What is it to "Unknow" Quantity?

I think I've maybe stated this out loud in class amidst other comments, but I find the typo on the "Unknown Quantity" homepage very compelling in and of itself. I'd like to take this first post on the accident to explore some of the implications of this typo.

First, though, I guess we should get a handle on what "Unknown Quantity" is. As Dr. Ulmer was saying last week, when we decide to pursue something theoretically, we're a bit like a group lost in the woods, but in the midst of something so desperately needing new solutions (like the accident, driven ahead by speed), we're a bit more like the protagonists of Frozen (2010, dir. Adam Green), a film I watched this morning. The set-up's pure pulp (I may be stealing that line from a blurb about The Naked Kiss): three friends get on a ski-lift at the end of the day without anyone's knowledge and get stranded up there, presumably for a week. Only those with extremely strong stomachs need apply. I have an incredibly strong stomach and was tempted to look away, not because of gore but because of the extended ways that Green looks at this accident. Doing theory's like taking the role of the characters. How the hell do we get off this ski-lift? Do we jump? Try our hands at climbing on the lift's wires? Either way will likely result in getting grievously injured. Luckily, the stakes for us aren't quite so high.

Anyway, in pursuing a Museum of the Accident and throwing seemingly incongruous elements together (what does the form Virilio offers have to do with the experimental films he includes? And, even in that restricted field, what does the found footage montage heaven of Bruce Conner have to do with the slow introspection of Jonas Mekas?) to attempt to find answers in the chaos.

Virilio characterizes modernity as something of confusion overall. I'll get into the implications of this "confusion" on game theory on a separate post, but his metaphor of a kaleidoscope, the tumbling of incongruous elements that produce impossible images, seems a proper one for a time in which technology (all manner of accidents), humanity (can't we all just be human!?!), and our own bodies (everything gives you cancer) intermix and produce these sublime landscapes of disaster.

When nothing's sure, our rhetoric needs to match it. When he released L'Avventura to boos at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, Antonioni wrote in his press release, "Eros is sick," reflecting what he saw at the time as a rapid shift in cultural and sexual mores. His minimalist style, refining de Chirico and the Rossellini-Ingrid Bergman movies into the finest of cinematic sheens, attempts to take on the confusion of the time. He gives his characters space not to talk, to be confused.

That was another time. Now we also have to reckon with a kaleidoscope of media and a neverending onslaught of information (the opening credits of Enter the Void and the first twenty-five minutes of Catfish visually depict this rather well). Could it be that Virilio hopes to produce a counter-kaleidoscope, a mash-up (if you will) of elements in the hopes of producing a counter to the general confusion of the accident? In that sense, the mass of hyperlinks one can find even in this paltry blog could serve that kind of purpose. I'll get into Virilio's specific aesthetic strategies in a future post, but let's settle that perhaps to meet the motion (in the Bergsonian sense) of the world at hyperentropy, we need a rhetoric capable of meeting hyperentropy but with an aim to be able to control, navigate, and plan for that entropy...

So, if that's the Unknown Quality, why is this guy leaving the typo up? Doesn't he have someone looking out for him?

What's an accident on the World Wide Web?

In a pair of conference papers I did last semester, I argued that the visual appearance of film grain allows us to rest easy even while we know that the specific celluloid apparatus is being subsumed by digital technologies. If we can view visible grain as a sort of accident in the production of a photographic image (an image made up of the shifting of those grains by light), I held that we could view pixelation and other decried digital artifacts (look up any DVDBeaver review to see the particular rhetoric associated with fidelity on home video) could be viewed as digital cinema's accident, a place where we see that apparatus laid bare.

If we assume that "Unknow Quantity" is a typo, it still manages to work because it begs us to consider the accidents in writing, the accidents that will allow rechainings in the string of signifiers (sorry for butchering your words, Jacques L.) through metaphor.

It becomes all the more pregnant if we consider it purposeful. To Unknow Quantity in Virilio's exhibit, we need to enter an altered state of consciousness: not necessarily one of unreflective absorption or aesthetic dreariness but one of hyper-reflexivity. As we peruse the website (which I assume we're all doing at length, a strategy perhaps at odds with the logic of internet space), the only way to perceive everything is to take everything at once. We need to open our mouths under the waterfall, regardless of its pressure (strange metaphor, I know, wrapping up). In the end, despite my wish that Virilio's copy-editor had taken greater care in preparing the header, I find that the header as it stands is much more interesting than it would be if it simply bore the name of the exhibit.