Marina Grzinic 
The Virtual-Image and the Real-Time Interval 
Introduction 
One could argue that virtual reality and cyberspace are merely fashionable 
passwords to contemporary culture; however, this paper takes the position 
that addressing questions of virtuality may enable a fuller understanding of 
some of the changes which deeply affect the notion of aesthetics today. 
Wolfgang Welsch, in his book Undoing Aesthetics, asserts that aesthetics is 
undergoing a process of epistemologization, referring no longer only to 
questions of the beautiful and the sublime. Welsch argues that we are witneses 
to a profound aestheticization of knowledge and reality, time and space, and 
even truth itself (Welsch, pp. 20-22). On the other hand, a similar shift in 
the definition of the paradigms of reality, time and space can be traced 
th rough the func t ion (i.e., defini t ion, meaning and significance) of 
cyberspace and virtual reality. Issues such as the nature of the human being, 
the di f ference between reality and the real, and those of the changed 
parameters of space and time, seem to be not only more deeply, but above 
all, differently questioned by the theme of virtual reality with its postulated 
construction of perfect, simulated environments. 
In the present paper I intend to explore the changes in the space-time 
paradigm produced by cyberspace and virtual reality. 
If I attempt, as an introduction, to delineate in a drastically reduced 
form, the transformations in the paradigm of space in art from Renaissance 
to the present day, a bird's-eye would trace out a path that begins with 
perspectival space in painting, continues through the illusionist spaces of 
panoramas and dioramas that were so popular in the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries, right up until the space created by the cinematic moving 
picture. This leads all the way to the virtual space of the nineties and into 
cyberspace. Despite the prevalent criticism declaring that all it takes to enter 
a cyberspace is the click of a button on a remote control server, the latter 
remains localized and spatially limited, unlike the Internet, whose totally 
virtual nature (excluding the only possible material side of the Internet, the 
computer console) means it is based on communicative non-limitation. Ken 
Hillis makes a useful distinction between cyberspace and virtual reality, or 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVI CA), pp. 137-151. 137 
Marina Grzinic 
VR for short. »To date, no single technology or machine circumscribes this 
emerging technology/medium of virtual reality - a term confusingly 
interchanged with cyberspace, but here understood as the technical means 
of access to the 'parallel' disembodied and increasingly networked visual 
'world' named cyberspace« (Hillis, p. 5). 
The essential point to grasp is that all of these paradigms or concepts 
of space in the sphere of the visual are related to a broader context of 
conceptions of time and space and the subject within them. For example, 
the industrial and technological revolution and the associated industria-
lization and urbanization of towns and the environment turned on its head 
the paradigm of visuospatial experience at the turn of the twentieth century. 
In his book The Production of Space (1974), Henry Lefebvre characterizes the 
period around 1910 as a watershed in the constitution of the paradigm of 
space. It was around that time that the space of classical perspective and 
geometry, which developed from the Renaissance onwards in the tradition 
of Greek Euclidean logic, began to disintegrate. Until then, a certain shared 
space of knowledge and political power, grounded both in the everyday 
discourse and in abstract thought, was shattered as a result of ever increasing 
industrialization. This disappearance of embodied spatiality, of the very 
concept of space, had far-reaching consequences for a shift in the field of 
representation. Classical models of vision were shattered together with the 
stable spaces of representation that had previously been formed by various 
techniques of perspective composition - techniques for deceiving the eye 
and imitating nature. 
It was this change in the production of space and the spatial model, 
which meant an ever greater meditation of space and, at the same time, the 
loss of direct experience of space, of its sensory apprehension by means of 
one's own body, that permitted the various technical advances in observing 
the subject in space, or the viewer in the visual sphere. The explosive 
proliferation of optical, illusionist toys, exhibitions and settings (e.g., the 
panoramas and dioramas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) was 
also a kind of surrogate for the reduced role of direct sensation for the 
individual in contact with space. 
What happens, for example, with the paradigm of space in the field of 
moving pictures? If in film, 'space' as a montage of attractions is beamed 
onto a remote white canvas, then the screen of electronic images, or the TV 
receiver, has enabled the space of illusion to enter our living rooms. The 
monitors of the data helmets we must place over our heads in order to enter 
the virtual world have brought space right onto our eyes. For Mark Poster, 
»virtual reality takes the imaginary of the word and the imaginary of the 
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The Virtual-Image and the Real-Time Interval 
film or video image one step farther by placing the individual inside the 
alternative worlds« (Poster, p. 189). 
What is important to comprehend here is that in virtual reality data-
environments some of the issues that arise are those relating to the sense of 
distance and weight, and questions of mass and time. The same is true for 
real - t ime t e l e c o m m u n i c a t i o n s , ope ra t ing at the absolute speed of 
electromagnetic waves, allowing local users of the Internet to communicate 
with any point on Earth without leaving - Tokyo, for example - as if there 
is no geographical or spatial distance. At this point, I can offer just a hint of 
the possible f u r t h e r political re-reading of cyberspace. Simultaneous 
collective processes of reception and communication in cyberspace have 
become the central determining metaphor for the new media environment. 
That which takes place on the Internet is increasingly seen and utilized as 
the 'new' public space. The Internet and the World Wide Web are becoming 
spaces that are not only parallel to the existing public one, but increasingly 
becoming a substitute for it. So-called public opinion is formulated via our 
own questioning, in the manner of Fredric Jameson, »what space, which 
actors, whose agents and what subjects?« 
As I in tend to conduct an analysis of the signifying and aesthetic 
principles generated by the space-time paradigm, I will first describe the 
mechanisms of its construction and constitution. Finally, precisely because 
of this constructed character of the paradigm of space, it is open to constant 
re-articulation. 
The Cinematic Image 
To understand the significance of a shift in the space-time paradigm, I 
propose a mapping out of a (historical) discursive timeline; to interpret the 
results of changes in the time/space paradigm, and in its experiences and 
sensations, as produced by the various technologies of the moving and digital 
images, e.g., photography, the film apparatus and virtual reality. This is a 
necessary step also if we are to go beyond the kind of theoretical stasis we 
currently face in re-philosophizing cyberspace and virtual reality. This stasis 
is the almost exaggerated quantity of mainly excellent descriptions awaiting 
classification. One of the aims of this paper is to begin to articulate a possible 
a n d / o r hypothetical approach to such a classification. 
To do so, I will first make use of two paradigms, or time models, 
developed by Gilles Deleuze in the eighties within two books: The Movement-
Image (first published in 1983) and The Time-Image (first published in 1985). 
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Marina Grzinic 
The books examine mutations in the history of cinematic signification. D. 
N. Rodowick, in his compelling book Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine explains 
that, for Deleuze, »the semiotic history of film is coincident with a century-
long transformation wherein we have come to represent and understand 
ourselves socially through spatial and temporal articulations founded in 
cinema, if now realized more clearly in the electronic and digital media« 
(Rodowick, 1997, p. xiii). For Deleuze, it is not to produce another theory 
of film, but to realize how aesthetic, philosophical and scientific modes of 
understanding converge to produce cultural strategies for imagining. What 
is specific to the image, writes Deleuze, »is to make perceptible, to make 
visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object 
and do not allow themselves to be reduced to the present« (Deleuze, Time-
Image, p. xii). 
I would like to present some of the elements of the two principal time-
machine paradigms of the image conceived by Deleuze: the movement-image 
and time-image - in order to suggest a third model: the virtual-image - which 
would be appropriate for an understanding of the temporal and spatial 
characteristics of cyberspace. 
Deleuze linked the notion of the movement-image to the classical 
cinema, for example, to the films of Eisenstein, Keaton etc.; in short , 
Deleuze's movement-image draws upon the American silent cinema, the 
Soviet school of montage, and the French impressionist cinema, whereas 
the time-image originates in the modern European and New American 
cinema, for example, the films of Resnais. 
The following outline of the two Deleuzian models of time — images is 
extremely schematic, but for the purpose of the thesis of this paper, I will 
summarize here that it is their respective spatial rendering of time (i.e., time 
through space) which divides the movement-image from the time-image. The 
main platform of this unusual idea derives from Deleuze's re-thinking of 
the interval - the space or division between photograms, shots, sequences -
and how the organization of intervals informs the spatial representation of 
time in cinema. 
According to Deleuze, in the movement-image (e.g., in Eisenstein and 
Keaton films), time is reduced to intervals defined by movement as actions, 
and the linking of such movements is accomplished through montage. The 
movement-image can only provide an indirect image of time. On the contrary, 
when reality in the film image is represented in a dispersed way, and the 
linear actions dissolve into the form of aleatory or random strolls, then, as 
result of this, the action-reaction schema of the movement-image begins to 
break down, producing a change in the nature of both perception and affect. 
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The Virtual-Image and the Real-Time Interval 
Since the linking of images is no longer motivated by action, the nature of 
space changes, becoming disconnected or empty. Acts of seeing and hearing 
replace the linking of images through motoric actions, as in the case of the 
movement-image. In the time-image, the interval is no longer part of the 
image or sequence either as the ending of one action or as the beginning of 
another . In the time-image, the interval becomes an autonomous value, 
giving us a direct image of time. The interval no longer facilitates the passage 
from one image to another in any detectable manner. 
The movement-image and the time-image, however, each manage this 
relation with time differently. The former provides us with an indirect image 
of time, and the latter, a direct image of time. On this basis, in the time-
image model, according to Rodowick, the interval functions as an irreducible 
limit, the flow of images or sequences bifurcate and develop serially, rather 
than cont inuing as a line, or integrating into a whole. The time-image 
produces a serial rather than organic form of composition (Rodowick, p. 
14), as is the case in the movement-image. 
Whereas the cinematic movement-image presents an indirect image of 
time as exteriority, or extensiveness, in space (Rodowick, p. 48), the cinematic 
time-image presents a direct image - the anteriority of time as creative 
evolution, the pure form of time as change or Becoming (Rodowick, pp. 
48-49). What happens, we have to ask ourselves, when actions no longer 
master time? Deleuze, through Rodowick, argues that the image must turn from 
exteriority in space toward a process of genesis in mental relations of time. 
The Virtual-Image 
Here, in proposing the third image — the virtual-image - 1 would argue 
that what occurs here is, first and foremost, the reversal of the Deleuzian 
established basic relation of time and space: instead of the spatial rendering 
of time (i.e., time through space) we experience in the cinematic image, 
my thesis is that in the virtual-image, space is rendered through time. 
To comprehend the time-space features of this possible third model, 
or paradigm, of the virtual-image that I would like to propose here, I will 
make use of its time-space characteristics as described by Edmond Couchot. 
In Couchot ' s summary: »In fact, virtual space and time obey laws 
different from those of the reality we perceive with our senses. Data space is 
an exclusively symbolic space: neither largely substrate in material, nor in 
energy, even though the computer circuitry (hardware) itself is a part of 
our physical reality; it is made up of information. It has no dimensions per 
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Marina Grzinic 
se, no set pe rmanen t place or topos. Hence its fundamenta l ly u topic 
character. Yet it can also merge with real space as interfaced. Likewise, 
corresponding to this utopic space is a simulated virtual time, itself with its 
own extraordinary properties. That is, 'it seems' (phrase added by the author, 
M.G.), an autonomous time without past, present or future, wholly beyond 
any deterministic or non-deterministic becoming, or again, of any living sense 
of becoming. A time that partakes not of chronos, but is an uchronic (or 
better to say, achronic - added by the author, M.G.) time, hence its ability 
to also merge - hybridize - with the time where dwells the manipulator or 
observer. (...) Uchronic time comes into its own in the immediacy of image-
calculations and simulational-model parameter modifications without any 
delay in the unfolding of the visualized phenomenon. Changes in parameter 
value take effect the very moment the equations are be ing calculated, 
intervening in 'real-time,' as the technicians say, upon successive operations 
and displaying the results instantaneously via realistic or abstract images 
according to the models simulated, giving these simulation technologies 
fantastic effectiveness. Under such conditions, we can thus speak of creating 
a reality and modifying it at the rate of creation, as if 'real' computer time 
took the place of temporal reality, in such a way that reference time loses -
at least partially - its pre-existence. In a sense, synthesized virtual time marks 
the end of time. In these virtual time-space relations, the determinant factor 
is no longer the speed of information transfer, but rather the speed of data 
calculation time. It's as if that invisible barrier, the speed of light at which 
television and radio information circulate, were at the po in t of be ing 
overtaken by the immobile speed of calculation« (Couchot, pp. 16-17). 
In short, changes in parameter values take effect the very moment the 
equations are being calculated, intervening in real-time. And real-time, which 
is time entirely processed by the computer , is equal to zero space. For 
example, for Mark Poster too, this point of the real-time interval in virtual 
reality is crucial. Virtual reality is close to real-time, which arose »in the audio-
recording field when splicing, multiple-track recording and multiple speed 
recording made possible times 'other ' to that of clock-time or phenomeno-
logical time« (Poster, p. 189). In virtual reality, the normal or conventional 
sense of time has to be preserved by the modifier 'real, ' exactly as in the 
coinage: real-time. Real-time is, according to Kac, an immediate transmission 
and reception of a signal as it is produced by a device, without delays; live 
television is a common example of real-time transmissions (Kac, 1998). 
In the virtual-image, the interval disappears; real-time is not direct time, 
but a time without intervals, where space has the value zero. Moreover, the 
non-place, which may be defined as a cyberspace interval, produces a 
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The Virtual-Image and the Real-Time Interval 
meaning in which the distribution of information is a result of a synthesized 
process of calculation. This is not the movement-image's differentiation and 
integration of meaning, nor the time-image's relinking of irrational divisions, 
but a simulational process. Instead of the organic form of composition that 
belongs to the movement-image, and the serial form of composition that 
belongs to the time-image, the virtual-image produces a synthetic one. 
I would like to propose the following models of time-images, according 
to the following temporal , spatial and compositional characteristics, 
respectively: 
the movement-image - indirect-time interval - exteriority of space — 
organic form 
the time-image - direct-time interval - anteriority of space - serial form 
the virtual-image — real-time interval - non-space — synthetic form 
It is impor tan t to emphasize the already ment ioned constructed 
character of the discourse of space, as the space paradigm is, so to speak, 
never grounded in space, but is always ex-, an- or non-space. »The non-place 
of cyberspacetime,« as Nguyen and Alexander pointed out, »contains 
innumerable networks resting on logical lattices abstracted from unthinkably 
complex data fields that unfold across an endless virtual void« (Nguyen and 
Alexander, p. 102). A non-space can be understood here and now, not as a 
form of utopic space, but above all, as a conceptual matrix, a paradigm of 
such a space. 
At this point, a path to follow might also be examined in reverse mode, 
by taking spatial modalities inherent in cyberspace as a starting point and 
transposing them back into reality. That means that some of these paradigms 
can perhaps be functional outside the realm of the computer. Or vice versa, 
we might ask how radicalized spatial organizations manifested in reality may 
serve as models for active intervention in cyberspace. Such a case is the project 
of the Slovenian visual art group IRWIN, entitled NEUE SLOWENISCHE 
KUNST (NSK) STATE IN TIME. One of the most attention-grabbing projects 
of the NSK movement in the 1990's has been the »State in Time« project, 
which is primarily carried out by the above-mentioned group, IRWIN. It 
was within the context of a paradigm of this sort that the NSK Embassies 
and NSK Consulates were realized. NSK Embassies were realized in Moscow 
(1992), Gent, Belgium (1993), etc. NSK consulates were opened in Florence, 
Italy (1993), at the Hotel Ambasciatori, and in Umag, Croatia (1994), in 
the kitchen of the private apartment of gallery owner Marino Cettina. 
The group IRWIN established the NSK Embassy in Moscow in a private 
apartment (address: Leninsky Prospect 12, apt. 24) in May and June 1992. 
The facade of this residential dwelling was embellished with the artistically 
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Marina Gržinič 
articulated insignia of a state embassy. The project took place within the 
context of the internationalization of one of the greatest Eastern European 
phenomena, Apt-Art (Apartment-Art), which was a phenomenon of artistic 
creation and exhibition in private apar tments within the Moscow art 
underground. The Moscow Apt-Art emphasized the status of private space 
and changed it into a center of communication through the self-organization 
of those most excluded. The NSK Moscow EMBASSY project represented a 
new actualization of the p h e n o m e n o n of life and creat ion in private 
apartments during the era of Communist totalitarianism. 
In his book, Spectres de Marx, Jacques Derrida put into play the term 
'spectre' to indicate the elusive pseudo-materiality that subverts the classic 
ontological oppositions of reality and illusion. Slavoj Žižek argues that »We 
should recognize the fact that there is no reality without the spectre, that 
the circle of reality can be closed only by means of an uncanny spectral 
supplement.... 'Spectre' is not to be confused with 'symbolic fiction'... reality 
is never directly 'itself,' it presents itself only via its incomplete-fai led 
symbolization, and spectral apparitions emerge in this very gap that forever 
separates reality from the real, and on account of which reality has the 
character of a (symbolic) fiction: the spectre gives body to that which escapes 
(the symbolically structured) reality« (Žižek, pp. 26-28). In an attempt to 
emphasize the synthetic dialectical moment developed in the NSK State in 
Time, we are compelled to ask ourselves how can we label this spiritual 
element of corporeality (NSK State In Time) and this corporeal element of 
spirituality (embassies in concrete private spaces)? I propose we conclude: 
SPECTERS. Allow me to state the following: the NSK State in Time is the 
specter of the state, NSK Embassies are the specters of Embassies. As Richard 
Beardsworth has shown in his important book Derrida & the political. »Any 
country, any locality, determines its unders tanding of time, place and 
communi ty in re la t ion to this process of ' g loba l ' s p e c i a l i z a t i o n « 
(Beardsworth, p. 146). 
On the other hand, we can re-articulate the NSK STATE IN TIME also 
as a precise articulation of the evacuation of the specific historical, social 
and political space of the former Eastern Europe, after the fall of the Berlin 
Wall. As Peter Camborn Wilson, alias Hakim Bey, stated in his lecture at 
the Nettime meeting entitled »Beauty and The East« in Ljubljana in 1997, 
the Second World has been erased, and only the First and Third Worlds 
are left. In place of the Second World, Bey argued, there is a big hole from 
which one jumps into the Third (Cf. Bey, 1997). NSK STATE IN TIME is a 
transposition, as much as it is also a spectralization, of the evacuation of the 
specific historical, social and political space of the former Eastern Europe, 
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The Virtual-Image and the Real-Time Interval 
of this non-space condition. It is possible to find the same condition in the 
center of the myth of liberating and innocent cyberspace. »Whatyou discover 
(in cyberspace - added by the author, M.G.) is always,« according to Olivier 
Marchart, »your own image in a reversed form. (...) This sentence - since 
obviously, it paraphrases the Lacanian communication formula - has an 
axiomatic status. Wherever you go, you are always already there« (Marchart, 
1998). And this is exactly to what the IRWIN NSK STATE IN TIME project 
is pointing a finger. The group IRWIN has the power to articulate its proper 
position using the same mechanisms and matrices that seem, at first glance, 
to be part of another »absolutely virtual« territory. 
Contestational Errors 
Since what I am proposing here is a research into the discursive 
constructions and articulations of the changes of time and space paradigms 
produced by image technology, to look also at the characteristics of the time-
space paradigm developed and sustained in the photographic image would 
offer more insight into the latter stages of such a proposed research. 
In his »Short History of Photography«, Walter Benjamin focuses on how 
the problem of time characterized the evolution of early photography. I will 
summar ize briefly Ben jamin ' s insights, relying on D. N. Rodowick's 
presentation: 
»Nei ther the indexical quality of the pho tograph nor its iconic 
characteristics fascinated Benjamin as much as the interval of time marked 
by exposure. In the technological transition from an exposure time requiring 
several hours to only fractions of a second, Benjamin marked the gradual 
evaporation of aura from the image. The idea of aura invoked here is clearly 
related to Bergson's durée. For Benjamin, the longer the interval of exposure, 
the greater the chance that the aura of an environment - the complex 
temporal relations woven through its represented figures - would seep into 
the image, etching itself on the photographic plate. (...) More concretely, 
the temporal value of the interval determines a qualitative ratio between 
time and space in the photograph. In the evolution from slow to fast exposure 
times, segmentations of time yielded qualitative changes in space: sensitivity 
to light, clearer focus, more extensive depth of field, and significantly, the 
fixing of movement. Paradoxically, for Benjamin, as the iconic and spatial 
characteristics of photography became more accurate by decreasing the interval 
of exposure, the image lost its temporal anchoring in the experience of duration, 
as well as the fascinating ambiguity of its 'aura'« (Rodowick, pp. 8-9). 
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Marina Grzinic 
Rodowick at tempted such a summary because he is interested in 
Benjamin's commentary on the photographic exposure time, which can be 
seen simultaneously as the accumulation of duration and as a reduction of 
the time intervals, as a kind of a prototype of both of Deleuze's time-image 
models. In face of this, I myself am interested in this contraction of the 
interval of exposure time because it depicts a process of erasure, the desire 
to rid ourselves of the uncontrollable movements and mistakes that can occur 
over such long exposure times. Fur thermore , today we are witness to, 
metaphorically speaking, the constant decreasing, the constant shortening, 
the condensation of the interval of exposure, on the trajectory moving from 
photography through cinema to cyberspace. This amounts to a process of 
cleaning and leaving behind the mistakes. With the virtual image and its real-
time interval - when the speed of light at which television and radio circulate 
informat ion is overtaken by the immobi le speed of calculat ion — we 
experience an ever more exact and radical process of complete image 
evacuation, or emptying. The result is an aesthetic process of the sterilization 
of the image. With the arrival of the new media, and with digitalization, a 
physicality of the connection of the image within reality-time is lost. Mistakes 
in the image, which were evidence of its reality-temporality existence, are 
traumatically lost. With mistakes, one might say, the subject finds ways to 
make a place in time. With the virtual image's real-time contraction, with 
the contraction of the temporal-reality intervals, the image undergoes a 
process of complete 'emptying out.' 
In short, I want to emphasize the technical constitution of temporality. 
»The temporalization of time thus changes with a change in the technical 
process that forms it« (Beardsworth, p. 161). Moreover, it is possible to detect 
a process of constant tension between the nature of the technical tools that 
allows the mediation of time and the human experience of time. This tension 
can be n a m e d , again, as spectra l izat ion. At stake in this process of 
spectralization lies the human experience of time. »Most immediately, it is 
clear that with the digitalization of memory support-systems, our experience 
of time is being rapidly foreshortened, creating, among other things (...) 
the tension between the international nature of the electronic and digital 
gaze and the corporal realities that make up much of human life. Less 
immediately, but more profoundly, it is also clear that fu ture technical 
intervention on the genetic ' ingredients ' of the h u m a n will accelerate 
processes of evolution at such a speed (if this remains the right term) that 
present conceptions of history, inheritance, memory and the body will need 
to be dramatically reorganized, if the 'selection' of what is ' human ' , and 
what is not, is not to become the monopoly of an organization between the 
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The Virtual-Image and the Real-Time Interval 
t e chnosc i ences a n d capi tal . Jus t as these t echn iques toge ther with 
developments in machine intelligence will soon wish to suppress human 
' fa i lure(s) ' (precisely our submission to time), so the real time of the 
teletechnologies risks reducing the differance of time, or the aporia of time, 
to an experience of time that forgets time« (Beardsworth, pp.147-48). 
This process of evacuation reached its limit of absurdity, for example, 
with the virtualized visual scenarios of the Gulf War, which can be contrasted 
with the lack of information about the 'dirty' and very real war in Bosnia-
Herzegovina. Instead of the direct images from the war in BiH, we were, in 
most cases, via the so-called live, real-time programming connections, 
confronted, on the one hand, with old televised images, and on the other 
with the voice of the radio amateur reporting live, in real-time. 
Dimitris Eleftheriotis notes a similar process in a different, though 
complementary, field. According to Eleftheriotis, » 'The Digital Image 
Stabilizer' is a popular feature of many new camcorders: it operates through 
a digital analysis of each frame which detects and eliminates 'abnormal ' 
movements. In a similar fashion, visual surveillance technology depends upon 
the identification of 'abnormal' or 'irregular' movements which disrupt the 
'normal ' flow of people in a street, a shopping center or supermarket -
research currently under taken looks for ways in which the detection of 
abnormal movement can become an automaton built into the system« 
(Eleftheriotis, p. 105). Both processes can be understood as the opposite parts 
of the same mathematical, legal, as well as aesthetical operation, emptying 
out and sterilization of the image. As Mark Lajoie has stated, »The distance 
between the user on one side, and the seeming space on the other is absolute. 
It should come as no surprise that many of the technologies involved in the 
virtual reality in te r face have their origin in machinery designed for 
performing tasks in environments inhospitable to human beings - chemical 
factories, nuclear power plants, vacuum space. Cyberspace offers to do the 
same with all relations to the material, treating the material as a toxic agent, 
or poisoned environment, to place an imperceptible yet omnipresent barrier 
between all material relations with others« (Lajoie, p. 163). 
In contrast to the clean, pure space of virtual reality, the material 
becomes an object of horror and disgust because it cannot be integrated into 
the matrix. In other words, the material becomes an abject. As Julia Kristeva 
has pointed out, »It becomes what culture, the sacred, must purge, separate 
and banish so that it may establish itself as such in the universal logic of catharsis« 
(Kristeva, »Psychoanalysis and the Polis,« p. 102, in Lajoie, p. 165). Materiality 
is entirely extracted from cyberspace, and reduced from object to abject - a 
senseless, obscene intervention (Cf. Critical Art Ensemble and Pell, 1998). 
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Marina Grzinic 
The entrance of mistakes in perfect, simulated environments can be 
viewed, therefore, as a point of developing new aesthetical and conceptual 
strategies, as the mistake as object of horror and disgust cannot be integrated 
into the matrix. Antiorp, a mysterious Danish composer whose gender - or 
even humanity — is unknown, promotes the idea that technology used to 
create art inevitably becomes the subject of the art itself. Errors, for example. 
Antiorp writes, »Generally, (people) aren ' t anticipating errors, browser 
deconstruction or denials of service. Incorporating these into programming 
generates an element of intrigue, seducdon and frustration. Error is the mark 
of the higher organism, and it presents an environment with which one is 
invited to interact or perhaps control« (Cf. antiorp@tezcat.com /=cw4t7abs/ 
(1998)). 
What matters in cyberspace is namely the possibility to in te rac t 
concretely, hence materially, by means of different devices - f rom joysticks 
to datasuits - with the virtual world. It is exactly at this precise point of contact, 
at the interface between the virtual and real, that the user is called to insert 
his or her fingerprints, and ultimately, his or her material body also in the 
form of a mistake. The interface can be considered an obscene stain 
constantly reminding the user of his or her inability to become fully subject 
in cyberspace, and we might also say the same with regard to the mistakes. 
Mistakes in the image are like a fingerprint on the film, a scratch or scars 
on the skin - the evidence of the existence of the image. To make a mistake 
is to find a place in time. A mistake is like a wound in the image; it is like an 
error in the body, or, as formulated by Beardsworth, failure(s) represent(s) 
precisely our submission to time (cf. Beardsworth, p. 148). This is a situation 
of producing a gap, a hiatus, where we can insert not only a proper body, 
but also its interpretation. 
We must continually engage to locate ourselves in the world in relation 
to others - human and non-human. »1 am conscious of my body via the world, 
that it is the unperceived term in the center of the world towards which all 
objects turn their face; it is true for the same reason that my body is the 
pivot of the world: I know that objects have several facets because I could 
make a tour of the world through the medium of my body« (Merleau-Ponty, 
p. 82). 
In December 1997, TV Tokyo s u s p e n d e d the weekly regular ly 
broadcasting of the popular 'Pocket Monster' cartoon, known as 'Pockemon,' 
because nearly 700 people nationwide, mainly children, were taken to 
hospitals after watching the show on 16 December. The TV viewers were 
afflicted by an outbreak of convulsions and faintness, ending with catalepsy. 
The scene from Pockemon, which was suspected of sending hundreds to 
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The Virtual-Image and the Real-Time Interval 
hospitals, can be described as four seconds of flashing red, blue, white and 
black lights. It was a kind of strobe flash, like second sunlight, something so 
hyper-bright that it resulted in both blindness and catalepsy. 
Through this example, we can discuss some other important points 
raised in connection with the relationship between our physical body and 
the image. While I wish to avoid falling into the trap of mass psychological 
hysterical readings of the eternally bad and dangerous influence of TV upon 
g e n e r a t i o n s of viewers, I will try to establish an almost here t ica l 
interpretation of the event. We could say that the TV-induced epilepsy-like 
illness brought back to a mass of TV viewers the reality of their physical 
bodies. The human body has been, for more than a century, captured or 
frozen as images via photography. It has been approximately 120 years since 
1877-80, when the psychiatrist Martin Charcot, at the Salpétriére Hospital 
in Paris, photographed his hysterical patients with the intention of making 
their illness visible (due to the underlying pathology of hysteria being 
invisible). Now, in the 1990's, the body fights back! With the hysterical 
suffering body of Pockemon, we witness a reaction, a disobedience, to the 
until now immobile, or frozen, body's relation to the image. The success of 
photography in capturing hysteria had to do precisely with the mechanisms 
internal to photography, which are connected with its »reality effect,« and 
with the photographic apparatus' potential to freeze the convulsive and 
hysterical body. 
It seems that today, in a world supersaturated with images, to make 
the body visible - to simply remind ourselves that we have a physical body 
- the body had to fall back again into hysteria, into an outbreak of convulsions 
and faintness. On the other hand, Pockemon allows us to discuss the idea of 
total visibility constantly produced by the mass media. But this kind of total 
visibility is just media-processed; it is simply another form of misconstruction. 
In reality, we have, as Peter Weibel once noted, zones of visibility and zones 
of invisibility. The Pockemon 'Cataleptic Tuesday' event (Pockemon has been 
aired every Tuesday since April 1997) brought us not only to the core of the 
processes of representation, and to the so-called zero-point of representation 
in relation to the physical body, but it represents an almost psychotic 
appearance of these phenomena, by the constantly hidden zones of invisibility 
in mass media. These zones flashed for a moment so brightly on the surface 
of the image, they allowed the body to become blind and hysterical. 
This phenomenon may also be described through the perspective of 
Paul Virilio, who claims that the introduction of computerized technology 
simply makes visible what had been assumed or, I use the word overtaken, 
- the fleeting time of exposure in instantaneous perception, which results 
149 
Marina Grzinic 
in »a collapse of mnemonic consolidation« (Virilio, p. 7). It is a process 
showing that the observer's moment of perception is no longer in synch, no 
longer integrated into the time of exposure, in the topographical perception 
and memorization processes impressed in the time of exposure. For Virilio, 
what characterizes the replacement of the depth of space by the depth of 
time, is a splitting of viewpoint, the sharing of perception of the environment 
between the animate (the living subject) and the inanimate (the object, the 
seeing machine). The vision (s) of this viewpoint, its visualizations, are what 
is already there in the eye of the camera(s), remaining in »a state of latent 
immediacy in the huge j unk heap of the stuff of memory, wanting to 
reappear, inexorably, when the time comes« (Virilio, p. 43). 
To reappropriate the place of this memory, of virtual memory, in the 
modern way means, therefore, not to use any more traces - as virtual memory 
is no longer in a function of the past, but of the future - but instead to use 
mistakes, as the speed of light at which TV and radio information circulates 
are at the point of being overtaken by the immobile speed of calculations. 
Acknowledgments 
I would like to thank Adele Eisenstein, C3 Budapest, for editing this 
paper. 
I received helpful theoretical insights f rom Machiko Kusahara , 
University of Kobe; Kikuko Toyama, Yamaguchi University; Keiji Asanuma, 
Seijo University, Tokyo; Chihiro Minato, Tama University, Tokyo; Toshiya 
Ueno, Wako University, Tokyo; Trinh T. Minh-ha, University of California, 
Berkeley; and Linda Wallace, Melbourne. 
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