a battlefield. When war is televised, when politics is staged for cameras, when disasters arrive first as footage, the image doesn’t merely represent the event; it becomes part of the event’s power. Virilio’s cynicism isn’t anti-art so much as anti-innocence: he’s telling you that the most “real” thing an image can do is alter you, quietly, at scale, without asking permission.
The verb “contaminate” is doing moral and political work. It implies impurity, involuntary contact, and a loss of agency. Virilio is skeptical of the fantasy that we can remain sovereign viewers, calmly interpreting a flood of screens. His larger project, shaped by postwar Europe, military technology, and the acceleration of everything from transport to warfare, treats speed as a kind of force that reorders society. Images are not neutral content; they’re logistics. They move, they mobilize, they preempt.
The subtext is a critique of a world where perception becomes a battlefield. When war is televised, when politics is staged for cameras, when disasters arrive first as footage, the image doesn’t merely represent the event; it becomes part of the event’s power. Virilio’s cynicism isn’t anti-art so much as anti-innocence: he’s telling you that the most “real” thing an image can do is alter you, quietly, at scale, without asking permission.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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