Paul Virilio

“The question today, then, is whether the world's populations are not close to having done with soft sciences and technologies, which still take into account the preservation of the planet and its inhabitants; whether they are not now in danger of being swept away by the terrorist excesses of a Laputian ratio, a universal philanoia attacking a human species which has become 'undesirable' in its entirety, the scandal of an Earth which is, so far as we know, the only biosphere in the solar system.”

“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.”

“With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organization, precede gesture and speech and their coordination in knowing, recognizing, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive.”

“How can we ultimately fail to twig that the apparent impiety of contemporary art is only ever the inverted image of sacred art, the reversal of the creator's initial question: why is there something instead of nothing?”