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Crepuscular Dawn 2002 185 pages Complementary Texts Paul Virilio – Information Bomb Keywords Copyright © 2004-2007 Isabel Pedersen |
Closely following Virilio’s The Information Bomb, Crepuscular Dawn also argues that war
generates media. In the Introduction, Lotringer recounts some of Virilio’s
life experiences with war and concludes: Like any traumatic event,
war remains at the center of his preoccupations, he has been looking for it
everywhere with anticipation, with dread, with excitement. Only war can match
war with intensity. However much you hate it, it becomes the means by which
you connect creatively to the world.
(9) Much of Crepuscular Dawn is an interview between Virilio and Lotringer.
Much of it is also autobiographical because Virilio recounts his life as a
child, a student, and an architect spawning new ways to inhabit spaces with
ideas like the “Oblique Function” (28-30). Virilio and Lotringer are preoccupied with Steve Mann, wearable
computer inventor and social commentator. They revere him for his humanistic
stance toward technology. They admire him because he consistently
interrogates the computer that he wears as a potential oppressor; they call
him “a benign forerunner of the Unabomber” (98). In one passage, they portray
Mann as a victim apprehended by American authorities and stripped of his
computer. They describe how Mann, disorientated without his computer, “bumped
against a pile of fire extinguishers and passed out. Finally |