Biography
We are living in the era of acceleration. We are travelling incessantly - in the morning: meeting in London, at noon: presentation in Berlin and in the evening: dinner in Paris, but the hairstyle is keeping up - as the advertising for hair spray suggests. In doing this, we are constantly noticing impressions, we are storaging pictures, we are passing through very different landscapes and cultures, a flow of pictures, which the human beeing is not able to assimilate. Eventually, there are remaining some memories dimly emerging.
But the memory does not dispose of pin sharp pictures as the technical confort of photography feigns. As well as the photos of the snap-shot tourism are not corresponding to the perception at the face: I can take a pin sharp picture of the Eiffel tower and then change quickly over to the next attraction. I haven't notices the Eiffel tower in the same manner as the photography is suggesting to me.
Who is seeing the Eiffel tower as it appears later on the photo? The camera or myself? The camera is freezing th situation as it never has been in reality. But I, myself, even in the moment when I am taking this false evidence, I am moving, I am looking here and there, I am keeping an eye on my wallet, and so on. And even the Eiffel tower is not standing still. Crowds of visitors are moving up and down.
"When the snap-shot ist aiming a scientific accuracy, the cessation, or better, the standstill of time on the picture falsifies inevitably the time felt by the contemplator, that means the time corresponding to the move of the created thing...the snap-shot in the photography, which was considered as the unquestioned evidence of an objective world, was in reality the medium of it's future decadence-....In augmenting the "evidences" for the reality, in the same time, the photography was voiding it....Room and time are forms of views which are not separable from our conciousness as well as form, color, dimension and so on."
Paul Virilio
