Virilio’s Screen: The Work of Metaphor in the Age of Technological Convergence

This brief essay traces the evolving role of the screen in the writing of high-speed theorist Paul Virilio. In Virilio’s writing, the screen serves as the locus of lost dimensions of space and technological transformations of time; it modifies our relation to space, is a surface-mount for its ‘accelerated virtualization’. If Virilio does not theorize the technological differences between film, television and the computer, I argue, it is because, for him, the screen remains in a metaphoric register, a virtual surface which overrides any specificities of its media formation.