Visibility in Progress

My theme is "visibility," a topic that happens to be close to the professional activity of visual design and the disciplinary field of visual communications. I intend to develop this theme in two stages: first, I'll try to consider how far visibility is present all over the world nowadays; then, I'll try to analyze how visibility is produced. The period we live in sometimes has been defined as a "civilization of the image;" and at other times as a "civilization of the written word." Some have spoken of a return to "the global village," a return to a civilization of a "second degree orality"I promoted by electronic technologies. In any case, a very visual civilization, even if it is now also audio-visual, or more precisely multisensoreal, as is promised by so-called virtual reality. The general tendency is to emphasize the importance of the visual in our daily lives and in the scenario of our technological future. In opposition to this kind of interpretation, some speak of the visual in a very critical way; they talk about a civilization of blindness, a "blackout" civilization. Paul Virilio, for instance; a French urbanist who defines himself as a "dromologist," which means a student of velocity; has become one of those critical voices by offering closeup observations of a series of phenomena in our society and technology.2 According to Virilio, the dissemination of technological innovations into our culture has prompted an acceleration of every single process and of all processes at the same time. This speeding up process alters the normal process of communication, which has a relatively slow rhythm, with an instantaneous kind of process that is called "switching" or "transducing." The time of transducing is governed by electronic devices; while the still, relatively slow, rhythm of communications is defined by the human organs and mind. Heavy stimulation can pass through the body of a person invaded by transducing processes, but it does not really interfere with the mind. The surrounding world is then seen as a world of dysphoriathe contrary of euphoria-which means essentially the experience of a world of depression caused by a substantial impoverishment of communication and, even more, by a substantial deprivation of sensory pleasure. I recall, for instance, a very harsh indictment of the air travel industry by Virilio: velocity is achieved at the expense of treating passengers as bodies on stretchers, or even as corpses in the storage drawers of a morgue. This article was originally presented as the ICOGRADA inaugural lecture at the PIRA/RSA Design Conference, London, April 1, 1992