In Blow up / fast forward, the temporal structure is reduced and accelerated into perceptive fragments.
The entire film by Michelangelo Antonioni is condensed into just 1 minute and 18 seconds, divided into 26 chapters, each allowed 3 seconds before the cut.
Just like in The Courses – 3 Times Per Second, the rhythm of this piece plays with the physiological limits of perception.

The sequence races ahead—each scene amputated just before it arrives, before it can inhabit you.
It's a radical act of temporal violence, yet one that mirrors how digital culture processes experience with no memory: hyper-acceleration, fragmentation, and simulation—an experience without embodiment.
The videoproject "Blow up / fast forward" offers the sheer acceleration of content — a Reizüberflutung that flattens narrative into pulses.

The video evokes the condition of contemporary media: the endless cut, the infinite scroll, where every fragment erases the previous one before it can even be registered.
A mode of attention in which presence is perpetually deferred, and the now becomes a series of near-hits. Not montage, but obliteration through succession.


Blow up, Antonioni, 1966
The movie doesn’t “tell.” It’s about seeing, but not knowing; about perception, but not truth.
The closer the photographer looks at the blown-up image, the more reality dissolves.
The image promises evidence, but only delivers ambiguity.
It's about the failure of representation, the limits of interpretation, and the illusion that seeing is knowing.
It’s also about emptiness in modern life alienation, surface, the absurdity of chasing meaning in a fragmented world.
Nothing is resolved. There is no final revelation. The truth is a phantom, always just outside the frame.
As Antonioni blows the image up to show that truth fades when we stare too hard, this Blow up / fast forward shows truth dissolved by acceleration itself.

Antonioni’s truth is hidden in the image’s ambiguity. In this video work, it is hidden in the velocity of the cut.
Both reveal an instability of real experience.

Simulated Experience
This compression seems to offer a summary but creates a ghost of the original.
There is no immersion—only the anxiety of almost catching meaning, of trying to hold onto a stream that deliberately slips away.
The body remains untouched. The images pass too quickly to be absorbed, too briefly to form memory.
There is no time for affect to take root, for memory to form, for identification to occur.
Like Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum, the “viewing” becomes a simulation of viewing—you think you’ve experienced something, but nothing registers in the body.
The body does not experience. It reacts—maybe—but it doesn't absorb.
The illusion of experience reflects the act of consumption.
This is cinema in a post-experiential mode.
Baudrillard writes about the collapse of meaning in the face of saturation—this is your territory of truth: the speed at which truth evaporates into signal, and experience collapses into gesture.
What remains is not memory, but a trace of rhythm, like the hum of a projector long after the film has stopped.
A non-event. A hyperfilm.


Time – Compression and the Theft of Lived Experience
To watch a stream of hyper-accelerated images—like in Blow up / fast forward — is to experience a false expansion of time’s flow.
Biologically, we measure time not in clock units but in events—changes the brain can register.
“Our experience of time is not continuous but rather composed of discrete temporal windows during which events are integrated; the perception of duration depends on the number and complexity of these events.” [Pöppel, E., 1997, “A Hierarchical Model of Temporal Perception"]
The more changes, the more time seems to pass.
This is why, under sensory overload, time feels dense, while boredom—where little changes—stretches time out.
But this is a trap: accelerated images flood the senses, tricking the brain into thinking something has happened, while in reality, no experience is formed.
The hippocampus, key in memory formation, can’t encode meaning when stimuli come too fast.
The body reacts, but it does not remember.
This is how image structures can steal time, like the Grey Men in Momo: not by taking it directly, but by depriving you of the ability to feel it pass meaningfully.


Momo
This structure recalls Michael Ende’s Momo, where the Men in Grey convince people to save time by eliminating the “unnecessary.”
The result is chilling: time is not saved, it is emptied. Life becomes efficient, but unlivable.
In Blow up / fast forward, this happens through images: you believe you’ve watched the film, but the body has no memory of it.
The experience has been cut away in the name of compression.
What remains is pure sequence without presence—motion without rest, time without depth.
As in Momo, time isn’t stolen from the outside — it disappears through the very structures meant to preserve it.
It shows the disintegration of time itself.

Speed
Flusser anticipated this in his reflections on technical images.
For him, images produced by apparatuses (like cameras or screens) collapse historical time into surfaces, replacing dialogue and depth with function and flow.
The apparatus programs not only the image but the viewer.
Time becomes operational—a matter of clicks, loops, cuts—rather than existential.

Virilio, on the other hand, speaks of the “accident of speed.”
When movement becomes instantaneous, space collapses, and so does the interval where meaning once lived.
Under high-speed image consumption, the interval between things disappears.
Without interval, there is no attention.
Without attention, there is no memory.
Without memory, there is no time as lived experience — only chronometric sequence.
The structure of how we live changes.
Watching fast images doesn’t just feel fast, it reshapes the possibility of presence.
Like in Momo, time isn’t stolen from the outside, it’s taken through the systems.