The Blackwell City Reader

(ed. by G. Bridge and S. Watson). Blackwell Publishing, 2002

The Overexposed City

Paul Virilio

At the beginning of the 1960s, with black United States, Dortmund in West Germany, ghettoes rioting, the mayor of Philadelphia and all of this at the very moment in announced: 'From here on in, the frontiers which other areas were being built up, of the State pass to the interior of the cities.' around tremendous international airports, a While this sentence translated the political METROPLEX, a metropolitan complex reality for all Americans who were being such as Dallas/Fort Worth. Since the discriminated against, it also pointed to an 1970s and the beginnings of the world even larger dimension, given the construc- economic crisis, the construction of these tion of the Berlin Wall, on 13 August 1961, airports was further subjected to the in the heart of the ancient capital of the imperatives of the defence against air Reich. pirates. Since then, this assertion has been con- Construction no longer derived simply firmed time and again: Belfast, London- from traditional technical constraint. The derry where not so long ago certain streets plan had become a function of the risks of bore a yellow band separating the Catholic 'terrorist contamination' and the dispos- side from the Protestant, so that neither ition of sites conceived of as sterile zones would move too far, leaving a chain-link for departures and non-sterile zones for ar- no man's land to divide their communities rivals. Suddenly, all forms of loading and even more clearly. And then there's Beirut unloading - regardless of passenger, bag- with its East and West sections, its tortured gage or freight status - and all manner of internal boundaries, its tunnels and its airport transit had to be submitted to a mined boulevards. system of interior/exterior traffic control, Basically, the American mayor's state- The architecture that resulted from this ment revealed a general phenomenon that had little to do with the architect's person- was just beginning to hit the capital cities as ality. It emerged instead from perceived well as the provincial towns and hamlets, public security requirements. the phenomenon of obligatory introversion in As the last gateway to the State, the air- which the City sustained the first effects of port came to resemble the fort, port or a multinational economy modelled railway station of earlier days. The airports along the lines of industrial enterprises, a were turned into theatres of necessary regu- real urban redeployment which soon con- lation of exchange and communication, tributed to the gutting of certain worker they also became breeding and testing cities such as Liverpool and Sheffield in grounds for high-pressured experiments in England, Detroit and Saint Louis in the control and aerial surveillance performed

tor and by a new 'air and border patrol', whose anti- staying for a year and then moving on -that it terrorist exploits began to make headlines with the contributed to the ruin of a place that each intervention of the German GS.G9 border guards in inhabitant found adequate... the Mogadishu hijacking, several thousand miles In fact, since the originary enclosures, the concept away from Germany. of boundary has undergone numerous changes as At that instant, the strategy of confining the sick or regards both the facade and the neighbourhood it the suspect gave way to a tactic of mid-voyage fronts. From the palisade to the screen, by way of interception. Practically, this meant examining stone ramparts, the boundary-surface has clothing and baggage, which explains the sudden recorded innumerable perceptible and proliferation of cameras, radars and detectors in all imperceptible transformations, of which the latest restricted passageways. When the French built is probably that of the interface. Once again, we 'maximum security cell-blocks', they used the have to approach the question of access to the City magnetized doorways that air- ports had had for in a new manner. For example, does the metropolis years. Paradoxically, the equipment that ensured possess its own facade? At which moment does the maximal freedom in travel formed part of the core city show us its face? of penitentiary incarceration. At the same time, in a The phrase 'to go into town', which replaced the number of residential areas in the United States, nineteenth-century's 'to go to town', indicates the security was maintained exclusively through closed- uncertainty of the encounter, as if we could no circuit television hook-ups with a central police longer stand before the city but rather abide station. In hanks, in supermarkets, and on major forever within. If the metropolis is still a place, a highways, where toll-booths resembled the ancient geographic site, it no longer has anything to do cit gates, the rite of passage was no longer with the classical oppositions of city/ country nor intermittent. It had become immanent. centre/periphery. The city is no longer organized In this new perspective devoid of horizon in the city into a localized and axial estate. While the was entered not through a gate or through an arc de suburbs contributed to this dissolution, in fact the triomphe but rather through an electronic audience intramural-extramural opposition collapsed with system. Users of the road were no longer understood the transport revolutions and the development of to be inhabitants or privileged residents. They were communication and telecommunications now interlocutors in permanent transit. From this technologies. These promoted the merger of moment on, continuity no longer breaks down in disconnected metropolitan fringes into a single space, nor in the physical space of urban lots nor in urban mass. the juridical space of their property tax records. From In effect, we are witnessing a paradoxical moment here, continuity is nip-Bed in time, in a time that in which the opacity of building materials is advanced technologies and industrial redeployment reduced to zero. With the invention of the steel incessantly arrange through a series of skeleton construction, curtain walls made of light interruptions, such as plant closings, unemployment, and transparent materials, such as glass or plastics, casual labour and successive I simultaneous replace stone facades, just as tracing paper, acetate disappearing acts. These surve to organize and then and plexiglass replace the opacity of paper in the disorganize the urban environment to the point of designing phase. provoking the irreversible decay and degradation of On the other hand, with the screen interface of "neighbourhoods, as in the housing development computers, television and teleconferences, the near Lyon where the occupants' ‘rate of rotation' surface of inscription, hitherto devoid of depth, became so great - people becomes a kind of 'distance', a depth of field of a new kind of representation, a 'visibility without any face-to-face encounter in which the

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vis-a-vis of the ancient streets disappears man/machine interface replaces the facades and is erased. In this situation, a difference of buildings as the surfaces of property al- of position blurs into fusion and confusion. lotments. Deprived of objective boundaries, the Where once the opening of the city gates architectonic element begins to drift and announced the alternating progression of float in an electronic ether, devoid of spatial days and nights, now we awaken to the dimensions, but inscribed in the singular opening of shutters and televisions. The temporality of an instantaneous diffusion. day has been changed. A new day has From here on people can't be separated by been added to the astronomers' solar day, physical obstacles or by temporal dis- to the flickering day of candles, to the elec- tances. With the interfacing of computer tric light. It is an electronic false-day, and terminals and video monitors, distinctions it appears on a calendar of information here and there no longer mean anything. 'commutations' that has absolutely no rela- This sudden reversion of boundaries and tionship whatsoever to real time. Chrono- oppositions introduces into everyday, logical and historical time, time that passes, common space an element which until is replaced by a time that exposes itself now was reserved for the world of micro- instantaneously- On the computer screen, scopes. There is no plenum; space is not a time period becomes the 'support-sur- filled with matter. Instead, an unbounded face' of inscription. Literally, or better cine- expanse appears in the false perspective of matically, time surfaces. Thanks to the the machines' luminous emissions. From cathode-ray tube, spatial dimensions have here on, constructed space occurs within become inseparable from their rate of an electronic topology where the framing transmission. As a unity of place without of perspective and the gridwork weft of any unity of time, the City has disappeared numerical images renovate the division of into the heterogeneity of that regime com- urban property. The ancient private/public prised of the temporality of advanced tech- occultation and the distinction between nologies. The urban figure is no longer housing and traffic are replaced by an over- designated by a dividing line that separates exposure in which the difference between here from there. Instead, it has become a 'near' and 'far' simply ceases to exist, just as computerized timetable. the difference between 'micro' and 'macro' Where once one necessarily entered the vanished in the scanning of the electron city by means of a physical gateway, now microscope. one passes through an audiovisual protocol The representation of the modern city in which the methods of audience and can no longer depend on the ceremonial surveillance have transformed even the opening of gates, nor on the ritual forms of public greeting and daily processions and parades lining the streets reception. Within this place of optical and avenues with spectators. From here illusion, in which the people occupy on, urban architecture has to work with transportation and transmission time the opening of a new 'technological instead of inhabiting space, inertia tends to space-time'. In terms of access, telematics renovate an old sedentariness, which replaces the doorway. The sound of gates results in the persistence of urban sites. gives way to the clatter of data banks and With the new instantaneous the rites of passage of a technical culture communications media, arrival supplants whose progress is disguised by the departure: without necessarily leaving, immateriality of its parts and networks. everything 'arrives'. Instead of operating in the space of a Until recently, the city separated its constructed social fabric, the intersecting 'intramural' population from those outside and connecting grid of highway and the walls. Today, people are divided service systems now occurs in the according to aspects of time. Where once sequences of an imperceptible organization an entire 'downtown' area indicated a long of time in which the historical period, now only a few morni- THE OVEREXPOSED CITY 443

merits will do. Further, the new techno- interaction. In effect, all of this participates .ogical time has no relation to any calendar in a new 'posturban' and transnational of events nor to any collective memory. It is kind of concentration, as indicated by a pure computer time, and as such helps con- number of recent events. struct a permanent present, an unbounded, Despite the rising cost of energy, the timeless intensity that is destroying the American middle classes are evacuating rempo of a progressively degraded society. the cities of the East, Following the trans- What is a monument within this regime? formation of inner cities into gheitoes and Instead of an intricately wrought portico or slums, we now are watching the deterior- a monumental walk punctuated by sump- ation of the cities as regional centres. From tuous buildings, we now have idleness and Washington to Chicago, from Boston to monumental waiting for service from a ma- Saint Louis, the major urban centres are chine. Everyone is busily waiting in front of shrinking. On the brink of bankruptcy, some communications or telecommunica- New York City lost 10 per cent of its popu- tions apparatus, lining up ar tollbooths, lation in rhe last ten years. Meanwhile, De- poring over captains' checklists, sleeping troit lost 20 per cent of its inhabitants, with computer consoles on their night- Cleveland 23 per cent, Saint Louis 27 per stands. Finally, the gateway is turned into cent. Already, whole neighbourhoods have a conveyance of vehicles and vectors whose turned into ghost towns. disruption creates less a space than a count- These harbingers of an imminent 'post- down, in which work occupies the centre of industrial' deurbanization promise an time while uncontrolled time of vacations exodus that will affect all of the developed and uncmp\oyment torm a periphery, the countries. Predicted for the last forty years, suburbs of time, a clearing away of activ- this deregulation of the management of ities in which each person is exiled to a life space comes from an economic and polit- of privacy and deprivation. ical illusion about the persistence of sites If, despite the wishes of postmodern constructed in the era of automotive man- architects, the city from here on is deprived agement of time, and in the epoch of the of gateway entries, it is because the urban development of audiovisual technologies of wall has long been breached by an infinitude retinal persistence. of openings and ruptured enclosures. While 'Each surface is an interface between two less apparent than those of antiquity, these environments that is ruled by a constant arc equally effective, constraining and activity in the form of an exchange between segregating. The illusion of the industrial the two substances placed in contact with revolution in transportation misled us as to one another.' the limitlessness of progress. Industrial This new scientific definition of surface time-management has imperceptibly com- demonstrates the contamination at work: pensated for the loss of rural territories. In the 'boundary, or limiting surface' has the nineteenth century, the city/country at- turned into an osmotic membrane, like a traction emptied agrarian space of its cul- blotting pad. Even if this last definition is tural and social substance. At the end of the more rigorous than earlier ones, it still sig- twentieth century, urban space loses its geo- nals a change in the notion of limitation. political reality to the exclusive benefit The limitation of space has become com- of systems of instantaneous deportation mutation: the radical separation, the neces- whose technological intensity ceaselessly sary crossing, the transit of a constant upsets all of our social structures. These activity, the activity of incessant exchanges, systems include the deportation of people the transfer between two environments in the redeployment of modes of produc-: and two substances. What used to be the tion, the deportation of attention, of the boundary of a material, its 'terminus', has human face-to-face and the urban vis-a-vis \ become an entryway hidden in the most encounters at the level of human/machine imperceptible entity. From here on, the

444 appearance of surfaces and superficies conceals a play of daylight and the shadow of buildings. secret transparency, a thickness without A strange topology is hidden in the obviousness of thickness, a volume without volume, an televised images. Architectural plans are displaced imperceptible quantity. by the sequence plans of an invisible montage. If this situation corresponds with the Where geographical space once was arranged physical reality of the infinitesimally small, it according to the geometry of an apparatus of rural also fits that of the infinitely large. When what or urban boundary setting, time is now organized was visibly nothing becomes 'something', the according to imperceptible fragmentations of the greatest distance no longer precludes technical time span, in which the cutting, as of a perception. The greatest geophysical expanse momentary interruption, replaces the lasting contracts as it becomes more concentrated. In disappearance, the 'program guide' replaces the the interface of the screen, everything is chain link fence, just as the railroads' timetables always already there, offered to view in the once replaced the almanacs. immediacy of an instantaneous transmission. 'The camera has become our best inspector,' In 1980, for example, when Ted Turner declared John F. Kennedy, a little before being decided to launch Cable News Network as a struck down in a Dallas street. Effectively, the round-the-clock live news station, he camera allows us to participate in certain political transformed his subscribers' living space into and optical events. Consider, for example, the a kind of global broadcast studio for world irruption phenomenon, in which the City allows events. itself to be seen thoroughly and completely, or the Thanks to satellites, the cathode-ray diffraction phenomenon, in which its image window brings to each viewer the light of reverberates beyond the atmosphere to the farthest another day and the presence of the antipodal reaches of space, while the endoscope and the place. If space is that which keeps everything scanner allow us to see to the farthest reaches of from occupying the same place, this abrupt life. confinement brings absolutely everything This overexposure attracts our attention to the precisely to that 'place', that location that has extent that it offers a world without antipodes and no location. The exhaustion of physical, or without hidden aspects, a world in which opacity natural, relief and of temporal distances is but a momentary interlude. Note how the illusion telescopes all localization and all position. As of proximity barely lasts. Where once the polis with live televised events, the places become inaugurated a political theatre, with its agora and its interchangeable at will. forum, now there is only a cathode-ray screen, The instantaneity of ubiquity results in the where the shadows and spectres of a community atopia of a singular interface. After the spatial dance amid their processes of disappearance, and temporal distances, speed dis tance where cinematism broadcasts the last appearance obliterates the notion of physical dimension. of urbanism, the last image of an urbanism without Speed suddenly becomes a • primal urbanity. This is where tact and contact give way to dimension that defies all temporal and televisual impact. While teleconferencing allows physical measurements. This radical erasure long-distance conferences with the advantage is equivalent to a momentary inertia in the derived from the absence of displacement, tele- environment. The old agglomeration negotiating inversely allows for the production of disappears in the intense acceleration of distance in discussions, even when the members of telecommunications, in order to give rise to a the conversation are right next to each other. This new type of concentration: the concentration of is a little like those telephone crazies a domiciliation without domiciles, in which property boundaries, walls and fences no longer signify the permanent physical obstacle. Instead, they now form an interruption of an emission or of an electronic shadow zone which repeats the 445 THE OVEREXPOSED CITY

for whom the receiver induces flights of fiscal receipts would be 6 to 10 billion verbal fancy amid the anonymity of a francs above the sum of public moneys remote control aggressiveness. invested. Where does the city without gates begin? Probably inside that fugitive anxiety, that One final question arises here. In a shudder that seizes the minds of those who, period of economic crisis, will mass de- just returning from a long vacation, con- struction of the large cities replace the trad- template the imminent encounter with itional politics of large public works? If that mounds of unwanted mail or with a house happens, there will be no essential differ- that's been broken into and emptied of its ence between economic-industrial reces- contents. It begins with the urge to flee and sion and war. escape for a second from an oppressive Architecture or post-architecture? Ultim- technological environment, to regain one's ately, the intellectual debate surrounding senses and one's sense of self. While spatial modernity seems part of a de-realization escape may be possible, temporal escape is phenomenon which simultaneously in- not. Unless we think of lay-offs as 'escape volves disciplines of expression, modes of batches,' the ultimate form of paid representation and modes of communica- vacation, the forward flight responds to tion. The current wave of explosive debates a post-industrial illusion whose ill effects within the media concerning specific polit- we are just beginning to feel. Already, ical acts and their social communication the theory of 'job sharing' introduced to now also involves the architectural expres- a new segment of the community - offering sion, which cannot be removed from the each person an alternative in which sharing world of communication systems, to the work-time could easily lead to a whole new precise extent that it suffers the direct or sharing of space as well - mirrors the rule of indirect fall-out of various 'means of com- an endless periphery in which the home- munication', such as the automobile or land and the colonial settlement would re- audiovisual systems. place the industrial city and its suburbs. Basically, along with construction tech- Consider, for example, the Community De- niques, there's always the construction of velopment Project, which promotes the techniques, that collection of spatial and proliferation of local development projects temporal mutations that is constantly re- based on community forces, and which is organizing both the world of everyday ex- intended to reincorporate the English inner perience and the aesthetic representations cities. of contemporary life. Constructed space, Where does the edge of the exo-city then, is more than simply the concrete and begin? Where can we find the gate without material substance of constructed struc- a city? Probably in the new American tech- tures, the permanence of elements and the nologies of instantaneous destruction (with architectonics of urbanistic details. It also explosives) of tall buildings and in the pol- exists as the sudden proliferation and the itics of systematic destruction of housing incessant multiplication of special effects projects suddenly deemed as 'unfit for the which, along with the consciousness of new French way of life', as in Venissieux, time and of distances, affect the perception La Courneuve or Gagny. According to a of the environment. recent French study, released by the Associ- This technological deregulation of vari- ation for Community Development, ous milieux is also topological to the exact extent that - instead of constructing a per- The destruction of 300,000 residential ceptible and visible chaos, such as the pro- units over a five-year period would cost cesses of degradation or destruction 10 billion francs per year, while creating implied in accident, aging and war - it in- 100,000 new jobs. In addition, at the end versely and paradoxically builds an imper- of the demolition/reconstruction, the ceptible order, which is invisible but just as 446 PAUL VIRILIO

practical as masonry or the public high- veloped with the rise of the City and the ways system. In all likelihood, the essence discovery and colonization of emerging of what we insist on calling urbanism is lands, since the conclusion of that con- composed/decomposed by these transfer, quest, architecture, like the large cities, transit and transmission systems, these has rapidly declined. While continuing transport and transmigration networks to invest in internal technical equipment, whose immaterial configuration reiterates architecture has become progressively in- the cadastral organization and the building troverted, becoming a kind of machinery of monuments. gallery, a museum of sciences and technolo- If there are any monuments today, they gies, technologies derived from industrial are certainly not of the visible order, despite machinism, from the transportation revo- the twists and turns of architectural excess. lution and from so-called 'conquest of No longer part of the order of perceptible space'. So it makes perfect sense that when appearances nor of the aesthetic of the ap- we discuss space technologies today, we arc parition of volumes assembled under the not referring to architecture but rather to sun, this monumental disproportion now the engineering that launches us into outer resides within the obscure luminescence of space. terminals, consoles and other electronic All of this occurs as if architectonics had nightstands. Architecture is more than an been merely a subsidiary technology, sur- array of techniques designed to shelter us passed by other technologies that produced from the storm. It is an instrument of meas- accelerated displacement and sidereal pro- ure, a sum total of knowledge that, con- jection. In fact, this is a question of the tending with the natural environment, nature of architectural performance, of becomes capable of organizing society's the telluric function of the constructed time and space. This geodesic capacity realm and the relationships between a cer- to define a unity of time and place for all tain cultural technology and the earth. The actions now enters into direct conflict with development of the City as the conserva- the structural capacities of the means of tory of classical technologies has already mass communication. contributed to the proliferation of architec- Two procedures confront each other. The ture through its projection into every first is primarily material, constructed of spatial direction, with the demographic physical elements, walls, thresholds and concentration and the extreme vertical den- levels, all precisely located. The other is sification of the urban milieu, in direct op- immaterial, and hence its representations, position to the agrarian model. The images and messages afford neither locale advanced technologies have since con- nor stability, since they are the vectors of tinued to prolong this 'advance', through a momentary, instantaneous expression, the thoughtless and all-encompassing ex- with all the manipulated meanings and mis- pansion of the architectonic, especially information that presupposes. with the rise of the means of transporta- The first one is architectonic and urba- tion. nistic in that it organizes and constructs Right now, vanguard technologies, de- durable geographic and political space. rived from the military conquest of space, The second haphazardly arranges and de- are already launching homes, and perhaps ranges space-time, the continuum of soci- tomorrow the City itself, into planetary eties. The point here is not to propose a orbit. With inhabited satellites, space Mankhaean judgment that opposes the shuttles and space stations as floating la- physical to the metaphysical, but rather to boratories of high-tech research and indus- attempt to catch the status of contempor- try, architecture is flying high, with curious ary, and particularly urban, architecture repercussions for the fate of post-industrial within the disconcerting concert of ad- societies, in which the cultural markers vanced technologies. If architectonics de- tend to disappear progressively, what with THE OVEREXPOSED CITY 447

the decline of the arts and the slow regres- tualization of 'narrative' appears as the sion of the primary technologies. other side of the crisis of the conceptualiza- Is urban architecture becoming an out- tion of 'dimension' as geometrical narra- moded technology, as happened to exten- tive, the discourse of measurement of a sive agriculture, from which came the reality visibly offered to all. debacles of megalopolis? Will architecton- The crisis of the grand narrative that ics become simply another decadent form gives rise to the micro-narrative finally be- of dominating the earth, with results like comes the crisis of the narrative of the those of the uncontrolled exploitation of grand and the petty. primary resources? Hasn't the decrease in This marks the advent of a disinforma- the number of major cities already become tion m which excess and incommensurabil- ■ the trope for industrial decline and forced ity are, for 'postmodernity', what the unemployment, symbolizing the failure of philosophical resolution of problems and scientific materialism? the resolution of the pictorial and architec- The recourse to History proposed by tural image were to the birth of the Enlight- experts of postmodernity is a cheap trick enment. that allows them to avoid the question of The crisis in the conceptualization of Time, the regime of trans-historical dimension becomes the crisis of the whole. temporality derived from technological In other words, the substantial, homoge- ecosystems. If in fact there is a crisis neous space derived from classical Greek today, it is a crisis of ethical and aesthetic geometry gives way to an accidental, het- references, the inability to come to terms erogeneous space in which sections and with events in an environment where the fractions become essential once more. Just appearances are against us. With the as the land suffered the mechanization of growing imbalance between direct and agriculture, urban topography has continu- indirect information that comes of the ously paid the price for the atomization and development of various means of disintegration of surfaces and of all refer- communication, and its tendency to ences that tend towards all kinds of trans- privilege information mediated to the migrations and transformations. This detriment of meaning, it seems that the sudden exploding of whole forms, this de- reality effect replaces immediate reality. struction of the properties of the individual Lyotard's modern crisis of grand narratives by industrialization, is felt less in the city's betrays the effect of new technologies, with space - despite the dissolution of the the accent, from here on, placed on means suburbs - than in the time - understood as more than ends. sequential perceptions - of urban appear- The grand narratives of theoretical caus- ances. In fact, transparency has long sup- ality were thus displaced by the petty nar- planted appearances. Since the beginning of ratives of practical opportunity, and, the twentieth century, the classical depth finally, by the micro-narratives of auton- of field has been revitalized by the depth of omy. At issue here is no longer the 'crisis time of advanced technologies. Both the of modernity', the progressive deterior- film and aeronautics industries took off ation of commonly held ideals, the proto- soon after the ground was broken for the foundation of the meaning of History, to grand boulevards. The parades on Hauss- the benefit of more-or-less restrained narra- mann Boulevard gave way to the Lumiere tives connected to the autonomous devel- brothers' accelerated motion picture inven- opment of individuals. The problem now is tions; the esplanades of Les Invalides gave with the narrative itself, with an official way to the invalidation of the city plan. The discourse or mode of representation, con- screen abruptly became the city square, nected until now with the universally rec- the crossroads of all mass media. ognized capacity to say, describe and From the aesthetics of the appearance of inscribe reality. This is the heritage of the a stable image - present as an aspect of its Renaissance. Thus, the crisis in the concep- 448 PAULVIRIUO

static nature - to the aesthetics of the dis- and Tumbull, just at the precise instant that appearance of an unstable image - present computer screens started popping up in in its cinematic and cinematographic flight architectural firms. 'Video doesn't mean I of escape - we have witnessed a transmuta- see; it means I fly,' according to Nam June tion of representations. The emergence of Paik. With this technology, the 'aerial view' forms as volumes destined to persist as long no longer involves the theoretical altitudes as their materials would allow has given of scale models. It has become an opto- way to images whose duration is purely electronic interface operating in real time, retinal. So, more than Venturi's Las Vegas, with all that this implies for the redefinition it is Hollywood that merits urbanist schol- of the image. If aviation - appearing the arship, for, after the theatre-cities of An- same year as cinematography - entailed a tiquity and of the Italian Renaissance, it revision of point of view and a radical mu- was Hollywood that was the first Cinecitta, tation of our perception of the world, info- the city of living cinema where stage-sets graphic technologies will likewise force a and reality, tax-plans and scripts, the living readjustment of reality and its representa- and the living dead, mix and merge deliri- tions. We already see this in 'Tactical Map- ously. ping Systems', a video-disc produced by Here more than anywhere else advanced the United States Defense Department's technologies combined to form a synthetic Agency for Advanced Research Projects. space-time. This system offers a continuous view of Babylon of filmic de-formation, indus- Aspen, Colorado, by accelerating or decel- trial zone of pretence, Hollywood was erating the speed of 54,000 images, chang- built neighbourhood by neighbourhood, ing direction or season as easily as one block by block, on the twilight of appear- switches television channels, turning the ances, the success of magicians' tricks, the town into a kind of shooting gallery in rise of epic productions like those of D. W. which the functions of eyesight and weap- Griffith, all the while waiting for the meg- onry melt into each other. alomaniacal urbanizations of Disneyland, If architectonics once measured itself Disney World and Epcot Center. When according to geology, according to the tec- Francis Ford Coppola, in One From the tonics of natural reliefs, with pyramids, Heart, electronically inlaid his actors into towers and other neo-gothic tricks, today a iife-size Las Vegas built at the Zoetrope it measures itself according to state-of-the- studios in Hollywood (simply because the art technologies, whose vertiginous prow- director wanted the city to adapt to his ess exiles all of us from the terrestrial hori- shooting schedule instead of the other way zon. around}, he overpowered Venturi, not by Neo-geological, the 'Monument Valley' demonstrating the ambiguities of contem- of some pseudolithic era, today's metro- porary architecture, but by showing the polis is a phantom landscape, the fossil 'spectral' characters of the city and its deni- of past societies whose technologies were zens. intimately aligned with the visible trans- The Utopian 'architecture on paper' of formation of matter, a project from which the 1960s took on the video-electronic the sciences have increasingly turned away. special effects of people like Harryhausen