Quote

The creation of a virtual image is a form of accident. This explains why virtual reality is a cosmic accident. It's the accident of the real.

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
Accident
Accidents
Image
Creation
Reality
Form
Virtual
Real
Explains
Cosmic

More quotes by Paul Virilio

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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.
Paul Virilio
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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.
Paul Virilio
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Writing is not possible without images. Yet, images don't have to be descriptive they can be concepts.
Paul Virilio
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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
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I have always been interested in the architecture of war, as can be seen in Bunker Archeology. However, at the time that I did the research for that book, I was very young. My aim was to understand the notion of 'Total War'.
Paul Virilio
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To separate mind from body doesn't make any sense.
Paul Virilio
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The thing about collaborators is that you don't know you are one whereas as a member of the resistance, you do. [In WWII,] the worst cases of collaboration weren't among the real collaborators, that official militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.
Paul Virilio
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The body is not simply the combination of dance, muscles, body-building, strength and sex: it is a universe.
Paul Virilio
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Jean Baudrillard is a friend of mine, I do not agree with him on that one! For me, the significance of the war in Kosovo was that it was a war that moved into space.
Paul Virilio
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There is a buddhist proverb which I like a lot. It says: Every body deserves mercy. That means that every body is holy.
Paul Virilio
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For instance, the Persian Gulf War was a miniature world war. It took place in a small geographical area. In this sense it was a local war. But it was one that made use of all the power normally reserved for global war.
Paul Virilio
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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.
Paul Virilio
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Whoever controls the territory possesses it.
Paul Virilio
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There is, then, a link between the logistics of perception, the wars in Lebanon and the Gulf as well as with CNN and the Pentagon.
Paul Virilio
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Cyberspace is an accident of the real. Virtual reality is the accident of reality itself.
Paul Virilio
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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.
Paul Virilio
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Art is drama. Any relationship to art is also a relationship to death.
Paul Virilio
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For example, it was this pack of wolves that sparked off the Rodney King affair a few years ago in Los Angeles. Let us consider the situation: a person videos Rodney King being beaten up by the cops. That person then sends in the footage to the TV station. Within hours riots flare up in the city!
Paul Virilio
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However, the Kosovo War took place in orbital space. In other words, war now takes place in 'aero-electro-magnetic space'. It is equivalent to the birth of a new type of flotilla, a home fleet, of a new type of naval power, but in orbital space!
Paul Virilio
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Technologies first equipped the territorial body with bridges, aqueducts, railways, highways, airports, etc. Now that the most powerful technologies are becoming tiny - microtechnologies, all technologies can invade the body. These micro-machines will feed the body. Research is being conducted in order to create additional memory for instance.
Paul Virilio