From a haphazard and rudimentary genesis, the much-hyped creation of virtual electronic media grew into an organized industry of "reality manufacturing" the logical outcome of the merging paths of Hollywood and cyber-tech. The reality - industry complex a product if high-concept comparate mergers began to produce mass-producing consumer items - the last hope for human contact in fragmented urban society. Virtual technologies in fact play far more ambiguous roles in reshaping the city environment.

Embracing the continuum of news and entertainment corporations like Time/Warner, Disney opens popular "halo-arcades" featuring "reality programming". Visitors are greeted by a network of constructed environments, imagery and service personnel, all "painting" a stage set for Disney-style imagineering.

While virtual technology provides corporations with valuable communication tools, the new industry has a devastating impact on employment.

Faced with declining prospects for a suspended and potentially unstable mid-level work-force, government opens national "virtual job" programs. For office workers suffering Post-Employment Stress Disorder, interactive "employment environments" provide cheap role therapy in the guise of simulated production tasks, staff meetings and regular opportunities for promotion. Meanwhile, the development of "virtual offices", back by environmental groups as an energy-saving innovation and a means of reducing traffic, further erases the line between corporate and private space. The term "home-working" takes on new meaning as the managerial class finds itself sharing work-stations with their families.

For the chronically immuno-deficient a growing number of "virtual health" clinics sell a simulation of well-being.

Taken together, these new technologies provide yet another means for compartmentalizing and controlling the experience of a city's divided population.

Those trapped in the misery of wilderzones and other low-income areas, find little compensations for the virtualization of society.

The most significant contribution comes from a Japanese PR gesture intended to offset the effects of prolonged trade wars with the United States. Toshiba Park (L.A.) located in a drought-stricken area of drained pools and brown lawns, the first holographic-T.V. park for the poor. Modelled on nineties theme-park designs, a fenced-in municipal park constructed to be seen but not entered, the one-acre Toshiba hologram offers stunning vistas of waterfalls, fields and lush forests. With the start of a black-market in virtual pharmaceuticals and other cathexis-stimulators "going to the country" becomes an outlet of choice for the excluded masses.

As the pace of life accelerates, the routes become ever more complex and it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain spatial simultaneity between any two people. This type of hectic lifestyle appears to make satisfying interpersonal relationships much more difficult in the urban environment. It is increasingly possible for large numbers of people to co-exist spatially without forming any lasting emotional bonds. The idea of people co-existing spatially but failing to connect is a recurring contemporary theme.

"Everyday we brush past so many other people. People we may never meet, or people who may become close friends."
~~ Chung King Express (1994)

In Chung King Express, the narratives involve stories about disconnections, loneliness and being alone in the vast city. What happens to the characters is not really the point; the movie is about their journeys, not their destinations. There is the possibility that they have all been driven to desperation, if not the edge of insanity by the artificial lives they lead, in which authentic experience seems at one remove.

Wong Kar-Wai is a film-maker in the tradition of Godard, he is concerned more with the "materials" of a story than with a story itself, and he demonstrates this by animating two narrative lines, somewhat similar, that have no obvious connection. He sets the stories in the contemporary Hong Kong of fast-food restaurants, shopping-malls, night clubs, concrete plazas and art/pop culture. His visuals rhythmically switch between film, video and pixilated images often in slow motion, as if the essential lives of his characters threaten to disintegrate into the raw materials of media.

One's own "sense of place" leads to another form of "Cartesian anxiety". If only a personalized knowledge can be authentic, then a generalized urban historical knowledge becomes impossible. An experienced sense of place is blurred becoming utterly inaccessible, so too is the existential perspective of every living contemporary.

A memory is "literally" remembered, as disparate fragments of data residing in various parts of the mind create replications not duplications of an original experience. This process is one of interpretation rather than reproduction, and as interpretation, it is a reformulation, a reconstructed version of an experience. As a result of this process the perpetuation of memory owes more to the last recalled event than to an authentic defining moment. A memory is therefore an animate replication of a replication adinfinitum - we remember what we remembered of what we remembered etc. A memory is therefore as different from and as similar to an initial moment as from other occasions of prompted recall. It is the product of continuous genesis, and therefore subject to the contingencies of a precarious ontology.

In Virilio’s theorizations, we have lost the old universe of ideologies, entering into a “new perspective” of “dromology”. An empire of “immediacy” speed and communication where the self mutates into a cyborg, half-flesh, half-metal, where existence is defined by rapid circulation through the technical capillaries of the mediascape and where culture is reduced to the society of the spectacle.

Virillo's speculations provides an insightful analysis of the complex discourse of contemporary technology. The "virtual body" does not exist except as an empty site for the convergence of a dynamic axis traced by three discourses: the digital coding of a technical culture which is programmed by computer - generated logic; the implosive logic of the image reservoir; and the imminent violence of the cyclotronic body-narrative continuity in the information society can only be assured by a violent speeding up of conscious perception.

Virillo approaches Nietzsche in understanding the dynamic language of the “will to will” as the architecture of the power field, across which subjectivity is expressed. In "Speed and Politics" Virilio states, "The related knowledge of knowing-power, or power knowledge, is eliminated to the benefit of moving power - in other words to study of tendencies and flows." Virilio writes a purely "circulatory" theory of power - power as a terminator vector of violent speed.

Virilio's metaphysics parallel Nietzsche's conclusions in "The Will to Power". "Suicidal nihilism" is the inevitable psychological "fallout" from the dynamic "spirit of willing" which, knowing that there is no substantive purpose to its willing, would "rather will nothingness than not will."