Writing about telecommunication and telepresence,
These technologies collapse the physical distances, uprooting the familiar patterns of perception which grounded our culture and politics
Small Optics (3)
Big Optics is real-time electronic transmission of information, “the active optics of time passing at the speed of light”
If information from any point can be transmitted with the same speed, the concepts of near and far, horizon, distance and space itself no longer have any meaning
Every point on Earth is now instantly accessible from any other point on Earth
Big Optics locks us in a claustrophobic world without any depth of horizon
Virilio asks us to notice “the progressive derealisation of the terrestrial horizon,…resulting in an impending primacy of real time perspective of undulatory optics over real space of the linear geometrical optics of the Quattrocento” (4)
He mourns the destruction of distance, geographic grandeur, the vastness of natural space, the vastness which guaranteed time delay between events and our reactions, giving us time for critical reflection necessary to arrive at a correct decision.
The regime of Big Optics inevitably leads to real time politics, the politics which requires instant reactions to the events transmitted with the speed of light, and which ultimately can only be efficiently handled by computers responding to each other.
Film - collapses distances, bringing everything equally close and destroys aura * as well as video conferencing
To Virilio- film became part of the human nature, the continuation of our natural sight (Small Optics)
-in contrast to Big Optics of instant electronic transmission
Electronic transmission function as a two-way communication (5)
Via telepresence, she can also be “present” in these locations. She can affect change on material reality over physical distance in real time *interactivity
‘Progressive diminishing and finally complete elimination of something which both writers see as a fundamental condition of human perception—spatial distance, the distance between the subject who is seeing and the object being seen’. —> 인간, the betweeneness* (6)
Distance becomes responsible for creating the gap between the spectator and spectacle, for separating subject and object
Distance allows the subject to treat the Other as object; in short, it makes objectification possible
Distance guaranteed by vision preserves the aura of an object, its position in the world