Beneath Mirabeau bridge flows the SeineAnd our loveMust I rememberJoy followed always after rain

Let night come sound the hourTime draws in I remain

Extract from Mirabeau Guillaume Apollinaire

PAUL VIRILIO

The problem of Technology

KEY INFLUENCES + IDEAS

PAUL VIRILIO

HEIDEGGER

HUSSERL

PHENOMENOLOGY

FOUCAULT

DELEUZE

GUATTARRI

MERLEAU PONTY

EINSTEIN

THEORY OF RELATIVITY

SUN TZU

MATISSE

BAUDRILLARD

DARRIDA

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

DROMOLOGYTHE SCIENCE OF SPEED

Unlike Marx, then, Virilio postulates that the transition from feudalism to capital-ism was not an economic transformation but a military, spatial, political, and tech-nological metamorphosis. Broadly speak-ing, where Marx wrote of the materialist conception of history, Virilio writes of the military conception of history.

‘Dromos’ from the Greek word to race. Meaning: the ‘science (or logic) of speed’. Dromology is important when consider-ing the structuring of society in relation to warfare and modern media. He says that the speed at which something happens may change its essential nature, and that that which moves with speed quickly comes to dominate that which is slower. ‘Whoever controls the territory possess-es it. Possession of territory is not primar-ily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and cir-culation

Einsteins theory of Relativity

SPEED

INTEGRAL ACCIDENT“The first sophisticated simulators were created by the US Air Force. Thus there is a cyberspace vision: one doesn’t fly in real space, one creates a poor cyber-space, with headphones. In a way, the simulator is closer to cyberspace than television. It creates a different world. The simulator quickly became a simulator of accidents, but not only that: it started simulating actual flight hours, and these hours have been counted as real hours to evaluate the experience of pilots. Sim-ulated flight hours and real flight hours became equivalent. What is accidented is reality. Virtuality will destroy reality.”

WARWAR“Truth is the first casualty of war”

Kipling

OMNIPRESENTS“The truth is no longer masked but eliminated, meaning the truth of the real image, the image of the real space of the object, of the missile observed. It’s eclipsed by the image televised ‘live’, or, more precisely, in real time.”

“A war of images and sounds, rath-er than objects and things, in which winning is simply a matter of not letting the other bloke out of your sights.”

Paul Virilio

“The winner of the next war will be the side who made the most of the electromagnet-ic spectrum”

Admiral Gorchkov

“Once you can see the target you can destroy it”

W.J. Perry Secretary of State for Defense.

“Surveillance and punishment go hand in hand”

Michel Foucault

WEA

PO

N G

ENEO

LOG

Y

STONECLUBSWORDSPEARBOW & ARROWTREBUSHETCANONMUSKETMACHINE GUNAIR PLANESTEALTH FIGHTERSDRONESROBOTIC WEAPONARYSTRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE (REAGONS ‘STARWARS’ PLAN)COMPUTER SIMULATION/VIRTUAL REALITY?

MILITARY +

TECHNOLOGY

DISTANCE/TIME = SPEED

DROMOSmeans of controlling territory

WAR AND CINEMA

Virilio’s interests in war, cinema and the logis-tics of perception are primarily fuelled by his contention that military perception in warfare is comparable to civilian perception and, spe-cifically, to the art of filmmaking. According to Virilio, therefore, cinematic substitution results in a ‘war of images’, or, Infowar. Infowar is not traditional war, where the images produced are images of actual battles. Rather, it is a war where the disparity between the images of battles and the actual battles is ‘derealized’. For Virilio, wars are ‘no longer about confron-tation’ but about movement — the movement of ‘electro-magnetic waves’.

ARCHITECTURE OF THE 21ST CENTURY SECURITY/ISOLATION

“For me the bunker is akind of metaphor for suffocation, asphyxiation, both what I fear and what fascinates me.”

Paul Virilio

BUNKER ARCHEOLOGY

SHOCK

REALITY

AWARENESS

WORLDWIDEWEB

VIRTUAL SPACE IN EXCHANGE FOR REAL SPACE

What becomes architecture? Is it now technolgies of communica-tion rather than by techniques of construction?

SURROGATES

VIRTUAL SPACE IN EXCHANGE FOR REAL SPACE

“Play isn’t something that brings pleasure; on the con-trary, it expresses a shift in reality, an unaccustomed mobility with respect to reality. To play today, in a cer-tain sense, means to choose between two realities. A concrete factual reality: meet someone, love that per-son, make love to that person. Or, the game reality: use the technologies of cybersex to meet that person from a distance, without touching or risk of contamina-tion, contact without contact.”

VIRTUAL REALITY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxyVEJVs5kA

“Play at being a critic. Deconstruct the game in order to play with it. In-stead of accepting the rules, chal-lenge and modify them. Without the freedom to critique and recon-struct, there is no truly free game: we are addicts and nothing more. “

Paul Virillio

“Many strategists said that it was easier to understand the Gulf War by buying American video games than by watching the news on television. In a certain sense, they were right. We didn’t see concrete events-how the ground troops broke though the Iraqi border, for example-but we did see war transformed into a video game, with the same image repeated over and over: a weapon hitting its target. The division of perception into two re-alities causes a blurring comparable to intoxication: we are seeing double.”

VIDEO GAMES

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3O52gK6c2A&feature=related

HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO ARCHITECTURE?

AWARENESS

SHARPENING PERCEPTION

AWARENESS

being attuned to reality

Virillio sought to recreate and update bunker architecture, “an architecture which resists man, which is an ob-stacle in his path.” The “oblique” thus participates in its own way in a tacti-cal form of warfare. Like the Situation-ists, who sought to loosen the grip of “the society of spectacle” with oblique “drifts” through the city, Virilio believed that a change in consciousness could preempt the effects of consumer soci-ety. However, after the events of May 68 he came to believe that circulation and stasis, not state power and class struggle, were the main factors of so-cial transformation. He came to see all pweer as “dromocratic”, since it must rely on transport and transmission oto control its territory.

understanding the problems

Modern Technology tends to dull peo-ples perception, and this is for the most part due to peoples lack of en-gagement in the real world. For Virilio, engagement is not static, rather it’s done through “movement”.

He believes that architecture can cre-ate the stage but ultimately it’s people that create teh movement. It opens the door for the possibilities, but it can-not tell you to dance. That is where the users have to fill in the story

One way of suggesting movement is through space and form. Virilio argues that modern architecture works mainly with orthagonal/rectilinear forms which creates static and boring spaces which limits the ability for the user to engage in the space.He suggests the “oblique form” over the rectilinear because it suggests movement and play in the space.

A proposed new urban order based on ‘the end of the vertical as an axis of el-evation, the end of the horizontal as per-manent plane, in favour of the oblique axis and the inclined plane’ (Virilio and Parent, 1996: v).

OBLIQUE FUNCTION

He believes that architecture can create the stage but ultimately it’s people that create teh movement. It opens the door for the possibilities, but it cannot tell you to dance. That is where the users have to fill in the story

rhythm and oscillation

Virillio sought to recreate and update bun-ker architecture, “an architecture which re-sists man, which is an obstacle in his path.” The “oblique” thus participates in its own way in a tactical form of warfare. Like the Situationists, who sought to loosen the grip of “the society of spectacle” with oblique “drifts” through the city, Virilio believed that a change in consciousness could preempt the effects of consumer society. However, after the events of May 68 he came to be-lieve that circulation and stasis, no state power and class struggle, were the main factors of social transformation. He came to see all pweer as “dromocratic”, since it must rely on transport and transmission oto control its territory.