According to Kac:
The role of the image, Virilio says, is “to be everywhere, to be reality (19).”
He distinguishes three kinds of logic of images, according to a clear historical development. For Virilio, the formal logic of the image is the one achieved in the eighteenth century with painting, engraving and architecture. In traditional pictorial representation it is the composition of the figure that has primary importance and the flow of time is relatively irrelevant. Time is absolute. The age of the dialectical logic is that of the photograph and of cinematography in the nineteenth century, when the image corresponds to an event in the past, to a differentiated time. At last, the end of the twentieth century with video, computer and satellites is the age of the paradoxical logic, when images are created in real time. This new kind of image gives priority to speed over space, to the virtual over the real, and therefore transforms our notion of reality from something given to a construct. Virilio says that to some extent the lesson of the new technologies is that reality has never been given, it has always been acquired or generated. Our images never really duplicated reality, they always gave it shape. The difference is that previously a functional distinction could still be made on more solid grounds.
How does such a transition in time change the notion of documentary? I noticed some of you mentionning i your manifestos that documentary refers to a past event…. How does that apply to the new image Kac refers to?
