Our culture is a product of speed. From fast cars to fast food it dictates the way in which we live, work and play. In the twentieth century, this accelerated age, speed has not only changed our world but also how we view our world.

In an exciting collaboration between The Photographers' Gallery and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, this exhibition explores the presence of speed in the work of some of this century's most visionary artists, from Umberto Boccioni to Siobhan Hapaska, from Marcel Duchamp to Richard Hamilton.

Doug Aitken's American International (1993) is an installation consisting of a large-scale back-lit transparency and a video, Fury Eyes, which documents Ron Fringer's attempt to ride a supercharged motorcycle down a racetrack at 190 miles per hour. The black and white image of Fringer, taken from a camera attached to the bike, begins to disintegrate as he approaches 170 miles per hour; his on-screen presence is replaced by that of Cindy Crawford, standing in a film studio as she awaits shooting on a workout video. As director of photography on Crawford's video, Aitken produced the large backlit transparency in front of which she performed, a view of the Californian desert where Fringer raced. In turn, the transparency has now become the backdrop to this installation. A meditation on the creation of the perfect body, the perfect machine, American International also explores the mediation of nature, where landscape becomes a mediascape which we experience through technology.

The Longer Day by Paul Ramirez Jonas is a different sort of road movie. Influenced by this quintessential American genre, Ramirez Jonas left his studio at sunrise and, his video camera pointing directly out of the windscreen, drove due west until sunset. It is at this point that we join the video, the sun flaring in the camera lens in a way reminiscent of Easy Rider (of course, in that classic of counter-culture, the traditional direction of travel was countered and our two heroes rode east). Travelling at speed, in the same direction as the sun, Ramirez Jonas is able to delay its disappearance; at times it sets beneath the inclined road only to reappear, moments later. The fundamental rhythm of daily life - that of the sun rising, then setting - is disrupted by the simplest of highway journeys. In its desperate attempt to extend the optimism of the American Dream, it is a work of immense romanticism.

Rachel Lowe's projection, A Letter to an Unknown Person, takes a sideways look at our motorised perception of the landscape. Here, the view is out of the side window of a moving car, the blur of green streaks and concrete flashes which have come to represent our countryside. A right hand enters the frame, holding a black marker pen, and procedes to draw a series of quick lines upon the window, in a manner reminiscent of Hans Namuth's film of Jackson Pollock painting on glass. The artist is using the window as a screen, tracing the landscape view as it passes over it; occasionally, the drawings and the view coincide for a fraction of a second, but their resemblance is soon gone. The futility of the gesture, of the artist's attempt to arrest the outside world, is all too apparent. Like the romanticism of Ramirez Jonas, here is an attempt to make sense of a world which is quickly passing us by.

In an interview recorded at the end of 1968, the influential American artist Robert Smithson remarked that "one pebble moving one foot in two million years is enough action to keep me really excited". One might only guess what his reaction might be to the new photographs by Naoya Hatakeyama of explosions in limestone quarries, an area in which he was been working for a number of years. Taken with a remote-controlled camera, metres from the explosion, these high-speed images arrest its dynamic movement, the rock face instead becoming baroque forms. Unable to control, or foresee, the composition of the final picture, these photographs become potent metaphors of modernity, technological images in which destruction and construction occur in the same instant.