Quote

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.

Paul Virilio

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Paul Virilio
Age: 86 †
Born: 1932
Born: January 4
Died: 2018
Died: September 10
Architect
Art Theorist
Exhibition Curator
Painter
Philosopher
Photographer
Sociologist
Urban Planner
Writer
Paris
France
Original
Balloon
Function
Satellites
Weapons
Balloons
Eye
Aircraft
Remote
Reconnaissance
Repeated
Anchored
Weapon
Sensing
Originals
Indefinitely

More quotes by Paul Virilio

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Let us put it this way, techno-scientific intelligence is presently insufficiently spread among society at large to enable us to interpret the sorts of techno-scientific advances that are taking shape today.
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Television exposes the world to the accident. The world is exposed to accidents through television.
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I believe that philosophy is part of literature, and not the reverse.
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If we turn to the war in Kosovo, what do we find? We find the manipulation of the audience's emotions by the mass media.
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There can be no doubt about this. It even held true for the soldiers involved in the Kosovo War. For the soldiers stayed mostly in their barracks! In this way, polar inertia has truly become a mass phenomenon. And not only for the TV audiences watching the war at home but also for the army that watches the battle from the barracks.
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I am always concerned with ideas of territory and movement. Indeed, my first book after Bunker Archeology was entitled L'insecurite du territoire (1976).
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I have said many times before, interactivity is the equivalent of radioactivity. For interactivity effects a kind of disintegration, a kind of rupture.
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The field of vision is comparable, for me, to the terrain of an archaeological dig. To see is to be on guard, to wait for what emerges from the background, without any name, without any particular interest: what was silent will speak, what is closed will open and will take on a voice.
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Cyberspace is an accident of the real. Virtual reality is the accident of reality itself.
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The research on cyberspace is a quest for God. To be God. To be here and there.
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I pursue through my research on speed and on my study of the organisation of the revolution of the means of transportation.
Paul Virilio
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Thus it is no longer a Caesar or a Napoleon who decides on the fate of any particular war but a piece of software! In short, the political intelligence of war and the political intelligence of society no longer penetrate the techno-scientific world.
Paul Virilio
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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.
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Resistance is always possible! But we must engage in resistance first of all by developing the idea of a technological culture.
Paul Virilio
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Already, viral contamination offers an initial response to the question of the downside of electronic circuits, but another area of research beckons the area of ecological pollution. The pollution not only of air, water, and other substances, but also the unperceived pollution of distances.
Paul Virilio
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Hence not only the crisis of geopolitics and geostrategy but also the shift towards the emergence and dominance of chronostrategy.
Paul Virilio
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France and Germany were opposed to a maritime blockade of the Adriatic Sea without a mandate from the United Nations (UN). So, what we witnessed in Kosovo was an extraordinary war, a war waged solely with bombs from the air.
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I could give examples of cabinet ministers, including defence ministers, who have no technological culture at all. In other words, what I am suggesting is that the hype generated by the publicity around the Internet and so on is not counter balanced by a political intelligence that is based on a technological culture.
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I don't believe in simulationism, I believe that the word is already old-fashioned. As I see it, new technologies are substituting a virtual reality for an actual reality. And this is more than a phase: it's a definite change.
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The globally constituted accident can be compared to what people who work at the stock exchange call 'systemic risk'.
Paul Virilio