Experiments with Immersive Spectatorship in the 19th Century

 

The website for Facebook Reality Labs promises that augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will soon “become as universal and essential as smartphones and personal computers are today.” Facebook is investing billions of dollars to fulfill this prophecy. It acquired the VR headset company Oculus in 2014, and in 2019 it bought CTRL-Lab, a startup developing a neural interface that allows users to control a computer with their thoughts. As part of the push to “build the future of connection with AR and VR,” Facebook is trying to connect brains to computers, so that people can communicate with each other as directly as possible, sharing an experience itself rather than a photo or video. The “magic of presence,” as Facebook calls it, is feeling that you’re inside a represented world because the feedback loop between your body and that world is so short that any mediation seems to disappear.

Given Facebook’s mission “to bring the world closer together,” it makes sense that the company would describe AR and VR as technologies for social connection and experience sharing. Meanwhile, other corporations and cultural institutions are imagining futures in which the immersive potentials of these mediums transform the activities central to their own missions. Google Glass and Google Earth, for example, express Google’s approach to AR and VR, respectively, as a drive to make the physical world “searchable” through embodied interaction. Museums and art foundations are investing in AR and VR as the “next level” in the relationship between art and technology, as new mediums that promise, as photography once did, a more direct experience of the world through art.

I want to look to the past instead of the future, to reject the notion that AR and VR are technologies moving toward some particular transformative change. The basic elements of these mediums existed long before computing, and do not necessarily improve through technological progress. In their expensive pursuits, companies like Facebook misrepresent the “magic of presence” as a technological achievement, when it is actually an aesthetic one that emerged as part of modern mass visual culture. While the interactivity of AR and VR is facilitated by computing, the small displays used for 3D headsets are like any other screens. Their imagery follows lens-based representational conventions that were codified in photography and cinema long before the advent of digital computation, and their methods for producing the effect of presence are rooted in nineteenth-century experiments with immersive spectatorship.
 
To some extent, the “magic of presence” was already available in the camera obscura, a means of projecting images that has existed for more than two thousand years. When a camera obscura is a room a person can stand in—as the Latin meaning of “camera” suggests—a circular aperture in a wall brings the outside inside, casting a moving color image of the exterior on the opposite wall. This effect is as startling today as it was centuries ago, even more so, given how a spectator’s body, if positioned within the cone of projection between the aperture and the far wall, becomes an additional surface for the image. Any sense of being within a pictured scene is undermined, however, by the reversal of the image. The world pictured on the wall appears with its sky toward the floor and its ground toward the ceiling. As camera obscuras shrank from rooms to boxlike devices—precursors of the photographic camera—lenses and mirrors were used to correct that reversal. But this gain in verisimilitude diminished the potential for immersion, because it produced a discrete picture rather than an encompassing scene.
 
The magic lantern, invented in the 1600s, adapted the box-style camera obscura for a more versatile projection technique that would later form the basis for film projectors. By positioning a glass slide between a lens and a light source, magic lanterns could project images at scales large enough for public shows. For the phantasmagorias that became popular in Europe in the 1790s, a skilled magic lantern operator, or several, projected images around a darkened space. The ingenious use of cranks, sliding plates, and dual lenses produced effects of movement, suggesting floating ghouls and dancing skeletons. This ghostly subject matter suited the limitations of this format. It proved difficult to construct more complex or realistic immersive spectacles with lantern slides. Phantasmagorias found enthusiastic audiences, especially in the United States, into the 1800s, though their popularity was eclipsed in that century by the painted panorama. These were erected in European cities as walk-in architecture: large, linked canvases surrounding a central viewing platform. The panorama was organized around the audience’s perspective, its continuous surface mapped to the gaze of a spectator who physically turned and moved to take it all in.

 
The emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century did not displace the panorama so much as absorb and support its existing logic. Photographs began to be arranged in series meant to express spatial and temporal continuity, to meet the expectation for expanded views cultivated by panoramas. Special cameras were invented to capture panoramic photographs, using either a swiveling head that allowed both the lens and the photosensitive surface behind it to rotate together, or a swinging lens that moved while the rest of the camera remained fixed. Panoramic cameras were invented for the earliest photographic formats, including the daguerreotype, and have been continually reintroduced, up through the “pano” feature of contemporary smartphone cameras.
 
Although photography quickly found its own panoramic formats, it was more difficult to adapt photographic imagery to the painted panorama’s wraparound dimensions. It was theoretically possible, using a magic lantern, to project photographic images within a circular enclosure. Efforts to project photographic panoramas failed, however, because the seams between image segments were too apparent. The very qualities of optical accuracy that are now associated with photographic verisimilitude actually worked against the panorama’s construction of visual continuity. Painted panoramas deployed strategies of distortion to disguise the piecemeal nature of their construction. Even if a panoramic photograph had actually been captured as a single image by a special camera, the multiple lenses required for projecting it would parse it into discrete segments.
 
Auguste and Louis Lumière, some of the earliest inventors of cinema, developed a remarkable attempt to resolve this quandary and merge photographic realism with panoramic immersion. Not long after they screened their first films in a Paris café in 1895, they began preparing their entry for the 1900 Paris Exposition. They invented devices to capture and project a wraparound photographic image twenty feet tall and sixty-six feet in diameter.1 They called this spectacle the Photorama. The Periphote, as they called their panoramic camera, could rotate 360 degrees to record one continuous negative measuring three by twenty-five inches. This image was then projected using a device that shared its name with the spectacle itself, the Photorama. This projector would rotate twelve apertures at 180 rpm around a static, cylindrical strip of film that contained a single panoramic photograph.
 
The Photorama almost reversed the technique that the Lumières had developed for their cinematograph, one of the first motion-picture technologies. Both a camera and projector, the cinematograph combined the basic structure of a magic lantern with the celluloid roll film that the Kodak company had invented for their inexpensive box cameras. The cinematograph wound a reel of film behind a rhythmically shuttered lens. Each frame of the film strip was quickly exposed, either to record, by imprinting light passing in through the lens, or to project, by filtering light passing out through the lens from a source behind the image.
 
In the cinematograph, then, a strip of film rotated to move multiple discrete images past one shutter and static lens. In the Photorama, on the other hand, the strip of film was a single photograph that remained static while multiple lenses and shutters moved. Cinematic projection produces a sense of seeing things move over time, within a coherent frame. But the Photorama’s technique of projection prioritized spatial continuity, prompting viewers to perceive a wraparound still image, one that avoided the visible seams introduced by other kinds of projectors or even the linked canvases of painted panoramas.
 
The Photorama was successful enough at the 1900 Paris Exposition that it was installed on the rue de Clichy in Paris in 1902, as a permanent entertainment. It closed in 1903, however, because of its excessive cost, and only one known copy of its unusual projector remains. Even by 1900, it was evident that the cinematograph, rather than the Photorama, marked the direction in which visual culture was turning—toward moving images. Several spectacles at the Paris Exposition adapted the painted panorama from the form of a wraparound enclosure to a scrolling form of scenery, pointing to cinema’s future dominance of visual culture. One such spectacle, the Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama, won a gold medal from Exposition judges.
 
The Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama was commissioned by the Wagons-Lits train car company and painted by Marcel Jambon and Alexandre Bailly. It depicted a train ride from Moscow to Beijing, using nine rolls of painted canvas whose length totaled more than half a mile.2 Spectators could sit in one of three actual train cars and watch out the window as scenery unfurled between concealed cylindrical spools. To create a sense that the train car was actually passing through a landscape, multiple layers of scenery moved past the spectator at different distances and speeds. Closest to the train car, actual rocks and sand representing the ground swept past on a fast-moving belt. Further away, moving a bit more slowly, a short painted canvas presented low bushes and vegetation. Beyond this, two larger painted canvases depicted features of the landscape. The largest was over twenty-five feet tall, and moved at a rate one-sixtieth the speed of the closest belt. As they gazed out the window, passengers could “feel” the car moving through the visceral effects of motion parallax.
 

  

The Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama demonstrates how the formats of painted panoramas shifted over the second half of the nineteenth century. But it also drew on photographic formats that developed during the same period. Moving panoramas often depicted a journey—along a wagon trail, a river, or a train line. At the same time, photographs arranged as a series were also a popular way to collect multiple views into a virtual form of travel. Series of photographs depicting railroads were especially prevalent in the United States as transcontinental lines were constructed after the Civil War. Major railroad companies commissioned professional photographers to document progress along the line, creating images that could be used to promote the sale of railroad bonds. Series of numbered photographs following a railroad line were sometimes published as plates in expensive, bound books intended for individual investors.
 
Railway photographs were also commonly viewed through a stereoscope, a device that presents each of a spectator’s eyes with a different image of the same subject, shifted to suggest the slightly different angles from which each eye sees. This prompts the spectator to perceptually coordinate the two images into an impression of visual depth. Viewers triangulate their own implied position within the pictured scene. The stereoscope was invented almost concurrently with photography and became popular after attracting attention at the Great Exhibition of London in 1851. The stereoscope does not require photographs and was initially demonstrated with drawn images. But inexpensive photographic printing methods helped inaugurate a craze for the devices in the second half of the nineteenth century.
 
Like the wraparound panorama, a stereoscope offered an immersive form of visual entertainment that seemed to embed spectators within a representation that filled or even exceeded the limits of their gaze. While panoramas were largely public spectacles, stereographs were collected and viewed primarily at home. They were purchased from shops, through catalogues, and even from door-to-door salesmen. The images ranged widely in subject matter but were promoted predominantly as a form of visual knowledge—a way, for example, to see Niagara Falls or take a virtual tour of Egypt. By swapping stereographs in sequence in the stereoscope, a spectator could imagine taking such a journey. Railway sets deliberately encouraged that idea. They often included descriptions of the scenery on the back of the stereographs written from the perspective of someone standing in the pictured setting.
 
AR and VR incorporate aesthetic strategies of immersion that range from the camera obscura through the panorama, as well as photographic and cinematic technologies. That is not to say they constitute the culmination or summation of these earlier efforts. Instead, each iteration of immersive media has constructed the magic of presence differently. The stereoscope offers a dimensional view, albeit from only one position. The scrolling panorama might create a sense of motion more powerfully than cinema’s moving image, but with a much lower degree of optical realism. The Photorama offered a photorealistic scene, but audiences didn’t find it as compelling as the carefully coordinated visual theater of the painted panorama. Standing in a museum, strapped into a VR headset, maybe also wrapped in a vest or gripping a controller, viewers find both new affordances and new limitations, along with familiar elements of older technologies.

Like AR, the camera obscura and the magic lantern mixed actual and projected worlds. The lenses in VR headsets are based on the principles of the nineteenth-century stereoscope. And just as a spectator needed to manually insert stereographs, or turn a crank to rotate through pre-loaded ones, changes of imagery in VR are triggered by gestures, whether mapped to movements in the virtual world or actual interactions with the device, like a click of a button on a handheld controller. To the stereoscopic effect of depth, AR and VR add the panoramic conceit of a wraparound view, a representation that appears to continue in any direction the user may turn. To the static immersion of the panorama, however, AR and VR add the sense of a dynamic scene. This effect of a living picture could be felt in a phantasmagoria as well, as ghosts seemed to flutter into and out of view, or inside a camera obscura, as clouds floated across a blue sky.

A history of immersive media aesthetics makes plain that the concept of immersion is not fixed. Aesthetic and technological changes continually alter ideas about how the magic of presence should look and feel. These shifts do not exemplify progress so much as they communicate a desire for whatever an “unmediated” experience of presence is assumed and imagined to be. Facebook’s concept of presence appears in the slippage between the different kinds of “connection” it is pursuing: why would connecting humans to computers help people connect with one another? By pursuing the immersive potentials of AR and VR in terms of neural interfaces, computer vision, biometric tracking, and other methods of coupling human and machine, Facebook Reality Labs projects suggest that we might get past the virtual, to reality itself, if we could hack embodiment as a primary kind of interface. While this research may yield intriguing forms of immersion in the near future, it furthers the disconnection that social media already fosters, by formulating presence and human connection in terms of the platforms onto which they are actively and profitably grafted.
 
1 Many sources have confused which device is which and have given inaccurate descriptions of their function. I am relying on an illustrated pamphlet authored by the Lumières and published by A. Storck in Lyon, France, in 1902, as well as the illustrated article “Le photorama, projections panoramiques de MM. A. et L. Lumière” from La Nature, vol. 30, 1er semestre, Feb. 22, 1902, pp. 171–74.
 
2 As Erkki Huhtamo explains in Illusions in Motion (MIT Press, 2013), most scholarly accounts have mistaken this panorama for a different, moving panorama painted by Pavel Pyasetsky that was also shown at the 1900 Exposition and also depicted the Trans-Siberian Railway. Pyasetsky’s panorama scrolled by hand cranking, and was less than two feet tall—a format often called a “parlor panorama.” The larger panorama that I discuss is described and illustrated in “Les panoramas de l’exposition” in La Nature 28, 1er semestre, no. 1407, May 17, 1900, p. 402.
 

A History of Presence. By Brooke Belisle. Art in America January 25, 2021.

Paul Virilio, Thinker of the "Science of Speed" and the Acceleration of the World

The French philosopher Paul Virilio, thinker of the "science of speed" and the acceleration of the world, the urban planner and essayist,  died on Tuesday September 18, of a heart attack at the age of 86.

See here :  Paul Virilio, premier sur la vitesse. By  Robert Maggiori. Liberation, September 18, 2018.

At the moment there is an exhibition in the  V&A Museum in London  called The Future Starts Here. The show begins with a quote by Paul Virilio :  “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.”

A review of this show. The Future Starts Here review – an engaging vision. By Rowan Moore, The Guardian,  May 12, 2018.   

Strangely enough, Paul Virilio, who died on 10 September 2018 at the age of 86, breached the Anglophone world with a book he did not exactly write. Pure War came out in 1983 and is based on interviews he conducted with Sylvère Lotringer, the philosopher and founder of Semiotext(e), who put it together as a real act of friendship. That book burst like an incendiary shell in certain readers’s minds and highlighted his two consistent themes: war and speed.

Virilio’s first love had been architecture. But what is architecture in the age of total war? For centuries, the European city had defended itself against slings and arrows with ramparts and walls, but the city was no match for modern artillery and aerial bombardment. The balance between war and the city shifted decisively in the modern age. The vector trumps the location. This was the bittersweet theme of his first major book, Bunker Archaeology (1975), which, among other things, is a meditation on the German defenses that had failed to keep the Allies at bay when they stormed the beaches and ended the war.

But war doesn’t really end, as Virilio noted, it just accelerates, approximating ever more closely to its pure form. In an era infatuated with the ‘politics’ of everything, he thought instead in terms of war. Modernity is war on ever increasing scales: expanding from the tactical to the strategic to the logistic. World War II was won not by generals but by quartermasters, by the ones who kept the biggest flows of boots and bullets and bodies moving toward the front.

Modernity is also war on more and more kinds of terrain. Warfare not only took to the air but to the airwaves. The modern world is a condition of generalized information warfare. Not only is architecture vulnerable to bombs, it proves defenseless against information, passing through the doors and walls of our homes, rearranging the space and time we imagine we live within.

The information war reversed the power of architecture and communication. The home or the city is now exposed to its flows. The consequences may be even more far-reaching. The vectors of communication call into being a whole new geopolitics – not of territories and borders but of communication and computational infrastructure. Already in the late 20th century he saw coming the kinds of conflicts we experience now, where nameless hackers shut down power stations by remote control, and drone pilots in facilities in Nevada steer airborne killer robots on the other side of the world.

The tone in which Virilio writes of such things is a deft balance between melancholia and fascination. There’s no going back. The old, slow, local world is gone. At his best, he avoids the clichéd style of both kinds of writers on technology: Those nostalgic for an old world, and those who enthuse about everything novel. He pulls off a style that makes the currently fashionable writers on the subject simply redundant. A fine example would be his other famous work, Unknown Quantity (2002), where he invites us to think about how each new technology brings with it its own specific and novel kind of accident.

Virilio was not a moralist. He observed, he speculated, he forged concepts to explain on the fly what is happening to us. He was not an optimist. Technical speed had already overcome the deliberative time of politics. This is an era, he said, not of democracy but of ‘dromocracy,’ the reign of speed. But he did think a lot about tactics in and against the accelerating world. The general line of tactics he advocated paid attention to time, and the possibility of interrupting accelerating time. A city is already a mesh of slow and fast times, but perhaps sometimes a new pocket of stillness can be created.

It would have given him no pleasure to see the general direction of his speculations so spectacularly borne out in our time. He is one of those special (and in a way accursed) writers who was right about things we don’t really want to know.

How Philosopher Paul Virilio (1932–2018) Spoke to an Age of Acceleration and Total War. By  McKenzie Wark. Frieze , September  19, 2018.

Cultural theorist Paul Virilio has been repeating essentially the same thing, packed inside different specifics at different times, over and over for the past 30 years. Maybe it’s time for everybody—not just French people and college students—to start listening to him.

Virilio is into revelations. He’s like some kind of prophet of the apocalypse. There are no moral judgments in his work, even though he is a devout Catholic. He deals more in the observation and analysis of banalities, or “evidences,” as he calls them. His best-known statement is “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.” It’s probably the most concise and eloquent explanation of causality we’ve ever read, and it can be applied to almost anything. Virilio expands this into what might be his main message, which is, to paraphrase, that every technological invention bears its specific defect in its DNA and that the cult of speed and acceleration that technology has engendered will be the death of us all.

Virilio worked, after World War II, as a stained-glass artist along with Matisse and Braque; in the 60s, with partner Claude Parent, his concept of oblique architecture revolutionized the field; and in the 70s, he came to know the then-bosses of French theory: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Virilio’s book Speed and Politics, published in 1977, marked the birth of his concept of dromology, or the logic of speed. He’s been the publisher of Georges Perec and Jean Baudrillard, he’s friends with Chris Marker and Peter Sloterdijk… and now he’s friends with us.

Vice: People know you as the theorist of disaster. Do you think you might be obsessed with it?

Paul Virilio: Not at all. Look at it this way: I used to be friends with Georges Perec, a child of the Holocaust. His parents died in a concentration camp. Once, when I was with him, I told myself: “I’m not a child of the Holocaust. My parents aren’t dead. I’m not Jewish. But I am a child of total war.” It lives in me in the same way that he can’t forget the Holocaust. We are children of the same war. We can’t be racist and say that he’s allowed to be haunted and I’m not.

V: You witnessed aerial bombings in Nantes…

P.V. : The bombings were a very complex and perverted phenomenon. You can’t understand the French collaboration and resistance movements if you don’t understand the occupation period. Being occupied is being in a situation of absolute perversity. You live next to your enemy, and your allies kill you. I was ten years old in 1942. I had to understand that the people who lived close by were my enemies, and the ones bombing me were my friends. I was a child of total warfare, of the lightning war, of the quick war: the blitzkrieg.

V. : Did you hide in basements during the bombings?

P.V.  : On the contrary, we used to go to the fields. We were scared of being buried alive in basements. We used to hear people screaming from the cellars, drowning because the water pipes had exploded. So my dad told us that we wouldn’t do that. We went to the fields and lay on the ground.

V: And yet you suffer from claustrophobia, right?

P.V. : Oh yes. Maybe it started back then, I don’t know. The bombs would fall close by and cover us in sand and dust, but we’d rather die in the sun than croak in a basement. Bombings are a cosmic phenomenon. You don’t feel like a concrete person is doing this to you, it’s more like the apocalypse or a huge storm or the eruption of Vesuvius. When I was young, I witnessed collective fear. Individual fear is easy to deal with as a young boy. Either you hit back or you run away. It just requires individual courage. But when your parents are terrified and grandmothers are crying and the people around you are screaming then, wow, you can’t be brave.

V : A lot of people see only the negative side of your theories. But I see much of it as positive, such as the fact that you are interested in accidents because they are the epitome of complete surprise.

P.V. :  Of course. There are happy accidents: love at first sight, winning the lottery… Aristotle said, “Time is the accident of accidents.” Time is what exists, and the accident is what happens. You have a substance that exists, like a mountain. And then you have the event: the earthquake. I didn’t study disasters, but accidents—rupture. Substance is necessary and absolute, accidents are relative and contingent. How could we manage to analyze today’s technical progress if we don’t analyze its accidents?

 V : Do you mean “accident” in the same way that some say “event” in modern-day philosophy?

P.V. : Yes, except that for me, an accident is the event of speed. Our accidents are linked to the acceleration of history and of reality. The French were occupied by the Nazis by surprise. They didn’t react well because they didn’t understand the speed of it all. They were taken by speed. Today’s events, like the stock-market crash, are speed accidents. I call these “integral accidents” because they trigger other accidents. There is an amplification of pure events in history. Today, history is entirely accidental. Look at 9/11. It’s not an event, it’s an accident. But we consider it to be as important as yesterday’s events. It’s like a declaration of war without a war.

V : Are you against progress?

P.V. : No. I’ve never thought we should go back to the past. But why did the positive aspect of progress get replaced by its propaganda? Propaganda was a tool used by Nazis but also by the Futurists. Look at the Italian Futurists. They were allies with the Fascists. Even Marinetti. I fight against the propaganda of progress, and this propaganda bears the name of never-ending acceleration.

V : I was kind of hoping you’d talk about your metaphor of the shipwreck…

P.V. : Oh yes, of course. It’s just that I’ve been repeating it forever.

V : It’s fairly simple, but so universal.

P.V. : Inventing a plane is not only inventing the crash but also inventing the breakdown. A jet engine is an amazing thing, but it’s also sensitive to birds, to volcanic ash… So you go from the plane that can go really fast to the plane that can’t fly at all. Whether it’s because of terrorism and being scared, or because of the volcano and it being too risky, or something new tomorrow, you can’t innovate without creating some damage. It’s so obvious that being obliged to repeat it shows the extent to which we are alienated by the propaganda of progress.

V : I’m guessing that you always hear, “Regardless, Mr. Virilio, progress is a good thing.” Does that annoy you?

P.V. : Yes, it’s very irritating. These people are victims of propaganda. Progress has replaced God. Nietzsche talked about the death of God—I think God was replaced by progress. I believe that you must appreciate technology just like art. You wouldn’t tell an art connoisseur that he can’t prefer abstractionism to expressionism. To love is to choose. And today, we’re losing this. Love has become an obligation. Progress has all the defects of totalitarianism.

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V : Let’s talk more about the danger that’s inherent in speed.

P.V . : “The faster the better” is completely false. The faster you go, the more risks you take. I used to have a Jaguar. I drove it at more than 200 kilometers per hour once with Claude Parent. He owned an E-Type, I had the S-Type. Physical speed freezes you. And the faster you go, the farther you have to look, and you lose lateral vision. You are fascinated.

V : You just made a gesture as if you were wearing blinders.

P.V.  : Why do animals have eyes on the side? There are very few that have eyes in the front like us. It’s because real danger comes from the side or from behind. Speed flattens the vision, like a screen.

V : You said once that “choosing resistance is not opposing yourself to new technologies, but refusing to collaborate.”

P.V. : Yes, that’s obvious.

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 V : Fifteen years ago, you said you wanted to write a book called The Integral Accident. You also said that everyone could write their own 1984. You still haven’t written it, but did you mean that the consequence of this integral accident would be totalitarianism?

P.V. : Yes, of course. The totalitarianism of totalitarianisms. The loss of liberty. Democracy is threatened everywhere.

V : As you’ve written, we face “the synchronizing of collective emotions that leads to the administration of fear.”

P.V.  : Exactly. The community of emotions that replaces the community of interests. We would get to a communism of affects. And that’s dreadful. This goes back to the panic phenomenon, in front of which we can’t have individual courage. No one talks about nuclear weapons. We are told about nuclear waste—which, by the way, is a huge problem because some of it can be harmful for 200,000 years. When we dig to bury it, we need to make sure this is remembered. Imagine placing nuclear waste in a hole. How do you tell people in 200,000 years that there are dangerous substances there? It’s not science fiction anymore. How do you communicate with those people? What language will they speak? The length of the threat isn’t considered here. And it’s the same for stocking nuclear weapons. They are everywhere. Anyone can get their hands on them. We don’t talk about this, but it’s so obvious. The propaganda of progress really exists. There is censorship here. Do you see the perversity we live in? It’s not a plot against humanity—it’s more complicated—but the result is the same.

Paul Virilio. Interview and Photo By Caroline Dumoucel.  Vice , September  3,  2010.

CTHEORY: What about early cinema as a primitive form of this, when people left the cinema in fright?

VIRILIO : Unlike Serge Daney or Deleuze, I think that cinema and television have nothing in common. There is a breaking point between photography and cinema on the one hand and television and virtual reality on the other hand. The simulator is the stage in-between television and virtual reality, a moment, a phase. The simulator is a moment that leads to cyberspace, that is to say, to the process because of which we now have two bottles instead of one. I might not see this virtual bottle, but I can feel it. It is settled within reality. This explains why the word virtual reality is more important than the word cyberspace, which is more poetic. As far as gender is concerned, there are now two men and two women, real and virtual. People make fun of cybersex, but it’s really something to take into account: it is a drama, a split of the human being! The human being can now be changed into some kind of spectrum or ghost who has sex at a distance. That is really scary because what used to be the most intimate and the most important relationship to reality is being split. This is no simulation but the coexistence of two separate worlds. One day the virtual world might win over the real world.

These new technologies try to make virtual reality more powerful than actual reality, which is the true accident. The day when virtual reality becomes more powerful than reality will be the day of the big accident. Mankind never experienced such an extraordinary accident.

CTHEORY: What is your own feeling about that?

VIRILIO : I’m not scared, just interested.

This is drama. Art is drama. Any relationship to art is also a relationship to death. Creation exists only in regard to destruction. Creation is against destruction. You cannot dissociate birth from death, creation from destruction, good from evil. Thus any art is a form of drama standing between the two extreme poles of birth and death, just like life is drama. This is not sad, because to be alive means to be mortal, to pass through. And art is alive because it is mortal. Except that now, art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art. To someone like Zurbaran, who paints still lifes, lemons and pears are the objects of art. But to the electronics engineer who works on the technologies of virtual reality, the whole reality has become the object of art, with a possibility to substitute the virtual with the real.

CTHEORY: Is there a transcendence of the body?

VIRILIO : That is difficult to say. First, what is under consideration is not only the body itself, but the environment of the body as well. The notion of transcendence is a complex one, but it is true that there is something divine in this new technology. The research on cyberspace is a quest for God. To be God. To be here and there. For example, when I say: “I’m looking at you, I can see you”, that means: “I can see you because I can’t see what is behind you: I see you through the frame I am drawing. I can’t see inside you”. If I could see you from beneath or from behind, I would be God. I can see you because my back and my sides are blind. One can’t even imagine what it would be like to see inside people.

The technologies of virtual reality are attempting to make us see from beneath, from inside, from behind…as if we were God. I am a Christian, and even though I know we are talking about metaphysics and not about religion, I must say that cyberspace is acting like God and deals with the idea of God who is, sees and hears everything.

CTHEORY: What will happen when virtual reality takes the upper hand?

VIRILIO : It already has. If you look at the Gulf War or new military technologies, they are moving towards cyberwars. Most video-technologies and technologies of simulation have been used for war. For example, video was created after the Second World War in order to radio-control planes and aircraft carriers. Thus video came with the war. It took twenty years before it became a means of expression for artists. Similarly, television was first conceived to be used as some kind of telescope, not for broadcasting. Originally, Sworkin, the inventor of television, wanted to settle cameras on rockets so that it would be possible to watch the sky.

CTHEORY: So it was only by a matter of degrees that the Gulf War became the ‘virtual war’, it was live broadcasting that really effected this change?

VIRILIO :  The high level of the technologies used during the Gulf War makes this conflict quite unique, but the very process of de-realization of the war started in 1945. War occured in Kuwait, but it also occured on the screens of the entire world. The site of defeat or victory was not the ground, but the screen. (I wrote a book called Desert Screen on the Gulf War.) Thus it becomes obvious that television is a media of crisis, a museum of accidents.

CTHEORY: This must surely result in some psychic crisis?

VIRILIO : It is as if I was to take my eye, to throw it away, and still be able to see. Video is originally a de-corporation, a disqualification of the sensorial organs which are replaced by machines…The eye and the hand are replaced by the data glove, the body is replaced by a data suit, sex is replaced by cybersex. All the qualities of the body are transferred to the machine. This is a subject I discuss in my last book, The Art of The Engine.

We haven’t adjusted yet, we are forgetting our body, we are losing it. This is an accident of the body, a de-corporation. The body is torn and disintegrated.

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CTHEORY: How can we address this loss?

VIRILIO : The true problem with virtual reality is that orientation is no longer possible. We have lost our points of reference to orient ourselves. The de-realized man is a disoriented man. In my last book, The Art of The Engine, I conclude by pointing at a recent American discovery, the GPS (Global Positioning System) which is the second watch. The first watch tells you what time it is, the second one tells you where you are. If I had a GPS, I could know where this table stands in relation to the whole world, with an amazing precision, thanks to satellites. This is extraordinary: in the Fifteenth century, we invented the first watch, and now we have invented the GPS to know where we are.

When you find yourself in the middle of virtual reality, you don’t know where you are, but with this machine, you can know. This watch has been used for ships and not only can it tell you where you are, but also it can tell others where you are: it works in the two ways. The question you’re asking is really interesting. For one can’t even know what it means to be lost in reality. For instance, it is easy to know whether you are lost or not in the Sahara desert, but to be lost in reality! This is much more complex! Since there are two realities, how can we say where we are? We are far away from simulation, we have reached substitution! I believe this is, all in the same time, a fantastic, a very scary and an extraordinary world.

CTHEORY: But to return to this question of transcendance…

VIRILIO : All in all, I believe that this divine dimension raises the question of transcendance, that is to say the question of the Judeo-Christian God for instance. People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God. Many people question their religious identity today, not necessarily by thinking of converting to Judaism or to Islam: it’s just that technologies seriously challenge the status of the human being. All technologies converge toward the same spot, they all lead to a Deus ex Machina, a machine-God. In a way, technologies have negated the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God. However, these two gods raise similar questions.

As you can see, we are still within the museum of accidents. That’s a huge, cosmic accident, and television, which made reality explode, is part of it. I agree with what Einstein used to say about the three bombs: there are three bombs. The first one is the atomic bomb, which disintegrates reality, the second one is the digital or computer bomb, which destroys the principle of reality itself – not the actual object – and rebuilds it, and finally the third bomb is the demographic one. Some experts have found out that in five thousand years from now, the weight of the population will be heavier than the weight of the planet. That means that humanity will constitute a planet of its own!

CTHEORY: Do you always separate the body from technology?

VIRILIO : No. The body is extremely important to me, because it is a planet. For instance, if you compare Earth and an astronomer, you will see that the man is a planet. There is a very interesting Jewish proverb that says: “If you save one man, you save the world: That’s a reverse version of the idea of the Messiah: one man can save the world, but to save a man is to save the world. The world and man are identical. This is why racism is the most stupid thing in the world.

You are a universe, and so am I; we are four universes here. And there are millions of others around us. Thus the body is not simply the combination of dance, muscles, body-building, strength and sex: it is a universe. What brought me to Christianity is Incarnation, not Ressurection. Because Man is God, and God is Man, the world is nothing but the world of Man – or Woman. So, to separate mind from body doesn’t make any sense. To a materialist, matter is essential: a stone is a stone, a mountain is a mountain, water is water and earth is earth. As far as I am concerned, I am a materialist of the body, which means that the body is the basis of all my work.

To me, dance is an extraordinary thing, more extraordinary than most people usually think. Dance preceded writing, speaking and music. When mute people speak their body language, it is true speaking rather than handicap, this is the first word and the first writing. Thus to me, the body is fundamental. The body, and the territory of course, for there cannot be an animal body without a territorial body: three bodies are grafted over each other: the territorial body – the planet, the social body – the couple, and the animal body – you and me. And technology splits this unity, leaving us without a sense of where we are. This, too, is de-realization.

There is a buddhist proverb which I like a lot. It says: “Every body deserves mercy”. That means that every body is holy. This is to answer the body question.

Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio. By Louise Wilson. Ctheory.net ,  December 1, 1994.

English editions of his books :  MIT Press

I read  the Dutch translation of  L'horizon négatif : essai de dromoscopie.  It was published as

Het horizon-negatief : essay over dromoscopie.  Translated by  Arjen Mulder and Patrice Riemens. Published by Duizend & Een in 1989.

Paul Virilio, French philosopher, talking about the art, speed, perception, and cinematic. In the lecture Paul Virilio discusses the concepts of velocity, light, futurism, tele-objectivity, in relationship to Duchamp, Lacan, Bataille, systemic crisis, abstract art, focusing on direction, screens, and acceleration. European Graduate School Video Lectures

Biography & bibliography : The European Graduate School

Wikipedia