Paul Virilio case study

PAUL VIRILIO Beneath Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine And our love Must I remember Joy followed always after rain Let night come sound the hour Time draws in I remain Extract from Mirabeau Guillaume Apollinaire

FOUCAULT

DARRIDA

GUATTARRI

DELEUZE

BAUDRILLARD

MERLEAU PONTY

PAUL VIRILIO

MATISSE

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

THEORY OF RELATIVITY

PHENOMENOLOGY

EINSTEIN HEIDEGGER

HUSSERL

SUN TZU

KEY INFLUENCES + IDEAS

DROMOLOGY THE SCIENCE OF SPEED ‘Dromos’ from the Greek word to race.

Meaning: the ‘science (or logic) of speed’.

Dromology is important when considering 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 possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation Unlike Marx, then, Virilio postulates that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was not an economic transformation but a military, spatial, political, and technological metamorphosis. Broadly speaking, where Marx wrote of the materialist conception of history, Virilio writes of the military conception of history.

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 cyberspace, 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. Simulated flight hours and real flight hours became equivalent. What is accidented is reality. Virtuality will destroy reality.”

WAR “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, rather than objects and things, in which winning is simply a matter of not letting the other bloke out of your sights.”

“Once you can see the target you can destroy it” W.J. Perry Secretary of State for Defense.

Paul Virilio

“The winner of the next war will be the side who made the most of the electromagnetic spectrum” Admiral Gorchkov

“Surveillance and punishment go hand in hand�

Michel Foucault

MILITARY + TECHNOLOGY

WEAPON GENEOLOGY

STONE CLUB SWORD SPEAR BOW & ARROW TREBUSHET CANON means of controlling territory MUSKET MACHINE GUN AIR PLANE STEALTH FIGHTERS DRONES ROBOTIC WEAPONARY STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE (REAGONS ‘STARWARS’ PLAN) COMPUTER SIMULATION/VIRTUAL REALITY?

DROMOS

DISTANCE/TIME = SPEED

Virilio’s interests in war, cinema and the logistics of perception are primarily fuelled by his contention that military perception in warfare is comparable to civilian perception and, specifically, 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 confrontation’ but about movement — the movement of ‘electro-magnetic waves’.

WAR AND CINEMA

BUNKER ARCHEOLOGY

REALITY

SHOCK

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

Paul Virilio

AWARENESS SECURITY/ISOLATION ARCHITECTURE OF THE 21ST CENTURY

VIRTUAL SPACE IN EXCHANGE FOR REAL SPACE

What becomes architecture? Is it now technolgies of communication rather than by techniques of construction?

W WW ORLD

IDE

EB

SURROGATES

VIRTUAL REALITY

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

“Play isn’t something that brings pleasure; on the contrary, it expresses a shift in reality, an unaccustomed mobility with respect to reality. To play today, in a certain sense, means to choose between two realities. A concrete factual reality: meet someone, love that person, 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 contamination, contact without contact.”

“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 realities causes a blurring comparable to intoxication: we are seeing double.”

“Play at being a critic. Deconstruct the game in order to play with it. Instead of accepting the rules, challenge and modify them. Without the freedom to critique and reconstruct, there is no truly free game: we are addicts and nothing more. “ Paul Virillio

VIDEO GAMES

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

HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO ARCHITECTURE?

AWARENESS

understanding the problems

being attuned to reality SHARPENING PERCEPTION Virillio sought to recreate and update bunker architecture, “an architecture which resists 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 believe that circulation and stasis, not 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

OBLIQUE FUNCTION

Virillio sought to recreate and update bunker architecture, “an architecture which resists 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 believe 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.