"What is to be feared, what has a more calamitous effect than any other calamity, is that man should inspire not profound fear but profound nausea; also not great fear but great pity. Suppose these two were on day to unite, they would inevitably beget one of the uncanniest monsters the "last will" of man, his will to nothingness. nihilism."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s correlation of nausea and pity - "to will to nothingness" - occurs in the complexion of Virilio's "dromocratic subject". In this site, the body is evacuated, transfigured as a blank "metabolic vehicle", a speedway absorbing all of the iridescent signs of the mediascape, trapped in a closed horizon which moves according to technological, not biological time. Virilio exemplifies the interpolation of the flesh by speed - the interiorization of the "will to nothingness" as the dynamic nexus of dromology. A new type of body has subsequently emerged, "the presence in the world of bodies without wills". The metabolic body is invaded by all the strategies - neon minds/electric egos/data skins - of the grand circuitry of a society constructed upon the sleek of surface and network feeding into continuous regenerating simulacra.

Lenny: Such people will serve as terrible examples to all those who use the world as their theatre, where technical power and its religion become the Rules of the Game. I was running along a straight line, which reminded me of the Greek labyrinth that Dickson told me about, in which so many philosophers lost their way, where even a secret agent could stray from his course.
~~ Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville

The "televisual experience" is our new exterior brain. Galaxies of dreams and information - people become more comfortable with televisual reality than with daily life. A new reality approaches, a new synthetic materiality giving people infinite access to infinite alternative realities through data streams of light. These realities will program, shape and broadcast information fragmenting terminally the fabric of reality. Reality will be a multiple series of channels, option switches feeding the mind.

The accessibility of reality through representation is qualified by a subjects suspension of disbelief. Belief in the authority of representation can be inconsistent with knowledge based on the subjects direct experience of the world. What overrides this understanding are emotional responses to representations. Essentially this illusion is analogous to a dream state, a wish fulfilment where rather than images being assumed to be transparent conveyors of being, they are allowed to become conditioned by projective desires.

Dreams are animate consciousness. Composed of images and thoughts that apparently exist in real time. They present mirrors of realities and experiences prescribed by individual subjects. The dynamic is desire. The thought patterns of dreams illuminate and re-structure a fabricated terrain of experience. As both permutations and a consequence of desire, dreams are meanings internally contextualized.

Today it is impossible to talk about the nature of perception, the analysis of objective reality without also talking about the development of virtual imagery and its influence on human behaviour.

This should be considered primarily in relation to the philosophical questions of the shattering of the viewpoint - the sharing of perception of the environment between the animate/living subject and the inanimate/object-seeing machine. Once the subject is definitively removed from the realm of direct/indirect observation of virtual images created by the machine for the machine, instrumental virtual images will be for us alien.

One of the fundamental aspects of the development of the new technologies of digital imagery and of virtual images offered by electron optics - the relative fusion/confusion of the factual and the virtual; the ascendancy of the reality effect over a reality principle.

The three tenses of action, past/present/future have been progressively replaced by two tenses "real time" and "delayed time", the future having disappeared in computer programming and in the corruption of so-called "real-time" which simultaneously contains both sections of the present and sections of the immediate future.

Dissimulating the future in the ultra-short time of on-line computer communication "intensive time" will replace "extensive time" in which the future was still laid out in periods of weeks/months/years.

Confronting the fusion of the object with its equivalent image the confusion between presentation and televised representation, the process of real-time deception will triumph over classic perception. Scrapping the absolute nature of traditional concept of space and time is the scientific equivalent of the deception of regarding the reality of observed facts. In the face of the devaluation of territorial space, we embrace a distorted temporality where true/false are no longer relevant. The actual and the virtual have gradually taken their place.

"If in pre-industrial eras the low speeds of various vehicles structured and geometrized the social landscape through infrastrucutural necessities, since the acquisition of high speeds, this structuring has evolved radically. The essential is no longer visible, except at times; the means of communication and the vehicle - projectile coalescence concentrate what is essential to the new "social" space. Since energy's area has become the locus of power, it is here, and not there that the critical is from now on played out. The energy crisis develops in crisis energy, which means the split between reality - the materialness of the human habit - and unreality - the immaterialness of a power that is founded only on the violence of energy and on the ever-expanding extension of its field."
~~ Paul Virilio

Time and space become a pure problematic. Represented and projected magnitudes are there no longer but imperfect programs; they appear in turn eminently subject to expression. Expressive and being a part of the subject as much as the milieu. It is a progressive annihilation of the independence between TIME/SPACE/SUBJECT.

"It is hard to imagine a society that would deny the body just as we have progressively denied the soul. This however, is where we are headed."
~~ Paul Virilio