The discovery of the of the sea is a precious experience that bears thought. Seeing the oceanic horizon is indeed anything but a secondary experience; it is in fact an event in consciousness of underestimated consequences.

I have forgotten none of the sequences of this finding in the course of a summer when recovering peace and access to the beach were one and the same event. With the barriers removed, you were henceforth free to explore the liquid continent; the occupants had returned to their native hinterland, leaving behind, along with the work site, their tools and arms. The waterfront villas were empty, everything within the casemates’ firing range had been blown up, the beaches were mined, and the artificers were busy here and there rendering access to the sea.

The clearest feeling was still one of absence; the immense beach of La Baule was deserted, there were less than a dozen of us on the loop of blond sand, not a vehicle was to be seen on the streets; this had been a frontier that an army had just abandoned, and the meaning of this oceanic immensity was intertwined with this aspect of the deserted battlefield.

But let us get back to the sequences of my vision. The rail car I was on, and in which I had been imagining the sea, was moving slowly through the Brière plains. The weather was superb and the sky over the low ground was starting, minute by minute, to shine. This well-known brilliance of the atmosphere approaching the great reflector was totally new; the transparency I was so sensitive to was greater as the ocean got closer, up to that precise moment when a line as even as a brushstroke crossed the horizon : an almost glaucous gray-green line, but one that was extending out to the limits of the horizon. It’s color was disappointing, compared to the sky’s luminescence, but the expanse of the oceanic horizon was truly surprising: could such a vast space be void of the slightest clutter? Here was the real surprise: in length, breadth, and depth the oceanic landscape had been wiped clean. Even the sky was as divided up by clouds, but the sea seemed empty in contrast. From such a distance there was no way of determining anything like foam movement. My loss of bearings was proof that I had entered a new element; the sea had become a desert, and the August heat made that all the more evident – this was a white-hot space in which sun and ocean had become a magnifying glass scorching away every relief and contrast. Trees, pines, etched-out dark spots; the square in front of the station was at once white and void – that particular emptiness you feel in recently abandoned places. It was high noon, and the luminous verticality and liquid horizontality composed a surprising climate. Advancing in the midst of houses with gaping windows, I was anxious to set foot on my first beach. As I approached Ocean Boulevard, the water level began to rise between the pines and the villas; the ocean was getting larger, taking up more and more space in my angle of vision. Finally, while crossing the avenue parallel to the shore, the earth line seemed to have plunged into the undertow, leaving everything smooth, no waves and little noise. Yet another element was here before me: the hydrosphere.

When calling to mind the reasons that made the bunkers so appealing to me almost twenty years ago, I see it clearly now as a case of intuition and also as a convergence between the reality of the structure  and the fact of its implantation alongside the ocean: a convergence between my awareness of spatial phenomena – the strong pull of the shores – and their being the locus of the works of the “Atlantic Wall” (Atlantikwall) facing the open sea, facing out into the void. (Bunker Archaeology, Paul Virilio, 1975) 

 

 

As light from distant stars is deflected by an imposing mass, favouring the illusion of gravitational optics, our perception of depth might well be a kind of visual plunge, comparable to the fall of bodies in the law of universal gravitation. If so, the perspective of the real space of the Quattrocentro would have been early scientific evidence of this. In fact, from the moment in history, optics becomes kinematic. Galileo was to supply proof of this in the face of all opposition. With the Renaissance perspectivists, we ‘fall’ into the volume of the visible spectacle as though by the force of gravity; literally the world opens up before us. Much later, physiologists will discover that the faster you move from one place to another, the further ahead your eyes adapt. From then on, the old ‘vanishing lines vertigo’ is coupled with the projection involved in focusing one’s eyes.  To illustrate this sudden magnification of vision as a result of an increase in speed, here is the tale of a parachutists, a free fall specialist: 

‘Eyeballing consists in visually assessing the distance between you and the ground the whole time you are falling. You evaluate your height and work out the exact moment you need to open your parachute based on a dynamic visual impression. When you are flying in a plane at an altitude of 600 metres, you don’t have anything like the visual impression you have when you clear this altitude in a high-speed vertical fall. When you are at 2,000 metres, you can’t see the ground approaching. But when you reach the 800 to 600 metre mark, you start to see it ‘coming’. The sensation becomes scary pretty quickly because of ground rush, the ground rushing up at you. The apparent diameter of objects increases faster and faster and you suddenly have the feeling you are not seeing them getting closer but seeing them move apart suddenly, as though the ground were splitting open. 

This account is invaluable as it illustrates in a truly gravitational way the dizziness induced by perspective, its apparent weightiness. To this ‘eyeballer’, perspective geometry appears for what it has never ceased to be: a headlong rush of perception in which the very rapidity of free fall reveals the fractal nature of vision that results from high-speed eye adaptation. In this experience, at a certain distance, at a certain moment, the ground no longer approaches, but parts and splits open, going suddenly from a ‘whole’ dimension with no receding lines, to a ‘fractional’ dimension in which the visible spectacle gapes open. The horizon of visibility of the ‘faller’ prior to being smashed to smithereens depends essentially on the speed at which his eyes adapt, focusing and an imperceptible time freeze depending on the mass of his body itself. The path’s being defines the subject’s perception through the object’s mass. The falling body suddenly becomes the body of the fall. (Open Sky, Paul Virilio, 1997).  

 

notes to self

1. 
BLIP.LAND – all about optics – instability of vision
The gaze is labyrinthine, the eye is only the crest of the wave that dopplers out into consciousness…don’t assume away the mind’s swift yet complex apparatus for making meanings. 
2. 
In what way do living in bubbles of wealth create myopias – the echochambers of the eye, the retinal lakes, private fisheries of desire…Frensham Ponds on sundays
Through the ethanol gates, we chase not only a feeling, but perspective emergent from feeling, we chase how the world goes woozy, how objects, depth, relations, intimacy re-configure… 
3. 
Dear [             ] 
It has been what seems like an eternity since I started putting together a website called blip.land and I feel my own thoughts on the Silk Roads have evolved in the time since without my putting them down, I would still like to continue our conversation, I appreciate the sense of time lost but would be invigorated to hear from you all as to next steps, I find myself drawn more and more to trying to understand my own position now from the silk roads then, and less and less to metaphor and abstraction of its unfurling, perhaps it is from reading Don Delillo’s Underworld and the way individuals interweave as the Cold War hums but never enters the frame, I get the same sense of a symphony in passing as the Silk Roads hum, and that the movement to try and find it again is more and more appealing to me than presenting it as if it was then, and as if the time and distance and things gained/lost since were not an engine in the optics and the retinal memory room now
…Harun Farocki…the analysts not seeing the chimneys…seeing has its history.
4. 
At relatively early time points on the forgetting curve – minutes, hours, and days, sometimes more – memory preserves a relatively de- tailed record, allowing us to reproduce the past with reasonable if not per- fect accuracy. But with the passing of time, the particulars fade and opportunities multiply for interference – generated by later, similar experiences to blur our recollections. We thus rely ever more on our memories for the gist of what happened, or what usually happens, and attempt to recon- struct the details by inference and even sheer guesswork. Transience in- volves a gradual switch from reproductive and specific recollections to reconstructive and more general descriptions. When attempting to reconstruct past events based on general knowledge of what usually happens, we become especially vulnerable to the sin of bias: when present knowledge and beliefs seep into our memories of past events (see Chapter 6). Whether an experience is quickly forgotten or remembered for years also depends on what happens after those first few seconds when a memory is born. Human beings are story- tellers, and we tend to tell stories about ourselves. Thinking and talking about experiences not only helps to make sense of the past, but also changes the likelihood of subsequent remembering. Those episodes and incidents we discuss and rehearse are protected, at least partially, from transience; those that we don’t ponder or mention tend to fade more quickly. Of course, the experiences that cause us to ponder and discuss them repeatedly might simply be more memorable in the first place. Af-ter the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the Bay Area in 1989, those who experienced it firsthand were so eager to relate their memories of this distinctive and disturbing event that others quickly became saturated by endless tales of “where I was when the earthquake hit:’
long-term transience is probably not entirely attributable to inter- ference from similar experiences: loss of information over time occurs even when there is little opportunity for interference to play a role.
5.  
Is it that the intensification of sensing is not necessarily about becoming more hyper-alert, but working against the grain of speed, time, machines, to take time, slow down reasoning, slow down instrumentation, slow down matter at the same time as particles are being smashed at unimaginable speeds, rockets are launching into the cosmos… munitions pound Yemen… an intensification of sensing is often in the arresting of the logic of speed 
6.
We have telescopes and microscopes…do we have chronoscopes…trained on the block years since the referendum result…waking up, going to work in a strange lull, and now…May gone…Boris…a strange change in the weather…The chronoscope, a litmus of the years gone, like a glass-lamp catching the flies of incident…  he thought back of the Straits…the hulls of ships moving across the retina of its aqualine roof… the shipcrews inside…under duress of revolutionary guards…or fast frigates…or spy drones…  the reverb of a distant trade war…
7. 
Could we design a camera whose photographic exposure time was slowed to rate of decades….  What would a photo of that thin streak of a journey from Georgia to China look like… Mao’s brilliance at playing the radiowaves… he knew how to time and run and mis-construe information…  much like Sharon in Hollow Land… it was control of the prism… the spacings and timings of information release…  Nothing new across a wet sun in the docklands… 
8.  How does sense of time / sense of space change during war…. Do the pupils dilate in the glint of falling bombs… 
9. This blip of land, two mounds a small lake, screaming its face – a small island in a sea of unknown… the trace forms of ethanolial residue leaving 
Is the Tiananmen Square man photograph interscalar – the tank resembling the weight, size of the Chinese Communist Party…against the grain of a small diminutive man in protest..
The mute satellite image and the loud, explosive noise on the ground … a necessity to try and find the sound, noise, life inside a satellite image, sat there in silence… but it is kinetically imploding, we cannot register… I looked back at where I grew up and went back through the historical imagery…the uncanny of seeing your house, your garden, objects that were photographed then, in 2003, you were 9 …. 
Re: long duration in vision / optical inertia: 
“Moments and places, despite physical limitation and narrow localization, are charged with accumulations of long-gathering energy. A return to a scene of childhood that was left long years before floods the spot with a release of pent-up memories and hopes. To meet in a strange country one who is a casual acquaintance at home may arouse a satisfaction so acute as to bring a thrill. Mere recognitions occur only when we are occu pied with something else than the object or person recognized. It marks either an interruption or else an intent to use what is recognized as a means for something else. To see, to perceive, is more than to recognize. It does not identify something present in terms of a past disconnected from it. The past is carried into the present so as to expand and deepen the content of the latter.”
11. 
What does Don DeLillo say in Underworld … once the bipolar tension of the Cold War is gone, that’s when we are truly disoriented…. 
12. 
W.G. Sebald – I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighth floor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. 
Think of the Arcades Project…a series of fragments… seems to all harken back to that boat, on the Caspian…   the missiles launching from the Caspian
I remember the moon over the Caspian…it was the night England beat Colombia on penalties…the air was moist..with a breeze pulling over… ‘The Rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect (–> Roche limit) 
13. 
What about a story written as if a something looking up at the thin retinal frame of the Straits of Hormuz…muffled to sound…but looking up and seeing the hulls of boats move rhythmically across its surface…   
An interesting perspectival position… to understand geopolitics from… Lesser was lowered into the tank beneath the lake… 
Speed time – watching the movement of city streets…the flow of lights…
The scalar unit sat beside the optical smoothers…their role was to sit inside the frenetic optics of incidents, and to stitch the polypersperctival chaos into a coherence… see Hong Kong, note the sheer overfullness of the image in perspective, wide lens, close up, height etc…
The financial analyst in his room above the Straits of Malacca… he stitched together the smallprints of companies… when he got bored he discovered satellite images of the companies he worked for…he imagined dropping a bomb on their headquarters..watching the spokes splinter off like dying embers in a fire. 
Note the Article in the Economist you read on plane to Algarve…re: Chinese military seeking to find ‘jointness’ || it is all about the cohesion between separate functional units… this is also broached by Cixin Liu in The Dark Forest…a battleship made of multiple spheres, where functionality is not centralised but each room/with an interface can form the bridge. 
The sheet of lake… hemmed in by two islands protruding outward… perception affixed by the narrowness of the entry/exit – all rhetoric emblazoned on this gap of the straits … alliances out in the ocean unfolding … 
14.
Where a blip is ephemeral / transient / often the sole trace of a moving system: 1. “an unexpected, minor, and typically temporary deviation from a general trend e.g. “the Chancellor dismissed rising inflation as a blip” and 2. a very short high-pitched sound made by an electronic device. Land is an ever-present / malleable / heavy strata