In his essay “The Vision Machine”, Paul Virilio addresses the role of technology in shaping the perceptions of man. He continues where Walter Benjamin left off, arguing that spatial distance has been erased by telecommunication. Physical locations meet inside of the screen, where every point on Earth is instantaneously accessible from every other point (Doesn’t that sound like the properties of a Hologram?). The philosopher also argues that the instantaneous nature of the screen destroys human memory. In this work, Virilio prophesies that computer technologies will progress to the point where they will do all the seeing for humankind.
the phatic image – a targeted image that forces you to look and holds your attention – is not only a pure product of photographic and cinematic focusing. More importantly it is the result of an everbrighter illumination, of the intensity of its definition, singling out only specific areas, the context mostly disappearing into a blur (p.14).
The age of dialectic logic is the age of photography and film, or if you like, the frame of the nineteenth century. The age of paradoxical logic begins with the invention of video recording, holography and computer graphics … as though, at the close of the twentieth century, the end of modernity were itself marked by the end of a logic of public representation (p. 63).
The time frequency of light has become a determining factor in the appreciation of phenomena, leaving the spatial frequency of matter for dead. Whence the unheard of possibility of real-time special effects, decoys that do not so much affect the nature of the object – a missile say – as the image of its presence, in the infinitesimal instant in which the virtual and the real are one and the same thing for the sensor or the human observer (p. 71).
Virilio, Paul. (1994). The Vision Machine. London: British Film Institute.
