war smash hits (as seen on tv)

Various

CD jewel case

Fourth record of a thematic series of 9, published from 1993 to 1998, called Utopian Diaries. The ironic War Smash Hits (as seen on TV) was released in 1996.

Dropped for detonation at an altitude of some 500 meters, the first bomb produced a flash, a nuclear burst of 1/15,000,000th of a second. A Flash whose glow infiltrated every corner of the buildings all the way to their cellars, leaving its imprint in the stone, whose outward color altered with the fusion of certain mineral elements, while the protected surfaces remained curiously intact. The same was true of clothes and bodies, where kimono patterns tattooed the flesh of victims... If, according to its inventor Nicephore Niepce, photography is but a method of engraving by the action of light, or "photoengraving", where bodies inscribe their traces by the effects of their own luminosity, the nuclear weapon is heir to both the dark rooms of Niepce and Daguerre and to the projector of war. No longer the luminous silhouette beaming from the back of a darken room; but a shadow cast sometimes into Hiroshima's very cellars. The Japanese shadow play is etched no more, as once it was, on the flats of "a shadow theatre", but on the screen... the city's walls.

Paul Virilio, in Logique de la Perception