Gaze At Postmodern "Speed" In Aesthetics

“Speed” is a concept in science, which is used to describe physical motion. Paul Virilio, a French sociologist, who commonly known as “the senior pastor of speed”, describes modern landscape with speed and has proposed an aesthetic phenomenon—aesthetics of disappearance. “Speed” is beyond a description in the field of physics, but a kind of violence which has permeated into every aspect of our lives. Human being has been kidnapped by speed, in which they lose their initiatives, identity and emotions, and havs become alienation from themselves in the end. This thesis attempts to analyze a series of landscape of speed in aesthetic perspective.Chapter 1, The gaze of “Speed” conception. Speed is motion by nature, which is space in proportionate to the flow of time. In aesthetics, there are serene beauty of slow speed, speeding beauty of high speed and virtual beauty of acceleration in its classical age, the age of industrial revolution, and the age of information and technology. In the contemporary society, it creates a post-modernist landscape of speed by means of machine speed and technical speed. Machine speed is mainly represented by cars, trains and ship, which is the transfer speed that moves body further from the place. Technical speed, represented by light and electromagnetism, narrows the gap between the unconscious awareness and information instantly. They both constitute the violence of speed, thus changing living space of human beings and overturn the far – near view.Chapter 2, The aesthetic characteristics of ‘speed’. Different from the traditional aesthetics, modern aesthetics emphasize the feeling of shock, dizziness, absence and absurdity. The characteristics of aesthetics of speed are as followed. Firstly, the speed generalizes a new conception of time, which makes the time discontinuous, thus connect each moment of time. Secondly, distance becomes meaningless, which makes the disappearance of space. Lastly, people have no feeling and thoughts to the speed, which changes peoples’ cognitive modes. Technical speed can make people feel present when he or she is absent, which leads to subject’s disappearance. Different from the value of traditional aesthetics, the landscape of speed stresses on accidence rather than eternity, upholds hyper-reality than reality, and advocates the cold-bloodedness than warmness.Chapter 3, The ‘speed’ in art. ‘Art is nothing but speed.’ Almost all kinds of artistic forms have relationship with speed. Film making is a kind of art form that focuses on speed, from the art form to artistic techniques. Film making is produced by ways of continuous photography, and accelerating frame rate up to one frame per second. The film can be separate from daily life by the speed of film narration. Literature is a kind of slow art form. Literature is a slow procedure from ideation to creation and to acceptance, of which every step is slow. The Room, written by Li Zhiliang, describes that people are living in a fast rate of life in perspective of a mental patient, who is speechless to the society, thus making the production lack of sensation and reflection. The Slowness, written by Milan kundera, advocates that people must return to their original cognitive style and inner self, and they must resist the speed violence at a leisure pace of life.