this is a pretty hard one, virilio talks about the different impacts that technology has had on culture, society and space. i particularly liked the thought that the airport is now the gate to the city reduced to the security checkpoint that you must go through at the moment of embarking. as if the airplane itself was an extension of the place you are traveling to. it is also interesting to explore the thought of the expansion of the human body, through mechanical or technological means.

In Virilio’s The administration of Fear, there is this overarching idea that technology and the loss of physical face to face communication is creating a society that has lost touch with itself.  He talks about this process of “derealization”.  He says that, “We have lost the relationship to the material world in favor of the world of electromagnetic waves.”  I wonder if this is a bit on the paranoid side.  While Virilio makes several interesting points, specifically about the Russian’s missile retaliation system, I question that the increase in technology and the ability to be across from the globe from the person you are talking to has really diminished people’s ability to make conscious decisions.  He also talks about how, “a relationship to places and reality is disappearing, dissolving, evaporating.”  I think that as technology progresses and allows us to do more and begin to inhabit the virtual world, I do not believe that we will lose what makes us human.  We will still have the effects of the culture and place in which we grew up.  Increase use in technology does not make the physical world just stop.

Everything has been changed during the last decades from the concept of technology to its consequences on both society and peoples attitude. It is the new technology that brings new definition of places or activities. I was amazed with how the technology has changed the concept of gateway and entrance for cities. Previously each city has its own defined gateway which was recognizable by everyone entered to the city but now you cannot clearly show the cities boundary. After emergence of airports in cities and new kind of transportation system, the form and pattern of each city have undergone changes. For example, the major industrial areas in the cities moved to near the airports to be so close to the new gate ways of the cities and the connection of cities to the world of communication which is airports. Another point is that designing this kind of spaces has really affected by the functional concept of their content. It is the definition of departure or arrival that forms the plan of the airport. Besides, the need for controlling these major areas in terms of security required new kind of technology to be generated such as detectors, sensors or cameras. So we see it is the technology that introduced new kind of technology. Telecommunication and new media are coming through every parts of our living from working places areas to our private text messaging with friends. The physical dimension of every activity is being lost and if not has become less and less important because the communication media such as screen makes it easy for us to have access to everything far from us at that moment.

Speed of the technology improvement has a crucial effect on this procedure to destruction of the city or definition of spaces but the point is that it is not all about the technology itself. These are people and users of the technology that demonstrate their need for new type of technology .They used to be “consumer” which means that the technology was invented and they consumed it without thinking but in the contemporary era people have become “user” of the technology they use it and they want to interact with it. They define the speed of these changes; their expectations of technology have been increased so the technology has to adopt itself to the users. The new technology has some consequences that even the producer of that technology does not expect that.

So the reading this week seemed really long winded and drawn out and I feel I lost some of the concepts in there because I was losing track of whats going on. One of the over arching concepts in all three pieces was the sense of time and space and there relationship. Much like the article about the train we read earlier in the semester the notion of communication and electronic interfaces diminished the world to a screen so there was no sense of time or space because you can easily google maps a place and be “in” that city. I believe that Virilio is attempting to say that the human world is becoming inhuman and is now more of a mechanical world where we are losing sense of who we are and what it means to be human.

I assume the article Unable Bodies is using some events such war in ancient history as a metaphor to imply there’s another war in our era. Virilio suggests that speed became the main and only agent of process of what happening in human world, here comes a term: dromology. Indeed, unlike the war in ancient Greek or Sparta, however there are wars in other ways continuously happening in our epoch. That reminds me of Sisyphus and his rock. Human just can’t stop it and it becomes worse since the world is actually shrinking.

Furthermore, in The Overexposed City, there are several concepts which elaborate the term dromology and how it becomes the sole agent of process: surface became more and more blur, instead, the surface transformed into an “osmotic membrane”. Under this situation, “thickness without thickness,” “volume without volume,” “location has no location” — a war in a flat world.

The war between exploiters and colonized people is cruel, especially under the wave of globalization. In some point, we are all refugee. “…as the faster we move around the world, the less we appreciate it vastness” (Virilio) Actually our mind, aesthetics, sense of everything are already no longer belong to ourselves since the surface transformed into an “osmotic membrane” (Here in my perspective the surface is not only on the street or in the city but also exist among every individuals.)

Hence, here, there are no longer here and there anymore. The speed of the shrinking process of the world is speeding up. Here and there are both nowhere now for the sake of internet, television and satellites. In the world made of screens, “He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody ” (The Beatles, Nowhere Man, 1965)

For me it was very interesting how human affairs like politics and history and influence of new concepts of space, time and for sure speed on these affairs is presented by Virilio. In some parts of the text, regarding my lack of history knowledge I didn’t find out the exact historical samples (or, I was “allergic to watermelons” in some parts.) but I tried to understand the general argument of the text.

One of the main points in his ” Politics and speed” text is the when he mentioned futurist artists and combination of war and speed. He was trying to show a very clear correlation between war and speed. he wrote: “history progress at the speed of its weapons system.” and I believe that it’s completely true. I also want to quote him again from “The lost Dimension” when he asked a question after arguing about mass destruction. “In a period of economic crisis, will mass destruction of the large cities replace the traditional politics of large public works?” he then added ” If that happens, there will be no essential difference between economic-industrial recession and war.” Interestingly he discussed once that the goals that were not achieved in war time  can be achieved in post war economic opening era. it seems that no matter how history moves forward, the speed of our tools plays a very important role in it.

The other interesting point for me is when he wrote about spatial changes in cities with no gates. “opacity of building materials is reduced to zero.” Once again in this semester we can see the huge impact of technology on real time and space; the comparison of cathode ray screen with roman forum and the fact that our cities are not any more limited to space but to time.

Finally I think it’s the best time, not only because we had November 9th last week, but also the clear relations of Virilio’s articles with concept of a wall passing through a city, to remember Berlin wall, and think about its meaning and its influences once again.

I am very interested in these two Virilio’s notions ;”city of fear”, “city of screens”. I can even connect them in my mind and say city of fearful screens.

Virilio speaks about the ruin of the distance, position, and the notions of “here ” and “there”, he speaks about screens all over the city, and he continues that the opacity of building materials is reduced to zero. “Curtain walls made of light and transparent materials and even screens”. I think more and more about the ones who are responsible about the prophecy and importance of the visual quality of the city and even more critical; about people being influenced unconsciously by them. And here is the fear; it seems that ones for whom I  have sought are ones about whom Virilio says: “they are tempted to create policies for the orchestration and management of fear”.

“when you have passed through the corridor, they know everything about you”. Maybe that’s why urban planners tried to annihilate the idea of “”gated communities”[in 70s and 80s] as the physical sample of a gate. I read this sentence several times and each time I thought about the moment which I accepted something in order to enter somewhere (could be a virtual place) while I knew that I would lose something in return. I think about both the mentioned sentence and the very familiar one; “I agree to the terms and conditions”. This is maybe the new form of a gate..

And finally I want to just quote the sentence by which I am  strongly impressed from Virilio and add nothing in continue.

“we are entering the potential disorientation of traditional guidelines for law and the unlawful, with the deconstruction of the rule of law soon leading to the disorientation of politics.”

I find it really interesting  that Virilio often refers to postmodernism. I’ll start by quoting him: “If architectonics once measured itself according to geology, according to the tectonics of natural reliefs, with pyramids, towers and other neo­gothic tricks, today it measures itself according to state ­of ­the ­art technologies, whose vertiginous prowess exiles all of us from the terrestrial horizon.” I find this interesting because Virilio is referring to a different speed with which architecture now aligns itself. At one time, architecture was the backdrop of all permanence, and then modernists started looking at flexibility. Postmodernism was a reaction to their solution of generic column grids and flat floor plates which were untied to space-time (and by the way, worked really well-and still do). So, of course, they started again building temples and things as the reaction to the generic and flexible as a statement of permanence (which interestingly enough are falling to the wrecking ball quicker than modernist buildings due to their ugliness, unfortunately). But now we’re reaching this critical point again. Where the speed of technology far outpaces the speed of buildings. Here’s a practical example; even buildings built as recently as the late 90’s, with clients looking to upgrade them, are facing a lot of challenges. Most of these upgrades are technological in nature, and these buildings just plain weren’t designed for this stuff and it’s a massive challenge to retrofit them with it. Their lifespan has been exponentially reduced by the speed of technological development. So we have to be responsible for designing for the speed at which architecture must now adapt-or design the adaptation ourselves; but then again the tension emerges. Is architecture permanent, or flexible? Is it a statement or generic? Or is it something else, could it possibly be responsive to this speed?