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Baudrillard, Focault, Heiddeger, Virilio

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worst for it.”

George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn

• Enlightenment to photographic recording, Muybridge’s multiple chambers, Marey’s chronophotography and the Lumiere brothers’ film camera, not forgetting Melies, the inventor of the mystificatin of montage.
• …total war has made an essential contribution to the rise of projection equipment which can reveal and finally make possible the totalitarian tendencies of the moment.
• Light-weapons
• (After Atom bomb) If photography, according to its inventor Nicephore Niepce, was simply a method of engraving with light, where bodies inscribed by their traces by virtue of their own luminosity, nuclear weapons inherited both the darkroom of Niepce and Dauerre and the military searchlight.
• The black-out was a thing of the past, and darkness the fighter’s best ally, while the daylight theatre also became a darkened cinema for the shadowy combatants.
  • So much concealment, hiding, deception, even daylight does not reveal. Now it was not a matter of light (lumos), but light as a source of revealing.
  • Darkness betrays the fighter, dramatic twist to the plot of the film story.
• The old ballistic projection has been succeeded by the projection of light, of the electronic eye of the guided of ‘video’ missile.
• …uses of projectiles and light, that light which is the soul of the gun barrel.

Recently

• The disintegration of the warrior’s personality [...]. Looking up, he sees the digital display (optoelectronic or holographic) of the windscreen collimator; looking down, the radar screen, the on-board computer, the radio and the video screen, which enables him to follow the terrain with its four or five simultaneous targets, and to monitor his self navigating Sidewinder missiles fitted with a camera or infra-red guidance screen.
  • “War of the waves”
  • Only recent that airplanes were equipped with an on-board computer.
• …the confusion of senses involves not a panic-stricken terror but a technological vertigo or purely cinematic derealizaition, which affects the sense of spatial dimension.
• …motor-handicapped person temporarily suffering from a kind of possession analogous to the hallucinatory states of primitive warfare.
• People used to die for a coat of arms, an image on a pennant or flag; now they died to improve the sharpness of a film. War has finally become the third dimension of cinema.

• (Pg 92) Since armed clashes could now only be perceived through projection, only the photogramme of the war film could reveal their inner dynamic or general line.
• Alone capable of making visible the likelihood of attack, cinema became associate with battle in the same way the telescopic sights were attached to rifles or the cine-machine-gun to aerial warfare.
  • Enhanced ’seeing’ – while telescopes on rifles were a maximization (and decreasing space) of real-view, cinema’s association with battle provided a new idea of time, and also ‘decreased’ space.
• Saint-Exupery as a war pilot: I am an icy scientist, and for me their war is a laboratory experiment.
  • The airplane pilot is very detached to the clashing of hardware and his visuals from the aircraft is merely a faraway vision as if viewing through a television set.
• The soldier’s panic-stricken distancing form static warfare is transferred to the technology of lightning-war, to the telescopic lenses and the stereoscopic glass of military photo-analysis, in a medium which seems aqueous, glass-like with all its phenomena of refraction and diffraction.
  • Again like looking through a mirror, with all the refraction and diffraction, yet being able to see yourself.
• The rapid movement of armies meant that their advance had to be detected at the furthest possible point [...] so that the command would have sufficient time to respond.
  • Speed; looking further in time
• Now reports have lost their value within a few hours, or even a few minutes.
  • Causing the stream of reports to resemble an animation.
• ‘Iconoscope’: electronic television. He presented it not as a mass medium but as a way of expanding the range of human vision.

Ghost Wall

• Battle of Britain gave the air the transparency of ether.
  • Through Radar, although invisible, ubiquitous and unavoidable.
• Brief exchanges between crews and their ‘war hostesses’ passed through the ether, as if the couples were together in the same room. [...] The fighter-pilots were ceaselessly followed by these offstage voices
  • 1. Space reduced vertically (through audio).
  • 2. Fighter-pilots guided and kept company with “offstage” voices, like on stage.
• Screen Ghosts of enemy pilots served to confirm that they had been shot down, and ghostly radar images, voices and echoes came through on the screens, radios and sonars. The projection of light and waves had replaced the old projection of arrows and javelins.
• Although military force depends on its relationship to outward appearance, this power has over the years lost its verisimilitude in a profusion of camouflage, decoys, jamming, smoke-screens, electronic counter-measures, and so on. The offensive arsenal has equipped itself with new devices for a conflict in which optical and motor illusion have fused in the cinematic delirium of lightning war. Here what counts is the speed at which objects, images and sounds travel through space, until the moment of the nuclear flash
  • or until the moment of the flash
• The pilot’s gift for double sight thus introduced a new doubling of the warrior’s personality: with his head up, atmospheric transparency and ocular targeting; head down, the transparency of the ether, long-distance vision. Two military spaces, one close and one faraway, corresponded to a single battle, a single war.
  • Double perception war, merging together and weaving through eachother.
  • “Long distance” and invisible.
  • If there is an action, there is a reaction. If there is enhanced vision from the air down onto the ground, then there will be a response from the ground by lighting up the sky. -> Day and night merging and weaving through eachother.
• …the Allies developed the magnesium flare and the electronic flash, which allowed USAF bombers not only to light up the ground, but more importantly to dazzle enemy defenses for a few moments.
  • Part of confusion of senses. Take out the eye, victory is gained.
• The visible weapons systems of artillery, machine-guns, and so forth thus became entangled with the invisible weapons systems of a continent-wide electronic war.
• This total visibility, cutting through darkness, distance and natural obstacles, made the space of war translucent and its military commanders clairvoyant, since response time was continually being cut by the technological processes of foresight and anticipation.
  • Response/interpretation time not just limited to the interpreter in front of the monitor, but because of the initial mission plan before the feed that required interpretation was planned with foresight to eliminate time and lag as much as possible.
• PENCIL OF LIGHT
• Albert Speer: For the Nuremberg Party Congress in 1935, I used 150 anti-aircraft searchlights whose perpendicular, skyward beams formed a luminous rectangle in the night. Within these walls of light, the first of their kind, the congress unfolded in all its ritual. It was like fairy-like decor, reminding one of the glass castles imagined by poets in the Middle Ages. I now have a strange feeling when I think that mu most successful architectural creation was a phantasmagoria, an unreal image.
• Transparency, ubiquitousness, instant information – it was the time of the great ‘command operas’ where, in London as in Berlin, stage directors moved the naval and air fleets around.
  • D-Day in itself was like a theatre production, with marker ques for when the airborne units were flew in, to when naval gunships would start firing at the beach defenses.

Source

• Speer: The worse the situation became, the more this instrument of modern warfare served to underline the divorce between reality on the ground and the fantasy which presided over the conduct of operations at that table.
• …in this period of war the comings and going were less those of troops than of the outfrom detection and transmission equipment. Visual or audiovisual technology now began to reproduce not only the forced march or distant incursion – [...] – but the actual movement of armies, with automatic feed-back and retransmission in real-time.
  • automatic
  • once absent – now everywhere.
• In making attack unreal, industrial warfare [...] became the greatest mystification of all: an apparatus of deception, the lure of deterrence strategy.
  • To respond to an ‘unreal’ threat of attack (surveillance/reconnaissance), one must come up with ‘unreal’ tactics .
• …film replaced military maps.
• …the use of slow or accelerated motion in analyzing the phases of an operation – all this converts the commander’s plan into an animated cartoon or flow-chart.

• In the Bayeux Tapestry, itself a model of pre-cinematic march-past, the logistics of the Norman landing already prefigured The Longest Day of 6 June 1944.

Source

• In 1904, the first year of the ‘war of light’
• the focused incandescence of war’s first projector seemed to concentrate all the torches and all the fires of all the wars before it. Its beam pierced more than the darkness of the Russo-Japanese war; it illuminated a future where observation and destruction would develop at the same pace.
  • Light; observation; destruction; speed;
• Later the two would merge completely in the target-acquisition techniques of the blitzkrieg, the cine-machineguns of fighter aircraft, and above all the blinding Hiroshima flash which literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war’s recording surface, its film. And from this would come directed-light weapons, the coherent light-beam of the laser.
  • the light engraving the shadows and forms of wars and its members.
• on May 1904 in Cologne, Christian Hulsmeyer tested his ‘telemobiloscope’, which could alert a remote observer to the presence of metallic objects – the forerunner, in effect, of radio-telemetry and Watson-Watt’s ‘radio detection and ranging’ (Radar)

Source

• From the commanding heights of the earliest natural fortifications, through the architectonic innovation of the watch-tower, and the development of anchored observation balloons, or the aerial reconnaissance of World War I and its ‘photographic reconstruction’ of the battlefield, right up to President Reagan’s latest early warning satellites, there has been no end to the enlargement of the military field of perception.
• Eyesight and direct vision have gradually given way to optical or opto-electronic processes, to the most sophisticated forms of ‘telescopic sight’. The strategic importance of optics was already clear in World War I…
• The idea of war as fundamentally a game of hide and seek with the enemy was proved to the point of absurdity in those First World War earthworks where millions of men were entrenched and interred for four long years.
  • Because there are methods of hiding, there became improved seeking, and because there was improved seeking, the hiding also then developed. Then there becomes a point where hiding is no longer being invisible, but over-visibility to confuse. Here comes DECEPTION.
• All efforts were made to conceal and disperse one’s forces instead of deploying them in maximum concentrations.
• …the urgent need that developed forever more accurate sighting, ever greater magnification, for filming the war and photographically reconstructing the battlefield;  above all it explains the newly dominant role of aerial observation in operational planning.
• “narrow down targets”
• “firing blind”
• [WWI] The enemy’s presence made itself known only through the flash of gunfire or the glow from the trenches, and daytime blindness was hardly any different from that which set in at nightfall.
  • Tracer bullets, flares, searchlights.
  • A lightening war before the actual – Blitzkrieg.
• …aviation took over the cavalry’s function and reconnaissance planes became the eyes of the high command, a vital prosthesis for the headquarters strategist, illuminating a terrain that was constantly being turned upside down by high explosives. Landmarks vanished: maps lost all accuracy. [...] the landscape of war became cinematic…
  • As the pace of war heightened, the landscape of war changed constantly, an almost impossibly task for map-making as it would become unreliable within a few hours of combat and bombing. The pace (speed) of war determined and drove the engine of the frame speed for information.
• …the point is no longer to study the deformations involved in the movement of a whole body [...] but to reconstitute the fracture  lines of the trenches, to fix the infinite fragmentation of a mined landscape alive with endless potentialities. Hence the crucial role of photographic reconstruction, and of those military films which were the first, little known-form of macro-cinematography applied not [...] to the infinitely small but to the infinitely large.
• On the one hand, the secret of victory is written in the air by the ballistics of projectiles and the hyper-ballistics of aeronautics; on the other, it is negated by speed since only the speed of film exposure is capable of recording that military secret which each protagonist tries to keep by camouflaging ever larger objects (artillery batteries, railways, marshalling yards, and eventually towns as the black-out belatedly responded to the lighting war of 1940)
  • Guessing is eliminated
• The problem, then, is no longer so much one of masks and screens, of camouflage designed to hinder long-range targeting; rather, it is a problem of ubiquitousness, of handling simultaneous data in global but unstable environment where the image (photographic or cinematic) is the most concentrated, but also the most stable, form of information.
• Military strategy had earlier involved in the division of space, digging trenches, having a solid ground for headquarters opposite the enemy’s encampment.
  • hand-to-hand, face-to-face confrontation of past wars happened in real time, in tangible distance and controllable speed.
• 20th century moved onto the division of time, where the surprise effect  came from the sudden appearance of pictures and signs on a monitor, and where screens were designed to simulate, rather than dissimulate, a war that ever more closely resembled non-stop cinema or round-the-clock television.
  • Like The Truman Show (1998), starring Jim Carrey, where Truman Burbank realises his whole life was a TV show and his everyday was broadcast live, 24-7 nationwide to millions of viewers. (The director, Christof, shows God complex as he tries to convince himself and Truman, later in the story, that he gave him life and led his life in a safe atmosphere with love and care.)

The Truman Show: cameras on all possible angles to follow Truman’s life in the minutest details. Source of image

Through the Looking Glass

• (Pg 90) Ernst Junger: “The landscape had the transparency of glass”
• This total transparency affecting object, subject and surrounding space – which makes each of the antagonists feel both that he is watch by invisible stalkers and that he is observing his own body from a distance – illustrates the derangement of perception in an environment where military technology is distorting not only the battlefield, but also, and especially, the space-time of vision, where the observation machine and the modern war machine are conjoined to such a degree…
  • Like looking into a mirror and seeing your own self but also knowing that from the other side you are being watched and that you can watch the other side as well.
• The intensity of automatic weaponry and the new capacities of photographic equipment combine to project a final image of the world, a world in the throes of de-materialization and eventual disintegration.
  • “Einstein: Information explosion – as formidable as the atomic blast itself.”

• Crew members on the aircraft carrier Nimitz recently told a journalist from Liberation: ‘Our work is totally unreal. Every now and then, fiction and reality should get together and prove once and for all that we are really here.
• Total war takes us from military secrecy (the second-hand recorded truth of the battlefield) to the overexposure of live broadcast.
  • From the hidden, underexposed, blanketed to a full-blown exposure.
• Those American TV channels which broadcast news footage around the clock. [...] Because in fact this isn’t really news footage any longer, but the raw material of  vision, the most trustworthy kind possible.
• Today, directors (and politicians) have lost all prominence, and are swallowed up in technical effects, rather like Nocholas Ray in Wim Wenders’s Lightening Over Water. ‘We get our energy from chaos’, [...] the living pan-cinema is spreading before us that chaos which was once so well concealed by the orderly creation of war.
  • Chaos is now clearly visible, which was once blanketed by the orderly fashion of wars of the past. Also a increased vision of the chaos.

Source

• For the commercial distribution of video and audio equipment is destroying the extra ordinary technical capacity of the old cinema to shape society through vision, to turn a thousand film-goers into a single spectator.
  • By making seeing available for military purposes through aerial methods or other, means seeing chaos is available for hundreds of thousands – war becomes more embedded in society although subtle.

• The  new media allow the viewer to sense the differential time-spanborne by each technological object. The effect is a startling temporal relief, such that the engine of war restores the material war-time of military-industrial propaganda in which we are the involuntary protagonists.
  • War attracts more characters into the picture, like a movie of an epic scale, with cameos and extras adorning the main thread story.
• Leslie Howard: …I am working on a simple principle: that the mind will always triumph over brute force in the long run.
  • Links to Hitler’s aim in penetrating the ordinary civilian with psychology instead of using other brute force.
• The Luftwaffe’s bombers and reconnaissance aircraft were at once engines of destruction and engines of cinema, movie producers, as it were, filming not only the battlefield but also the territory of the United Kingdom itself.

Overexposure

• [The Allies] main technique was not classical camouflage but, on the contrary, overexposure. Enemy cameras were offered sight of scenery, materiel, troop movements – all part of the almost limitless repertoire of visual illusions in real space.

• Smoke coiled from [the landing ships'] funnels, they were surrounded by oil patches, laundry hung from the rigging, motorboats left wakes from ship to ship, and intruding aircraft could see their crews – overage or unfit soldiers of units such as the 10th Worcestershires and the 4th Northamptonshires. Thousands of carefully shielded truck lights indicated the presence of large convoys, and lights over ‘hards’ gave the impression of intense loading activity after dark. And behind this ‘invasion fleet’, which was large enough to ‘land’ the entire 1st Canadian Army, which did not yet exist, the fields of East Anglia and Kent were crowded with tanks, guns, half-tracks, ammunition dumps, field kitchens, hospitals, troop encampments and fuel lines. They too were fakes.
• The sound-track was also well worked out, with all the care of a film script. It contained various brief, misleading, dialogues that could be picked up by German radio-operators across the Channel – apparantly part of the normal run of military signals. And to add a final touch of authenticity, public figures, including King George himself, and Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery, were invited to visit the spurious docks, ships and building-sites. At other key moments, look-alikes of Churchill and other military leaders embarked on aeroplanes to undertake bogus trips.
  • A huge show put up, not for a direct audience, but an audience on surveillance and reconnaisance. More information to reveal the true information. No more hiding.
  • D-Day Deception by Mary Kathryn Barbier Preview
• The last power left to the director, as to the army officer, is not so much to imagine as to foresee, simulate and memorize simulations. Having lost material space, the bunkered commander of total war suffers a loss of realtime, a sudden cutting-off of any involvement in the ordinary world. [...] war and its technologies have gradually eliminated theatrical and pictorial effects in processing the battle image, and total war followed by deterrence have tended to cancel the scenario effect itself in a permanent technological ambience devoid of any substratum. With the new composites, the world disappears in war, and war as phenomenon disappears form the eyes of the world.
  • As the Second World War was coming to a close, America soon lost interest in the soldiers in Europe and started to move onto the regeneration of peace and entertainment.
  • the “word disappears in war”

Source

Power of the eye

• It is said that by the time De Mille was finishing The Ten Commandments, he imagined he was God himself leading the Jewish people
  • Dictatorship & power of the director
• People ’suddenly horrified by the everyday, the ordinary, and fascinated by the unusual’ (Leni Riefenstahl)
  • Cinema has developed enough to replace the ‘real’ seeing, with manipulated, directed seeing.
• Hitler may not have been the great statesman we saw in him,’ argues Albert Speer, ‘but he was and remains a psychologist whose like I have never encountered. Even as supreme army commander, he thought more about the psychological effect of a weapon than about its operational force.
• The swastika, for example, releasing potent affective associations, could not be confused with any other symbol – its stark simplicity still has an arresting power.
• He [Harlan] noticed that the Fuhrer’s hypnotic power only operated in real life; it was not present in his pictures, nor did it work in his countless newsreel appearances.
  • -> Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl
• Mazi myth: Creation of an artificial universe that looked entirely real and the resulting production of the first and most important example ever of an ‘authentic documentary’
• For Speer, the architect had a cinematic function similar to that of the military commander – namely, the capacity to determine in a building what is permanent and what is impermanent.
• A cameraman was attached to each platoon of the German army, and these gifted, intrepid men succeeded where Griffith had failed in the First World War. Each regiment had its own PK (Propaganda Company) responsible for gathering and immediately processing information – a kind of coordinating committee for film-army-propaganda, or pictures-tactics-scripts.
• PK cinema was thus built on the work of Leni Riefenstahl, for whom everything in ther hilms was true although it took place in intensive time similar to the real time of the Blitzkrieg, to the actual speed of military technology.
  • Cinema had to follow the speed of military technology to gain credibility and trust, however black or white the propaganda was.
• The Allied airforces were now free to practice a new strategy of zone bombing, whose aim was to obliterate not just military targets but entire regions.
  • Operation Gomorrah
  • This meant now the soldiers and was mechanics, the protagonists of the war, were not the only characters in cinema of life, the extras, the civilians, were added into the picture. This is how cinema grew to an epic scale from planned battlegrounds.
  • Cinema fully embedded into human life. To see is to live, to live is to see.
• The tragic affirmative of the enraptured crowd left the way to clear for the Gauleiter to conclude: ‘Well then, people of Germany, let the storm break!’ War now spread not just territorially but to the whole of reality, with neither limits or purpose.
• On the 30th of April, Hitler finally departed his ‘hell of images’, by committing suicide in the camera obscura of the Reichskanzlerlei bunker.
  • Irony, departing hell of images to go straight into another hell.
• the osmosis between industrialized warfare and cinema.

EagleEye

• Technological mystery now replaced the mystery of the filmscript and tended to become the defining concept of real war. Thus, in the extraordinary story of Enigma, and its technological counter Ultra, the Anglo-German battle over decoding machines changed the direction of war.
• Armies were now composed of numerous mobile units which struggled hard to establish contact in the course of the action, responding to orders given outside their own field of vision.

• • reducing space and time to nothing, a miniaturization of war.
  • Like playing with soldier & tank models, the direct line of sight of the commander is high above as in an aircraft.

• ***A monitor would have had to have recorded and analysed a number of facts and events incomparably greater than what the human eye and brain can perceive at a given place and time, and then to have inscribed the processed date onto the battlefield itself. The level of foresight required by the geopolitical dimensions of modern battlefields demanded a veritable meteorology [climate] of war. Already we can see here the video-idea that the military voyeur is handicapped by the slowness with which he scans a field of action overstretched by the dynamic revolution of weaponry and mass transport.
  • The speed of technology and feed of information is as fast as the frames in a filmroll, yet the reader that can determine the significance and hence initiate action based on the information is limited by the human eye and brain, so there is a handicap.
• Disappearance of the Proximity effect in the prosthesis of accelerated travel made it necessary to create a wholly simulated appearance that would restore three-dimensionality to the message in full. Now a holographic prosthesis of the military commander’s inertia was to be communicated to the viewer, extending his look in time and space by means of constant flashes, here and there, today and yesterday… Already evident in the flash-back and then in feed-back, this miniaturization of chronological meaning was the direct result of a military technology in which events always unfolded in theoretical time.
  • Time loses meaning and definition, lapses onto itself freely as if a protein molecule and expands while space remains the same all the while.
  • Through this, it is possibly to jump into the future, to the past or event repeat the present.

Source

III Corps
V Corps
VIII Corps
XII Corps
XV Corps
XX Corps

Divisions

1st Ind Div
2nd Inf Div
4th Inf Div
5th Inf Div
8th Inf Div
26th Inf Div
28th Inf Div
29th Inf Div
35th Inf Div
42th Inf Div
65th Inf Div
69th Inf Div

70th Inf Div
71st Inf Div
76th Inf Div
79th Inf Div
80th Inf Div
83rd Inf Div
86th Inf Div
87th Inf Div
89th Inf Div
90th Inf Div
94th Inf Div
97th Inf Div
99th Inf Div

4th Armd Div
5th Armd Div
6th Armd Div
7th Armd Div
8th Armd Div
9th Armd Div
10th Armd Div
11th Armd Div
12th Armd Div
13th Armd Div
14th Armd Div
16th Armd Div
20th Armd Div

17th Airborne Div
101st Airborne Div
2nd French Div

6th Cavalry Group

The theatre of existing

• Since [optical telegraphs], [...] geographical space has been shrinking with every advance in speed, and strategic location has lost importance as ballistic systems have become more widespread and sophisticated. This technological development has carried us into a realm of factitious topology in which all the surfaces of the glove are directly present to one another (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
  • Again, the shrinking of space and the importance of speed.
  • Disneyworld – although based on the portfolio of Disney, it was a world collapsed into acres of contained land, with themes touching on various geographical and cultural imagery. Bringing them into one tangible location.
• Young army recruits: before facing the battlefield for the first time, looks at it from afar in astonishment and ‘for a moment still thinks he is at a show’.
• Clausewitz: ‘The light of reason moves in a different medium and is reflected in a different manner. [...] To be a survivor is to remain both actor and spectator of a living cinema, to continue being the target of subliminal audiovisual bombardment or, in the colloquial language of the French soldiers, to ‘light up’ (allumer) the enemy.
  • Light up = reveal
  • Living cinema, life is a show, death is art.
• …how easily a tested mind could cut through such a subliminal barrage, could located and materialize in space the atmospheric dimensions of a battle, and could anticipate what the different parties intended to do.
  • Scenario of a battle & Special effects
• Newsreels too ‘realistic’ to recapture the pressure of the abstract surprise movements of modern war – so the old diorama method, with its enhancement of the visual field, was brought into service to give people the illusion of being hurled into a virtually unlimited image.

Visible invisibility

• The sites chosen for museums of the Second World War remind us that these fortress-tombs, dungeons and bunkers are the first and foremost camerae obscurae, that their hollowed windows, narrow apertures and loopholes are designed to light up the outside while leaving the inside in semi darkness.
  • Invisibility to see.
  • ‘hiding from sight in order to see’
  • Camera obscura
• Barbey d’Aurevilly: ‘You can see hell much better through a narrow vent than if you could take it in with both eyes at once’
• [Viewfinders and its interpretative codes for fixing the 3D identity of 2D images] introduced a new reading of the battlefield, but also considerably increased the impotence and obscenity of the military decision-maker, now in ever greater danger of being tracked down and eliminated. Thus in order to escape 2D observation from anchored reconnaissance balloons four or five hundred metres up, the army began to bury its strongholds and outworks in a third dimension, throwing the enemy into a frenzy of interpretation. Invisible in its sunken depths, the camera obscura also became deaf and blind, its relations with the rest of the country now depending entirely on  the logistics of perception, with its technology of subterranean, aerial and electrical communication.
• Third Window - how to light the surrounding without seeing it.
  • Invisibility visible
• Screens covered with gridded maps whose ceaseless animation abstractly logged the slightest movement of troops in what were still proximate theatres. About 1930, some countries [...] wound down their conventional means of defence and concentrated on research into perception. This reorientation led to the development of cybernetics and radar, as well ass advancing the sciences of goniometry, microphotography and radio and telecommunications.
  • The pace and speed of information replaces the permanency of photography with images succeeding so fast that it becomes like animation.
  • Visible invisibility
• During WWII, the military commands and war cabinets no longer needed to set up their bunkers near the field of battle – bore a passable resemblance to huge theatre-halls, for a war which had already become a Space Opera.
  • Proximitiy, space.
  • Almost like the headquarters far away in space like in Star Wars or floating around like in Star Trek.
• For the miniturization of technological power, reducing space and time to nothing, was incompatible with the expansive imagination of the Nazi Lebensraum and could only be countered with artificial depth and grandiosity.