Open Sky

1) Virilio takes a look at the impacts of what the newest forms of technology has on our environment. This isn't to say the physical environment that surrounds us, but our relative place in the world and our perception of the time in which we live it. He coins the term "dromospheric" pollution(Virilio 137). What he means by dromospheric pollution seems to be that, given humanity's ability to become more of a collective due to the fast paced communications and filmography, we have lost the "essence of the path, the journey" (Virilio 137). The patterns and rhythm of life no longer have their flux and flow through time, in preparation for what is to come next. That "next" that used to be within the collective, the "traject[ory]" (Virilio 139) no longer exists because we live in a world of instant moments. Everything now can be captured and contained in the merest of seconds and the lengths of time that used to be no longer last. He states that we are losing the momentum that is life and are becoming sedentary creatures as a result.

2) To make the previous statement more concise, Virilio illustrates the idea of a third horizon, a "trasapparent horizon spawned by telecommunications, that opens up the incredible possibility of a 'civilization of forgetting', a live (live-coverage) society that has no future and no past, since it has no extension and no duration, a soceity intensely present here and there at once-in other words, telepresent to the whole world" (Virilio 139). Instant communication leaves us devoid of any duration, the duration that could become our future as well as the lengthening of time that could have been our past. Life becomes only a repetition of instants, instants that are impossible to have memory of because there is no substasive "time" to remember. No longer are we at one place to travel to another, to be here in the present to travel to the future, but everywhere at once without the ability to expand in time or space. This new horizon that has invaded our world has consequences not only in the way that we live but in our perceptions of the world and the way that we think.

3) When everything becomes instantaneous, with "no more delay" (Virilio 140) then things that we percieve are no longer represented in volume. When the "interval becomes thin" (Virilio 140) then the objects themselves are perceived to lack the depth and solidity that they once did. The weight and substance are no longer relevant to the way that we think or the way that time affects them. Space is altered along with the new timing, and it is here the Virilio says that photography can take hold. Photography records time, and therefore stops the moments, and even though "in reality time does not stand still" (Virilio 140) there has come a new definition in photographic time that no longer parallels that of passing time. The new definition has to do with the change in the perception of density of things in our world. It is only the "surface of the negative freezes the time" (Virilio 141). Along with this registers a new time in Cinema, a time that has a new concept of a present time that is "no longer represented in chronological time---past-present-future--- but in the chronoscopic time --underexposed-exposed-overexposed-" (Virilio 141). This transfer of time coincides with the previous idea of time no longer having a past or future. We, our bodies and perceptions, are the center of the world and it is our substance that causes time to exists--to propel it forward-- but if we are caught in a perpetual present, we cannot lead time to any future point.

4) Together, all arguments about the change of time and perception of our motion in life, hinge on the change in our communications, which are based on the speed of light and sound. These changes disrupt our ability to have memories, have chronological time (in which can have a past, present, and future), and move together with a collective rhythm that has always been. I believe that Virilio sees the cinema as an antagonist to this because it helps develop the "ever-present" that we seem to have become stuck in. It enables time to take on a new form and our perceptions to be taken along with it. It is a true distortion of the way we perceive the world because "dromospheric pollution is pollution that attacks the liveliness of the subject and the mobility of the object by atrophying the journey to the point where it becomes needless" (Virilio 144). In the end, if we have no future to live for, no journey to live our life along, then what is the point?