"I think that cinema and television have nothing in common. There is a breaking point between photography and cinema on the one hand and television and virtual reality on the other hand. The simulator is the stage in-between television and virtual reality, a moment, a phase. The simulator is a moment that leads to cyberspace, that is to say, to the process because of which we now have two bottles instead of one. I might not see this virtual bottle, but I can feel it. It is settled within reality. This explains why the word virtual reality is more important than the word cyberspace, which is more poetic.

These new technologies try to make virtual reality more powerful than actual reality, which is the true accident. The day when virtual reality becomes more powerful than reality will be the day of the big accident. Mankind never experienced such an extraordinary accident.

CTHEORY: What is your own feeling about that?

Virilio: I'm not scared, just interested."

Virilio in the information bomb talks of the militarised structures of visualisation and virtualisation. Components of visual information are broken down into instantly transmissible packets, to be acted upon without thought. Thought equals delay: questioning the purpose of the process is seen as mere delay and inefficiency. An analogy can be drawn with the modularisation of higher education- towards an instrumental mode of correct task accomplishment; a limit-oriented worldview. The transparency of the tool…the re-insertion of the concept of the tool at a remove from the physical.

" Innate sensibilities- always the blessing of the artisan-become increasingly visual, and other skills slowly vanish. The experience in which most people become most practised is no longer the workings of nature or the use of hand-held tools, but rather the reading of images- staggering numbers of images. We get the picture, or, more accurately in the era of target marketing, the picture gets us.

Much the same trend was prophesied long ago by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in 1859, just twenty years after the invention of photography, exclaimed:" Matter in large masses must always be fixed and clear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of art and nature will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcases as of little worth."

The camera was an appropriate metaphor of modernity for other reasons as well. Its power to chemically fix light and shadow came out of, and effectively represented, the overall project of an innocent scientific realism. Its product, the photographic print or film, was celebrated by the moderns for its immediacy, its objectivity, its closure, and its freedom from codified interpretation." Martin McCullough from "Abstracting Craft: the practised digital hand"

From this initially negative position, McCullough makes a case for the tool in software as re-born analogy with the tools of craft production. Valid, but the " operator-capture" function of technology remains unaddressed. The commodity fetishism inherent in techietalk, which we all find ourselves indulging in occasionally, is a clue to the unresolved nature of our relationship to our equipment. When memory becomes externalised, our sense of self becomes uncertain: how much of these devices has become " us?" We can’t resolve this, and some of us begin to love our equipment in odd ways as a result. Yet painters don’t paint because they like brushes. Authors don’t write because of an abiding passionate fondness for pens. The unresolved emotional tug of new media will take a while to settle down: when it does, that will be the time to think on our changed relation to the world and consciousness. It’s too early yet; we’re still caught in a net of P.R. and corporate computing propaganda, which tries to convey breathless acceleration when an operating system upgrades. Perhaps we need a new form of ironic language: not cynical, but reflexive on the growth of meaningless excitement, and related to the degree of communal interaction of those in discourse.