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As I have said many times before, I was among the first people to experience the German Occupation of France during the Second World War. I was 7-13 years old during the War and did not really internalise its significance.

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
People
War
Experience
German
Firsts
Occupation
First
Significance
Many
France
Years
Among
Really
Second
World
Times

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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.
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The cinema was certainly an art, but television can't be, because it is the museum of accidents. In other words, its art is to be the site where all accidents happen. But that's its only art.
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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.
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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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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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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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Today, everything is about speed and real time. We are no longer concerned with real space.
Paul Virilio
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In industrialized warfare, where the representation of events outstripped the presentation of facts, the image was starting to gain sway over the object, time over space. Soon a conflict of strategic and political interpretation would ensue, with radio and then radar completing the picture.
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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Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed the hidden side of wealth.
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 example, we have developed an artistic and a literary culture. Nevertheless, the ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy.
Paul Virilio
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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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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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I have said many times before, interactivity is the equivalent of radioactivity. For interactivity effects a kind of disintegration, a kind of rupture.
Paul Virilio
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For the US, GPS are a form of sovereignty! It is hardly surprising, then, that the EU has proposed its own GPS in order to be able to localize and to compete with the American GPS.
Paul Virilio
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Sovereignty no longer resides in the territory itself, but in the control of the territory. And localisation is an inherent part of that territorial control.
Paul Virilio
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Concepts are mental images.
Paul Virilio
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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).
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