The Art of the Motor
by Paul Virilio and Julie Rose

COMMENT : Translated from 'L'art du moteur', 1993, Paris.

'The Art of the Motor' represents a major new statement of Virilio's highly original philosophy of technology. It includes analyses of such recent developments as nanotechnology and virtual reality. It conjures a world in which information is speed and duration is no more. Information as speed? This, Paul Virilio tells us, is the third dimension of matter - the speed of the transmission of information has collapsed the extension of the dimension of space and the duration of the dimension of time. He details the ways in which this change has led to a new visual regime, a serialisation of images and sound that permits an extraordinary manipulation of both the form and the content of messages. For Virilio, the incredible pace of the mutation of appearances, a pace made possible by the 'art of the motor', ends up mutating reality itself. The political ramifications of this change become clear as Virilio describes how social processes and institutions respond to dominant models of visualisation.