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International audience ; This article uses various conceits from Paul Virlio's thought to explore the ramifications of "indeterminate objects" to explore their effects on urban formations, media/mediated thought and human positionings within them, in terms of subjects in relation to objects. The three objects are glass, dust and the atomic bomb.

Remote sensing using nanosensors continue a long trajectory of multisensory teletechnologies devised by the military for surveillance and weapons verification at a distance. These remote-sensing systems form the basis of current military and corporate plans to monitor all elements of the earth in real time. Because these systems provide extensions of human senses and are also autonomous, they simultaneously extend and delimit the power and imaginary of the human subject as actor and political agent. By thinking through these multiple large-scale interrelated remote-sensing systems and offering a meditation on the autonomous (as a combination of the terms auto and nomos), the article explores the profound ramifications for imagining the political subject as agent and, further, for the conditions of thinking the autonomous as concept, subject, or technology.

Bashir Makhoul and Gordon Hon are the artist and curator, respectively, of the installation Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost. Many of the ideas behind the work were developed in discussions between them and here they have formalized this process in a transcribed discussion conducted after the first manifestation of the piece in Beijing. They have also just completed work on a co-authored book on contemporary Palestinian art and they discuss the context of Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost specifically as a Palestinian artwork in China. They raise many of the issues that were discussed during its production, such as surveillance and the merging of virtual and real space in modern military and colonial conflict. They explore the notion of threat of space as manifested by surveillance, military training and colonial occupation.

The import of underground facilities in military strategy in the US grew exponentially after the Gulf War. The success of precision-guided conventional missiles meant that any above-ground building or complex could be accurately targeted and destroyed, thus driving states with less sophisticated weapons to go underground to secure space for covert weapons development and the protection of command and control centres for military and governmental functions. Underground facilities have thus become the main challenge to objects of detection and targeting practices for US military research and development. This article provides a meditation on the underground in relation to military planning and technology, the limits of aerial visual control of terrain, the plans by the US military to counter underground defensive moves, the efficacy of tele-technologies to detect and destroy such installations at a distance, and an oblique genealogy of aerial and subterrestrial strategies in relation to technologies to overcome the limitations of each. In so doing, the article argues a deeply connected relationship between the imaginary and the material in attempts to realize a mastery of space and populations essential to military operations, thus posing questions about sensory perception, the status of the subject with regard to agency and control, and the prosthetic outfitting of the subject that both supports and blunts agency and control.

The scale and diversity of megacities finds analogous scale and diversity in the violence witnessed and experienced in these complexly dense urban sites. From full-scale military invasion to internecine ethnic and tribal conflict, from paramilitary incursions to strategic car bombs, from slum clearance to pervasive everyday low-level violence, from Mafia-led armies to incessant inflictions of violence on the urban poor, and from missile launches to machete attacks, megacities, most unfortunately, have them all. This article contextualizes many of the key concerns and issues addressed by the four main articles in the section; it does so by arguing for some specific historical, genealogical and technological explanations for the range and scale of violence inflicted upon and within megacity sites. The section proleptically discusses megacity phenomena that will be taken up in greater detail in the forthcoming second volume of the New Encyclopaedia Project Megacities: Problematizing the Urban.

Science, Art, Democracy -- A Laboratory of Form and Movement: Institutionalizing Emancipatory Technicity at MIT -- The Hands-on Approach: Engineering Collaboration at E.A.T. -- Feedback: Expertise, LACMA and the Think-Tank -- How to Make the World Work -- Heritage of Our Times.