by Pasi Vealiaho
An investigation of the aesthetics and politics of new visual media under twenty-first-century capitalism, from console games to virtual reality to video installation art.In Biopolitical Screens, Pasi Valiaho charts and conceptualizes the imagery that composes our affective and conceptual reality under twenty-first-century capitalism. Valiaho investigates the role screen media play in the networks that today harness human minds and bodies -- the ways that images animated on console game platforms, virtual reality technologies, and computer screens capture human potential by plugging it into arrangements of finance, war, and the consumption of entertainment. Drawing on current neuroscience and political and economic thought, Valiaho argues that these images work to shape the atomistic individuals who populate the neoliberal world of accumulation and war.Valiaho bases his argument on a broad notion of the image as something both visible and sayable, detectable in various screen