The age of the image’s formal logic was the age of painting, engraving and etching, architecture; it ended with the eighteenth century. . . . The age of dialectic logic is that age of photography and film or, if you like, the frame of the nineteenth century. . . . The age of paradoxical logic begins with the invention of video recording, holography, and computer graphics. (63)

These steps in the schema are broad, overlapping, and do not constitute by any means ruptures in the history of perception: photography and film did not rupture our perceptions of space; rather, they challenged the image’s "formal logic" and so produced new modes of perception. These technologies of perception exist in relationship to one another. Virilio’s work can be seen as a complicated mapping of these overlapping technologies of perception. Table one, below, lists just a handful of the technologies of representation that Virilio has analyzed in his writings:

Table 1: Examples of Technologies of Representation in the Writings of Paul Virilio

Virilio looks for technologies of representation in all arenas.  For example, Virilio argues that military technologies reinforce the logics of the image produced by media technologies (for example, film).  There is a connection between

the trick effects of the depiction of actual events in graphic illustration, photography, film, and television and good old military camouflage, designed to conceal armaments, convoys and troop movements [and designed] to leave the enemy in the lurch, no longer able to tell where reality begins or leaves off. (Art 54)

Film and camouflage paint, then, both partake of what Virilio calls "the reality effect."  The reality effect is Virilio’s shorthand for the acceptance of the logic of perception: "the reality effect replaces immediate reality" (Lost 24). Technologies of representation have the effect on the perceiver of confounding, expanding, intensifying, or reorganizing reality as perceived.  New technologies produce different reality effects.

As new technologies arise, other technologies (and the modes of perception they create) lose their dominance: "Nothing can be gained without loss. When a technical object is invented, say the elevator, the stairway is lost; when the transatlantic airlines are created, the ocean liner is lost . . . " (Politics 33). Of course, "loss" here is not to be read in extreme: buildings with elevators still have staircases. In the case of media technologies, when one mode of representation ascends, other modes of representation may lose their dominance, but are not erased.  Virilio is most sensitive to the transitions evident in reality effects resulting from media technologies today.  He says that

the world-view based on orthogonal orthodoxy has given way to a new perception, in which the basic concept of physical dimension has progressively lost its meaning and analytical power as a form of dissecting or dismounting perceptive reality. Instead we find other, electronic means of evaluating space and time, ones that share no common ground with the measuring systems of the past. (Lost 30)

These new, electronic technologies signal a change in our logics of perception: "infographic technologies will likewise force a readjustment of reality and its representations" (Lost 26-27). By Virilio’s articulation, for example, we no longer measure distance only by yards, blocks, or miles; we measure it by the delay in the signal of a live television broadcast. We no longer measure distance only by paces walked, but by satellites as part of GPS.

These shifts in the standard of measure, enabled by broadcast and digital technology, are forcing us to rethink the logic of perception under which we interpret our world. Virilio argues that,

Faced with the stereoscopic nature of a reality divided between optics and optoelectronics, acoustics and electroacoustics, touch and teletactility, we have been given notice to quit our customary ways of seeing and thinking, in order to apprehend a new kind of ‘relief’ that even goes as far as undermining the practical usefulness of the notion of horizon and, with it, the ‘perspective’ that previously allowed us to recognize ourselves here and now. (Open 44)

Virilio is deeply interested in describing the current "logic of the image" manifest in today’s media technologies.  He is equally interested in the political implications following from the development and use of these technologies, in the service of power.

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