Reading Paul Virilio's Art and Fear is just like having a conversation in a park with an old man, who is afraid of technology or an experience like when you trying to teach some old ladies to work Excel (I would say it is a badly designed software though).
I constantly having the feeling that the reason of the whole book is full of warning is because he is just too old and too nostalgic about the world when Hitler or Stalin can easily control or brainwash people with cinema or radio.
Although it seems pretty impossible to manipulate mass's mind as what they did in the past, it doesn't mean that it is impossible to implant or create influential effect on the mass. Thinking about social networks which is already dominated our life, we don't have to, but we applied for it because other people were using it, the twitter trends, or different portal for blogs, we don't actually need it, and we could simply just say no, such as facebook, but when everybody is using it, the force of connectivity, not only virtually, but when there are a lot of things are happening on these portals, we followed our wills to consent to these things. They didn't force us, but they make us think that we need it.
Talking about the deafness of the contemporary arts in the age of the multimedia, with the tele- age coming, also the digital era, he addresses concerns
"Meta-musical ambient music' what this means is a style music of the spheres without sound, presenting the symptoms of a blinding that would be the exact counterpart to the silence of the lambs... electro-acoustic music will generate new form of visual art. Eletro-optic computer graphics will similarl erase the demarcation line between the different art forms."
He warns that the contemporary art has a crisis of meaning, NONSENSE, just like Camus and Sartre was on about. However, there are some points that I do agree with Paul Virilio, as the contemporary art is getting hyper violence and hypersexual, the mean of art becoming promoting rather than communicating, later thinking about the media presentation, and the immediacy of art and its ability to be perceived at a glance, to be heard without delay, without the necessitating attention, our reflex was conditioned before we even had time to reflect.
With the indictment of silence, contemporary art can't quite shake off the accusation of passivity, indeed, of pointlessness - Paul Virilio
Therefore Paul Virilio in this book challenges the freedom of expression and reclaim the pitiful art and the politic of silence from an art world enchanted by its own extinction because to refuse pity is to accept the continuation of war.
At the end of the essay he said, also stucked me the most is:
What has recently taken place in Austria in the aftermath of the tragedy that has been playing out for ten years in the Balkans proves yet again that POLITICS, like ART, has limits, and that democratic freedom of expression stops at the edge of an abyss, on the brink of the call to murder - Limits blithely crossed by those already going by the name of THE MEDIA OF HATE. -Paul Virilio
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