vertigo

quotes by paul virilio from the aesthetics of disappearance

"child-society frequently utilizes turnings, spinning around, disequilibrium. it looks for sensations of vertigo and disorder as sources of pleasure. . . the child lartigue has thereby stayed in the same place, and is, nevertheless, absent. owing to an acceleration of speed, he's succeeded in modifying his actual duration; he's taken it off from his lived time. to stop 'registering' it was enough for him to provoke a body-acceleration, a dizziness that reduced his environment to a sort of luminous chaos. but with each return, when he tried to resolve the image, he obtained only a clearer perception of its variations."

"what happens is so far ahead of what we think, of our intentions, that we can never catch up with it and never really know its true appearance." -rainer marie rilke

"i don't think of a bilboquet as being bizarre. it's rather something very banal, as banal as a penholder, a key or the foot of a table. i never show bizarre or strange objects in my pictures. . . they are always familiar things, not bizarre but ordinary things are gathered and transformed in such a way that we're made to think that there's something else of an unfamiliar nature that appears at the same time as familiar things." -rene magritte

"to look at what you wouldn't look at, to hear what you wouldn't listen to, to be attentive to the banal, to the ordinary, to the infra-ordinary. to deny the ideal hierarchy of the crucial and the incidental, because there is no incidental, only dominant cultures that exile us from ourselves and others, a loss of meaning which is for us not only a siesta of consciousness but also a decline in existence."

"etienne jules marey understands that the acceleration of bodies, the fugacity of movement, as perceived by the vulgar eye, demand a guidance of vision disengaged from mnemonic traces. the whiteness of birds or that of horses, the brilliant strips pasted on the clothes of experimental subjects, make the body disappear in favor of an instantaneous blend of givens under the indirect light of motors and other propagators of the real. the heterogeneous succeeds the homogeneous, the aesthetics of the search supplants the search for an aesthetics, the aesthetics of disappearance renews the enterprise of appearance."

"reversible chronophotography, that is, cinema, illusion imposed on the physiology of our organs of visual perception (alfred fessard), oscillates, from the beginning, between the production of luminous, persisting impressions and the pure fascination that destroys the conscious perception of the spectator and conflicts with the natural functioning of the eye: 'fixity of the look directed at what we seriously think of as a single thing, for example, a colored spot, fixity that can last not much longer than a second without serious risk of seeing the subject fall into hypnotic ecstasy or into some other analogous pathological condition,' writes doctor abraham wolf. . .  the aim of cinema will be to provoke an effect of vertigo in the voyeur-traveler, the end being sought now is to give him the impression of being projected into the image."

"'the impact of disneyland and disney world,' says another collaborator, comes from walt's cinematic know-how: 'ideas, instead of entering in competition, complete and prolong each other. if the pedestrian is so comfortable in our kingdoms, it's because the size of the buildings and means of transportation is reduced a fifth of their normal dimension. nothing, neither trains, nor the identically duplicated cars, is on a normal scale, which creates. . . the dream.'"

"to the extent that its principle theme comes down to: science technology of other worlds, the revival of science fiction in the united states and in the industrialized nations seems linked to that of religions and sects. if on the one hand people like professor lawrence leshan are pointing out the similarity in vision of the universe and its laws in atomic physicists and in the great mystics, the science fiction narrative, on the other hand, demonstrates the incompatibilities existing between our presence in the world and the various levels of a certain anesthesia in our consciousness that, at every moment, inclines us to see-saw into more or less extensive absences, more or less serious, even to provoke by various means instantaneous immersions in other worlds, parallel worlds, interstitial, bifurcating, right up to that black hole, which would be only an excess of speed in these kinds of crossings, a pure phenomenon of speed, abrogating the inital separation between day and night."

"if terror is the accomplishment of the law of movement, attraction itself can convey anguish. attracting the gaze is to capture it and thereby to subvert attention, the optical illusion in a world entirely perceived as illusion."

"in the 17th century there appeared in france some very strict rules about clothes, mandating that the male abandon the 'right to beauty.' but at the same time the wearing of the uniform became obligatory, in spite of the opposition of the nobility. . . from uniformity we pass to invisibility as during the war of 1914 the authorities agree on the evident advantage in renouncing bright colors in the manufacture of uniforms and in adopting a habit of neutral shade to diminish the visibility of troops in the field. . . the major concern being less with identification than disintegration, since the word comes from the hindustani khaki, meaning color of dust."

"the immediacy of terrestrial transport, modifying the relation to space, annihilates the relation to lived time and it's in this urgency that its dynamic exaltation consists. paradoxically, it's the extreme mobility which creates the inertia of the moment, instantaneity which would create the instant! finally the instant becomes like the illusory perception of a stability, clearly revealed by technical prostheses, such as is demonstrated for us by einstein's example of passing trains: the feeling of the instant can only be given by coincidence (epiteikos), the moment when two trains seem immobile to travelers while they are really launched at top speed one beside the other. the notion of a time, which, according to bachelard, would accommodate only the reality of the instant, could only be established on the basis of our remaining unconscious of our own speeds in a world entirely given over to the law of movement and thereby the creator of the illusion of inertia."