Paul Virilio- On Georges Perec(2001)

(After May 1968) Hence our approach to the city, for instance, no longer connected to traditional notions of urban geography (cadastral survey, social classes, concentration, density and other phenomena); rather, it connected to what we termed the ‘infra-ordinary’, i.e. what we do when we do nothing, what we hear when we hear nothing, what happens when nothing happens. Outside of the city nothingness can perhaps exist […] but it certainly does not exist in the city. In the city there is never a void. There is always background noise, there is always a symptom, a sign, a scent. So we were interested precisely in those things which are the opposite of the extraordinary yet which are not the ordinary either – things which are ‘infra’. ‘[…]

(Perec writing the book ‘Attempt to be exhaustive about a Parisian location’) There he was trying to exhaust a place rather than time. he would not return to it, so he took three consecutive days to grasp everything that passed through that range of his perception. So he attempted to record everything, as would a surveillance camera: to record the ordinary, the banal, the habitual. That is, the signs of an event to which we may not have paid any attention, that we may not even have perceived. What interested Perec was the potential of the banal to become remarkable, how an ordinary sign can become extraordinary. At the time we were rediscovering the values of observation – the fact that looking is not self-evident. We look but we do not see; so how must we look in order to see? (Which means not just to see but actually to penetrate things.) We were very much aware that there are unknown things concealed by what is visible, things that are hidden not in the obscure, but in the obvious.

[…] For me – and I would say for Perec too, in his own way – the city is a film, one in a state of continuous metamorphosis, one in which not only is everything animated but everything is also incessantly(끊임없이) accelerated. Everything passes by, everything is always in the process of unreeling. And you cannot see this film if you stand still – walking is the tete de lecture of this film.