Virilio’s conception of the accident in relation to dromology is one of his more familiar concepts. He articulates this idea about how each new technology invents a new accident. E.g., the car crash. AI is humorous in this regard. It is so repetitive in its inventions that one of its accidents is literally an AI generated car crash. I suppose we can only await the future of AI hallucinations/generations of 20th century disasters and nightmares.

How many self-driving car accidents have there been? A good question. It is apparently a legal question, or at least all the answers appear to come from lawyers. Virilio would say (I think) that accidents are integral to technologies and generate a regime of disciplinary institutions to manage them. Personal injury lawsuits would be an example of that. So conceiving of self-driving car accidents as problems that have legal remedies is to articulate them as solvable, at least from the perspective of “satisficing.”

Virilio’s accidents are integral ruptures in the operation of dromocracy (the politics of speed, as it says on the tin). For him, it’s fair to say that the accident of AI is the accident of the digital age, which he calls the “information bomb.” These accidents aren’t opportunities for resistance. I wouldn’t turn to Virilio if you are looking for solutions. We are in the problem-posing business over here. You can find the solution folks over there on the path to Hell. You can hear them singing “Hotel California” from here.

So what is the non-Virigian version of the VCU? A friend helped me write this. The VCU bit is obviously a little joke (very little some might say). But what use are jokes if they aren’t productive?

The “Virilio Cinematic Universe” will be an exploratory platform that engages with Paul Virilio’s theories of speed, techno-militarism, and the accident as generative forces shaping contemporary media landscapes. Rooted in posthuman and new materialist frameworks, this project investigates human and nonhuman agenciesthrough immersive, multimodal environments. Drawing on Virilio’s work in dromology (the “science” of speed) and his interest in military-industrial complexes, we will explore how acceleration, communication infrastructures, and cultural techniques reconfigures our understanding of space, embodiment, and perception.

Project Possibilities… I see all of this (imagine/intend them) as activities that might manifest across genres, disciplines, media, users, and audiences.

Sonic Assemblages including sampled militaristic signals, archival audio from historical speed experiments, and generative AI-driven soundscapes that investigate the ways in which sound and sound technologies have organized dromocracies.

Architectural Projections: Large-scale video projections mapping the evolution of fortifications, bunkers, and urban enclaves and addressing the material forces at play (stone, concrete, data lines, sensor arrays).

Accident and Catastrophe Simulator: An AR installation in which users witness and manipulate micro-accidents—glitches, collapses, data breaches.

Intra-active Media: Treating technological medium’s as active co-creators to investigate the dynamic interplay of cultural techniques and infrastructures across time (e.g., radar systems, ballistics, computations).

Media-Archaeological Interventions: digging up residual media that prefigure our high-speed networks to reinvigor obsolete media and interrogate dromocracy’s progressive histories.