Press release
"Speed Space", explores the space of speed, which today might be seen as the contamination of time, speed as a type of pollution. The project is influenced by the writings of Paul Virilio who speaks of the geophysical as having lost its depth of field, harming our relationship with the natural world. Visible horizons are shifting and the human vs machine discussion is in full swing.

The work takes the form of an indoor billboard inspired by a book cover designed by the Russian artist El Lissitzky for the poet Vladmir Mayakovsky. The difference between Russian 1920s, Constructivist ideals and 2005 technological exploits are explored. The celebration of speed as a utopian place of the modern world verses the accelerated outcome of the current technological pace.

The project combines various media (painted wall, framed photograph, monitor and pot) to present a staged 'landscape'. Within this 'landscape' the individual elements contain their own specific sense of speed. For example, the photograph is a static representation of a tree. Each element is seen as part of a created network which directly reflects the new technology age we live in and the histories which accompany its development.

Catalogue Text
Excert from THE ART OF THE MOTOR by Paul Virilio

The concept of the world as a GREAT OBJECT, denounced by Merleau- Ponty in 1959 as an optical illusion of perceptual faith, introduces us to the reality of the end of the millenium.

In Merleau- Ponty's phenomenology of perception, we find the idea Husserl shared that space is limited to the world of sensory experience and that beyond this there is no space worthy of the name, only the excess of a "time depth": universal time, which has nothing in common with the void of so- called cosmic space. But today, with INFORMATION as the last dimension of space- time- matter, it is very tempting for infonauts to identify this spaceless time

depth with information that is no longer restricted but has become generalized. In other words, with an INFORMATION- WORLD in which physics and computer science would be completely indistinguishable.

The pollution of the far reaches of the life- size geophysical world through implementation of the absolute speed of information- carrying waves, has now capped off the pollution of natural substances--the air, water, flora, and fauna. We will soon see the data pollution of our world proper and, finally, of the astrophysical universe itself. The expansion phenomenon that big bang supporters are keen on will extinguish itself suddenly before the "evidence" of the generalized principle of information expansion!10

9. Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Le Visible et l'lnvisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p.31.

10. Jaffelin, Pour une the'orie.

THE ART OF THE MOTOR by Paul Virilio

tranlated by Julie Rose, The Art of the Motor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 141-142