Paul Virilio
[Writer and theorist, b. 1932, Paris, lives in La Rochelle, France.]
While the human gaze becomes more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, become even faster.
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[When everything becomes visible,] we’ll dream of being blind. This is the engine of art.
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... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war’s
recording surface, its
film. ![](/images/rdquo.gif)
Images contaminate us like viruses.
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From the original watchtower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote sensing-satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye’s function being the function of a weapon.
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Digital messages and images matter less than their instantaneous delivery; the “shock effect” always wins out over the consideration of the informational content.
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To regain our liberty (and our distance), we must slow the images down.
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What the technology of photosensitivity introduced... is that the definition of photographic time was no longer the same as time passing, but essentially a kind of time that gets exposed, that “breaks the surface”—surfaces; and this exposure time then succeeds the classic time of succession.
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