Lost Dimension by Paul Virilio

p. 10
Construction no longer derived simply from traditional technical constraint. The plan had become a function of the risks of "terrorist contamination" and the disposition of sites conceived of as sterile zones for departures and non-sterile zones for arrivals.... The architecture that resulted from this had little to do with the architect's personality. It emerged instead from perceived public security requirements.

p. 11
When the French built "Maximum security cell-blocks," they used the magnetized doorways that airports had had for years. Paradoxically, the equipment that ensured maximal freedom in travel formed part of the core of penitentiary incarceration. ... In banks, in supermarkets, and on major highways, where tollbooths resembled the ancient cit gates, the rite of passage was no longer intermittent. It had become immanent. ...Users of the road were... now interlocutors in permanent transit. From this moment on, continuity no longer breaks down in space, not in the physical space of urban lots nor in the juridical space of their property tax records. From here, continuity is ruptured in time, in a time that advanced technologies and industrial redeployment incessantly arrange through a series of interruptions, ...

p. 13

... a difference if position blurs into fusion and confusion. Deprived of objective boundaries, the architectonic element begins to drift and float in an electronic ether, devoid of spatial dimensions, but inscribed in the singular temporality of an instantaneous diffusion. From here on, people can't be separated by physical obstacles or by temporal distances. With the interfacing of computer terminals and video monitors, distinctions of here and there no longer mean anything.
   This sudden reversion of boundaries and oppositions introduces into everyday, common space an element which until now was reserved for the world of microscopes. There is no plenum; space is not filled with matter. Instead, an unbounded expanse appears in the false perspective of the machines' luminous emissions.

p. 31-32
The great divide-between the reality of temporal and spatial distances and the distancing of various video-graphic and info-graphic representations-has ended. The direct observation of visible phenomena gives way to a tele-observation in which the observer has no immediate contact with the observed reality. ... Irrespective of the vector of the spatial conquest, observation machine is not so much the vehicle or apparatus of the physical displacement of observers, but rather of an image.

p. 43
   The space-time of the opto-electronic representation of the world no longer involves the visual horizon, nor the vanishing point of perspective. Depth now pertains exclusively to the primitive grandeur of speed, the grandeur of this new void, the vacuum of speed, that replaces all extension and all depth of field, including geometry and geophysics.
   The center of the universe is no longer the geocentric earth or the anthropocentric human. It is now the luminous point of a helio-centrism, or better yet, of a lumino-centrism, one that special relativity helped install, whose uncontrolled ambitions derive from the purposes of general relativity.
   Thus, in the new representations of the form-image of the sensible world, the "point of light" replaced the vanishing point of perspectivists. the luminous point became the vanishing point of the speed of the light, the non-place of it's acceleration, a photon, electron acceleration that contributes to the present formation of the dimensions of infinite space, just as the point without dimension of ancient Greek geometry served to establish the dimensions of the finite world, including the development of arithmetic and mathematic numeration, as well as the geometric and geographic formulation of the image-form of the "planetary globe."

p. 44-45
...Schatzman, ... : "Finite or infinite, the universe and every fraction thereofis condemned to struggle against attraction by movement." This dromological vision of the universe promotes the exclusive importance of the Newtonain cosmology, the central role of the constant of gravity, as well as the centrality of the constant of the speed of light, the two essential constants of current physics. According to Schatzman, "The existence of gravity allows a difficult to escape from expansion. For every value of density in the universe there exists a minimum speed of expansion if it is to avoid collapsing in on itself. It is for this that the kinetic energy of movement compensates exactly the potential energy due to gravity."
   Strangely enough, the Newtonian cosmology involves the necessity of an explosive universe, or - after an initially dense state of contraction, and practically unlimited inertial confinement - space_time would have exploded in a spectacular, blinding light  preceding all particles of matter. All of this explains the "gravitational catastrophe" as the unique motor force of the cosmos.

p. 67-68
   Only the point remains, this absence, this suspension of physical dimensions that, unlike the atom, is never broken down since it is the ultimate reality, the figurative reference for all disintergrations, for all mathematical and morphological irruptions, and likewise for all lasting or momentary interruptions, since matter that is extended in space is also and simultaneously extended in time.
   Why do we stand amazed before the assumed properties of the black holes of outer space? ... These are the black dots of the line wherein begin and end our rational representations. As Bachelard slyly suggested, "The original sin of reason is that of having an origin." According to the most recent theories of the origin of origins, the principle of causality of the universe will not be a primary substance; it will be an accident: an absolute and necessary accident which rendered all subsequent substance relative and contingent. This original sin was to human nature.

p. 69
   According to Walter Benjamin, architecture, like cinema, "presents material to a simultaneous collective reception." This is what filmmaker Rene Clair meant when he claimed, "The art that is closest to cinema is architecture."
   This sudden confusion between the reception of images from a film projector and the perception of architectonic forms clearly indicates the importance of the transformation of the notion of "surface" and of "face-to-face" that gives way to the appearance of the interface. ... Matter, for example, like architecture, is no longer even what it pretends to be, since this matter is "light." It is the light of an emission, of an instantaneous projection that results in a reception rather than a perception.

p. 70
   We already know that all representation involves reduction of scale, proportion, content, or nature. But now reduction is rejected, for the simultaneous collective response acts as a ubiquitous eye that sees everything at once. ... Benjamin's earlier phrase installs architectural space in an "alter-world," and alter-world that cinematographic techniques, building on photographic antecedents, tried to conquer. These included the multiple superimposed images of Gance and Eisenstein, Painleve's rapid - and slow- motion filming, and the systematic use of new means of transport - such as camera rigs, trains, elevators, airplanes and so forth - by people  like Fromiaut, Vertov, Griffith, and Moholy-Nagy. We see that the material presented by architecture to the simultaneous reception is, in fact, the total matter of materialism itself- and especially of historical materialism - that gives its meaning and dimension to time and history, as well as to space.

p. 71
For Benjamin, the architectonic no longer operates among the registers of resistance, material and appearances; it occurs now instead within the order of transparency and the ubiquity of the instantaneous, both mythical qualities that predict those of the great political and social liberation: "By close-ups we inventory the world of things around us, emphasizing the hidden details of everyday objects and exploring commonplace sites under the genial guidance of the camera. If, on the one hand, the film helps us understand the necessities of our lives, it also leads us into an immense and previously unsuspected field of action. ... the film... abandoned in the midst of its far-flung debris, we take on adventurous expeditions. With the close-up, space expands; with slow-motion, movement takes on new dimensions. With film, we begin to see entirely new structures of matter."

p. 73
The office, which was once an other-place, an architectural aside, has now become a simple screen. In the bourgeois apartment, the space reserved for work and study has become the terminal of an office-viewfinder, in which the data of tele-information instantaneously appear and disappear as the three dimensions of constructed space are translated into the two dimensions of a screen, or better of an interface, which replaces more than the volume of the ancient dwelling, with its furniture and their arrangements, its contracts and blue-prints. This new arrangement also directs the more or less distant displacement of the occupant. This transmutation - where the inertial confinement of the new office has become the axis of gravity and the nodal center of techno-bureaucratic society - explains yet again the contemporary, post-industrial redeployment.

p. 84
We live today in an ever-growing fault between the promptness of the  broadcasts and our own capacity to grasp and measure the present moment. The question of modernity and post-modernity is superseded by that of reality and post-reality: we are living in a system of technological temporality, in which duration and material support have been supplanted as criteria by individual retinal and auditory instants.

p. 101
   Jorge-Luis Borges once remarked, "If something were unforgettable, we could never think of anything else."
   Essentially, memory - electronic or other - is a fixation. ... a momentary absence of consciousness, a picnoleptic interruption, is the existential prerequisite for time, and for the identity of time as lived by individuals. In a parallel manner, the absence of the dimension of the point, or punctum, that iconic cutting of the representation of physical dimensions, is the basis for the past.

p. 108
   "Form is the base that rises to the surface." This poetic definition of interface now extends beyond the aerodynamic mode of formation that emerges from the informational capacities of air plane electronics.

p. 127
   No longer a struggle for space, now time is interrupted.

p. 131-132
   In this interactive environment, the absence of extension is equivalent to the absence of delays. Time is so short between the first and second strike that it virtually abolishes any difference between unexpected attack and massive reprisals, ...

Lost Dimension by Paul Virilio (1991, Semiotext(e): NY)