Like the phenomenon of synaesthesia (the confusion, or mergence of different senses), the experience of speed causes a confusion of different subject positions.

The visual sense enables the world of both people and objects to be controlled from afar, combining detachment and mastery. It is by seeking distance that a proper ‘view’ is gained, abstracted from the hustle and bustle of everyday experience. (Frisby and Featherstone in Urry, 2004: 30)

If we combine that concept with Baudry’s illusion of mastery (1984), one could argue that cinema audiences already have the control of event anticipation and logic of character behaviour, and so are already more engaged with the remote spatio-temporality.

While the boundary and buffers of the interface detach the kinematic subject from the environment, the spectacles, actions and activities within the environment provide modes of reattachment. Cinematic techniques like that of engulfment and immersion, and new video game playing abilities can thus be said to create virtual motility; of motilities within motilities. This poses the same critical challenge as that of multiple spatio-temporalities within a single place.

Baudry asserts that cinema functions as a support and instrument of ideology (1975: 46). What is the idealism inherent in speed? Automobility has been seen as a cause for globalisation (Urry, 2004: 25); the car is an icon of mobility, freeing the people from ‘immobility’. Yet paradoxically, the vehicle requires the subject to submit to the objective immobility of motility, in order to experience mobility and higher extremities of speed.

If Virilio argues that the cockpit of a vehicle is analogous to the cell that imprisons and incapacitates the driver/pilot (1990: 17-36), then acceleration is analogous to cell injection, of being forced into the seat. Likewise, deceleration is analogous to de-cell-eration; in other words, a process of cell ejection. Then, one could argue that the reverse of the crash, is the experience of the launch. Prior to the launch, the lead up to the launch resembles that of the crash; that of the suspense of an approaching event that changes the mode of transportation. The launch is the controlled initial state of ecstasy, of the acceleration from a static position. Conversely, the crash is the uncontrolled final state of ecstasy, of the sudden deceleration to a static position. The automobility / autonomy of the kinematic subject then is a relation with the interface of the vehicle that dynamically empowers over the subject’s life. While the driver may be in control of their direction and velocity, the acceleration of the vehicle affords the system power over the kinematic subject. In the controlled automobility of a vehicle, the kinematic subject dynamically authorises the system to and from the empowerment of motility. With the physiological and psychological affects of kinaesthesia, ecstasy, and flow experience contributing to the enjoyment of speed exposure, the vehicles of speed create a desired altered state of consciousness.