The vision machine describes a new phase in the relation between visual technologies and human perception. It fi rst implies a profound disconnection between image and human eye. We are now inured to images that are seen from ‘outside’: not only from outside the frame of reference of our own bodies but also outside what could be seen by any human body. A second aspect of this dislocation is that images seen (recorded) by a machine are often no longer addressed to any human eye but are destined for viewing (analysis) by another machine.

If the photograph was the fi rst modern technological image, the vision machine describes the contemporary merging of the photographic apparatus with the computer to produce a machine capable not only of ‘seeing’ but also of ‘interpreting’ what it sees. For Virilio, the advent of the vision machine raises the question of the disappearance of the viewer, and, potentially, of the properly ‘human’ point of view of embodied sight. As such, the concept belongs to contemporary debates about relations between human and non- human actors in complex socio- technical milieux.

Virilio's analysis of ‘machines for seeing with’ has been a consistent theme in his work at least since War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989 [1984]). The concept of the vision machine was fi rst developed in Virilio's The Vision Machine (1994b [1988]). Tracing a history of the modern image through Impressionist painting, photography and cinema, he describes a progressive industrialisation of perception.