A Landscape of Events

In `A Landscape of Events’, the celebrated French architect, urban planner, and philosopher Paul Virilio focuses on the cultural chaos of the 1980s and 1990s. It was a time, he writes, that reflected the “cruelty of an epoch, the hills and dales of daily life, the usual clumps of habits and commonplaces”. Urban disorientation, the machines of war, and the acceleration of events in contemporary life are Virilio’s ongoing concerns. He explores them in events ranging from media coverage of the Gulf War to urban rioting and lawlessness. Some will see Virilio as a pessimist discouraged by “the acceleration of the reality of time”, while others will find his recording of “atypical events” to be clairvoyant.