Faster, faster, faster

Tete Álvarez

 

According to the legend, the god Heracles established the distance that athletes should run in the Olympic stadium by placing one foot in front of the other 600 times, resulting in a distance of 192.7 meters. The Romans used an abacus to count how many laps the boats had made in a sailing race. Since then, the technical devices used for measurement and capture have cut down the fractions of micro-time to the ten-millionth of a second.

Paul Virilio tells us in Speed and Information that "the phenomena associated with immediacy and information are nowadays among the most pressing problems for political and military strategies. Real time prevails over real space and the geosphere. The supre macy of real time, its immediacy, over space and surface is a consummate fact with inau gural merit (announcing a new era)." He mentions as well the exact moment of the "end of the exterior world", of "the loss of immediate consciousness" and of "the intuition of the moment" produced by the capture of that real instant in images.

The use of the photo finish, a system of analysis employed in sporting competitions to determine the precise positions of the ath letes at the moment of crossing the finish line, on local passers-by shows my interest for relating certain magnitudes with ones I have previously worked with: space and time, and how the development of technology in the information society has substantially modified the way in which we perceive them.

Linear time understood as historical evolution has given way to real time, the "perpetual possibility" in the verses of Elliot, one single, eternally present time which turns to ash concepts such as present and future. Territory, formerly plural, has evolved into a virtual global space, a space unified by the speed of communications required by the logic of our commercial system.

"Consumable, pseudocyclical time is spectacle time, both as the time for consuming images, and as an image of the consumption of time, in every sense of the word," predicted Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. And it is true that this type of global scale capitalist production requires a type of discourse in which the spectacle of merchandise should predominate. The gaze therefore becomes the sign of the times for merchandise.

"Power is inseparable from wealth and wealth is inseparable from speed. Whoever says power, says, above all dromocratic power - dromos comes from the Greek and means "race", and every society is a society of races", he concludes Paul Virilio.